For five consecutive years, Silicon Legal has been recognized by PitchBook among the top 10 most active law firms in the VC space.¹ To celebrate, we invited some of our innovative entrepreneur and seasoned investor clients to share their lighthearted reflections from 2023 and predictions of what lies ahead.
For more hot takes from our clients, review them all here.
Nate Williams
If the venture capital ecosystem was a movie, what would the title of 2023 have been?
Fight Club
Friend, Enemy, or Spouse?
| AI | Spouse |
| Web3 | Enemy |
| Future of Work | Friend |
In five words: What’s your most outlandish prediction for the venture capital market in 2024?
Amazing Startups and Amazing (Fund) Vintages
Who, what, or where did you find your greatest inspiration in 2023?
I wrote about it on LinkedIn but I took on a charity challenge based on a contact who battles Diabetes. I was able to channel my grit and discipline to complete a workout 365/365 days during 2023 including over 350 miles of Family Hikes.
If you could rename one popular tech term to be more honest and descriptive, what would it be and why?
“Growth Hacking” = “Sales”
“Business Development” = “Sales”
“Revenue Development” = “Sales”
“Head of Accounts” = “Sales”
So why use the term “Growth Hacking” instead of “Sales”? For some reason out here Sales last 10-20 years became an unpopular term as the world focused on a certain paradigm of a highly technical founder. But so many startups fail because they cannot generate meaningful customer insights or revenue. So as a firm we at UNION are not afraid of Sales (or hardware for that matter) and have a contrarian approach to generating early traction.
About Union Labs
Union Labs is a DeepTech Seed fund that invests in exceptional founders from diverse backgrounds who are applying deep technologies to solve hard problems.
About Silicon Legal Strategy
Silicon Legal Strategy is the premier boutique law firm providing targeted, bottom-line-oriented advice to technology startups, innovative entrepreneurs and seasoned investors. Trained at the top firms in Silicon Valley, our attorneys and staff are incredibly passionate about technology and have extensive experience representing early stage companies and investors. We are a known quantity in Silicon Valley, and work with or sit across the table from every major law firm in the area. Perhaps most importantly, we ourselves are entrepreneurs. We truly understand the challenges of a startup — like building and motivating a team, creating repeatable processes to ensure continued customer satisfaction at scale and dealing with infrastructure issues. We face these challenges every day — and as a result, are able to deliver more relevant, bottom-line-oriented advice. Put simply, we actually “get” what entrepreneurs are going through.