Today we're announcing the first close of Baseline Venture Fund I at €4M, with a target of €5M total. We'll be investing €100,000 first checks into 50 Irish and European startups over the next three years. The fund is backed only by private investors, all founders and high-net-worth individuals from Ireland, Europe, and the US. No government money. No institutional capital. Just people who believe in what we're building here.

As a founder, especially if it’s your first time starting something, there’s a lot you need to quickly wrap your head around, and not all of it will be your core skill set, but you’ll just need to roll your sleeves up and figure it out.Everything from product design and development, developing and executing a go to market strategy, acquiring first customers, and then figuring out how to iterate on all that.

In very simplistic terms, startups are experiments. Or rather, a series of increasingly more complex experiments. Everything you do in a startup is iterative, and it’s never done, just like software.One of the first things you should be working on is how you tell the world about what you’re doing. And for many, a fundraising deck is their first encounter with telling that story. Over the years I’ve seen lots of well meaning but poor advice given to founders about how to think about their story in deck form. But it’s pretty simple… it’s just a tool. It’s one of many at your disposal, and like all great tools, it has just one job: to set up your first meeting with an investor for success.