Happy New Year from Iterative Venture!
"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." - Charles Swindoll
Dear Iterative Community,
Thanks for your support as our community has reached over 4000+ members. It’s been a while since we made our last update with the newsletter (We promise to provide regular updates going forward and continue sourcing opportunities for the community).
We wish you all a happy new year and want to share where we have been, our reflections, and what’s in store for the Iterative community in 2023.
We are excited to continue on this journey with you all! Please feel free to reach out to us at team@iterativeventure.com
Where We Have Been
As some of you may know, we were busy, throughout 2022, fundraising for a web 3 focused investment vehicle (more than happy to share our experience). We started at the height of the last bull market only to encounter the fastest and steepest rate hike in recent decades.
Our original motivation was that if we can readily fundraise, we can be better prepared to invest and support founders from the Iterative (and by large extension Facebook/Meta) community.
However, with the rapid shifting of investment sentiment and interest, we took sometime to redraft our strategy for the coming year and adapt to the new market environment.
What’s in store in 2023:
Keep building (Technology platform): Given the fundraising environment and the centralizing effect of capital, we believe that it is best to build right now with our position as an upstart community/company.
More specifically, tapping into our expertise in analytic and engineering, we will take a stab at building insights tools to augment our support for the founders in the community.
If there’s anything we can do for you, please feel free to reach out and reply to this email.Community building (Networking events, education sharing, podcast sessions etc): I say this lightly (but not really). What made this community strong back when we started in 2021 was the excitement that all of us shared coming together to explore new ideas.
Along the way, many were able to find meaningful connections, made friends, and moved on with new opportunities.
This also means that, us at the Iterative team needs to provide more regular updates and stay closely in touch as a community. We plan to restart this initiative this year as well - hence stay tuned as there is more to come.
Keep bringing opportunities (Investment, job opportunities etc): The original mission of the community when we started out back in early 2021 was so that we can gather together a community of entrepreneurial folks from Facebook/Meta to go on this journey together.
Throughout our journey (albeit slower throughout part of 2022), we continued to source investment deals and job opportunities to help the community whether it was at the height of the bull market (2021 - earlier part of 2022) or at the height of the bear market (layoff during November 2022).
We plan on doubling down on this effort so to provide further value for the community.
For interested folks, you can subscribe to our deals below:
Our learning along the way
It’s been a rollercoaster of a journey, for better or for worse, from early 2021 till now and we’ve learned a thing or two:
Keep going, adapting, and learning: During the bull market, every narrative works, because the real driver in the market is the fed - riding tide (easy monetary and fiscal policy) lifts all boat.
In the bear market, having mental fortitude to keep pushing on, show progress, and keep the momentum up is key as many people and teams will falter during this period.
What this showed us is that we have to be resilient, know ourselves, know our priorities and what’s important and keep going. We have to remain as an optimist regardless of time and we need to know ourselves and know what we want as tough times like right now will severely challenge our resolve.
Furthermore, no decisions are ever perfect. It’s better to keep going, learn to improve, and show progress rather than to contemplate and find a perfect solution. Because there is none.
On that note, one great quote that we heard was that “If you want to learn twice as fast, fail twice as much”.
Take care of others: People come together and opportunities happen because we had a good time together bonding and sharing thoughts.
Our decision points whether to do something or not is more dependent on our relationship as well as our trust for each other whether consciously or subconsciously rather than a rational decision.
A classic example is shown in the book `Blink` by Malcolm Gladwell: the key indicator of the likelihood of surgeons being used for malpractice is the amount of time they spent with each patient (to be exact, three (3) more minutes than those who had been sued), not necessarily their credentials, quality of medical cares, etc.
Whether we like to say it or not, our emotions precedes how we make decisions. When our emotion is of a certain way, all of our reasons for decision making will be drawn with the emotional lens in perspective.
Thus, to foster more opportunities and create a stronger community, we at Iterative Ventures is committed to provide more opportunities for all of us to come together and form meaningful and deeper relationships.Timing is everything: When we started out in 2021, everything looks like it was always going to the right and up.
Of course you all know what happened in 2022 and suddenly nothing seem to work and morale drops to the bottom everywhere. (I was at various events when FTX melted down. What were networking sessions became drinking sessions).
We can only control what we can control and stay focused thus us at Iterative team are coming back full steam to build as that is something we CAN do.
Thank You
Thank you all for the continued support. We miss all of the great relationships we’ve formed along the way and we want to continue where we’ve left off and build deeper and more valuable relationships.
Please feel free to reach out to us via team@iterativeventure.com and we look forward to meeting and working with all of you in this community.
Keep iterating!