Startup Advisory

Startups are all about execution. I help founders execute better through relevant, concrete, actionable advice, delivered with alignment and empathy.

Why Me?

Because unlike most advisors, I’ve walked the walk, not just talked the talk.

I’m the co-founder of a successful venture-backed tech startup, and can advise on every aspect of the startup journey: from inception, through multiple phases of growth and financing, all the way to exit and beyond.
I draw on years of experience in the trenches actually building and selling products, hiring and empowering teams, raising capital and negotiating deals, designing and executing growth strategies, and more – as a founder, not just an operator.
I remain engaged with the ecosystem and with current best practices through my subsequent work with dozens of founders as a very active and involved angel investor, startup advisor, and venture partner.

How I Help

I’m deeply familiar with both the low-level tactical problems and daily grind of running a startup with all its attendant uncertainty and scarcity; and the high-level challenges and imperatives of building a business that matters over the long term.

Here are a few categories where I have particular expertise:

Financing: I’m exceptional at helping startups tell their stories to investors, and orchestrating successful financing rounds.
Growth: I’m adept across a wide variety of B2B growth channels and go-to-market motions, and I help companies devise and then execute the growth approaches that work best for them.
Team-building: I help founders understand what excellence looks like for each function and at each stage, so that they can build a truly world-class team.
Planning: I help founders with their resoure allocation decisions, so that they can balance risk and reward, uncertainty and upside, time and money, and thus maximize their odds of success.
Operations: I help problem-solve at an extremely granular, day-to-day level, whether those are problems of people, technology, process, or something else.
Culture: Culture is every successful startup’s secret weapon. I help founders create outstanding organizational cultures with thoughtfulness and intentionality.
Personal Development: The best founders level up constantly and consistently. I can show you how.

My Advisory Philosophy

Most advisors are terrible. They take advantage of inexperienced (and experienced) founders; they give advice that is not just bad, but actively counterproductive; they waste founder time with irrelevancies; they add friction, confusion, and negative energy.

I’m not most advisors. I pride myself on being off-the-charts valuable to the companies I serve; and if I’m not, I encourage founders to fire me.

I’m selective about my advisory clients. I want to spend my bandwidth on companies where I can make a meaningful impact; if I don’t think I can help you, I won’t waste your time or mine.

I typically work with startups between 100k and 10M in revenue: roughly, Seed to Series C (though some of my advisees don’t want or need to raise venture capital). I mostly work with saas, data and marketplace startups; mostly B2B, some consumer; and mostly North America, some Europe.

Contact Me

If this all sounds interesting, I encourage you to reach out: my email is at@abrahamthomas.info