Insights topic
Funding & Investment
Funding stages, valuation, investor expectations and the relationship between capital and company building.
Scale
Building enterprise value, not just revenue
The six components of enterprise value beyond revenue, and the decisions during Scale that make a company valuable rather than merely large.
Read the articleGrowth
The metrics that matter: CAC, LTV and payback
How to calculate CAC, LTV and payback honestly, with a worked example and the ratios that actually drive decisions.
Read the articleInvesting
Building an early-stage investment portfolio
Position sizing, spread, pacing, follow-on capital and the role of SEIS and EIS in constructing an early-stage portfolio you can actually hold.
Read the articleInvesting
Assessing risk in early-stage companies: an investor's checklist
The six-lens diligence framework we use when assessing an early-stage company, and the questions under each that reliably surface the real risk.
Read the articleInvesting
How GCV Labs and GCV Invest work together
Build and fund are two distinct capabilities in the Growth Capital Ventures ecosystem. Here is where the boundary sits and why it exists.
Read the articleInvesting
SEIS and EIS explained for early-stage investors
A plain-English guide to SEIS and EIS: the reliefs, the limits, the conditions, the risk-to-capital test, and the questions to ask before you rely on either.
Read the articleInvesting
Why invest in venture-built companies?
What a venture-built company looks like from an investor's side of the table, and which early-stage risks the model removes — and which it does not.
Read the articleStrategy
How to size a market: TAM, SAM and SOM without fooling yourself
What TAM, SAM and SOM actually mean, how to calculate them bottom-up, and a worked example you can copy.
Read the articleInvestment
Capital alone doesn't build great companies
Funding is a necessary input into company building. On its own it is rarely the constraint that decides whether a venture works — and treating it as the main event is one of the most common mistakes in early-stage company creation.
Read the articleInvestment
Venture builder vs venture capital: what actually differs
Both models want valuable companies. They differ in when they engage, what they contribute and where the work sits — and confusing the two leads founders and corporates to expect the wrong things from each.
Read the articleVenture Building
What is a venture builder?
A venture builder creates companies. It is not an incubator, an accelerator or a fund — it is an operating model for turning opportunities into businesses, and understanding that difference matters before you choose who to build with.
Read the articleComing next on this topic
- Funding stages explained: pre-seed to Series A
- What investors assess at each stage
- Valuation for early-stage ventures
- Building an investor-ready data roomScale
- Milestone-based funding and why it worksIncubate
- Cap table management for foundersCreate
- Convertible instruments and priced rounds
- What a good investor update looks like