Bootstrap Funds: Post-Traction Investments, Access to Experts, Islamic Finance

There’s a broad spectrum of VCs and founders, the latter of whom possess differing levels of capability to maintain high growth and continually raise equity dollars at inflated valuations. For example, there are many companies who raise an angel/seed round, then a Series A, spend most of it on customer acquisition which flows right into FB and Goog... See more

3. Access to capital - Despite explosive growth in early stage venture funding, many SMBs and solopreneurs are unable to secure the funding they need to operate.

First, most emerging firms raise small funds. Smaller funds generally outperform, as they can participate meaningfully in early rounds and a single outlier has the potential to generate strong fund-level performance, even if the fund is only able to garner modest ownership.

In the past, there have been many attempts at disrupting venture capital:

• The proliferation of angel investors (AngelList, 2010)


• Enactment and regulation of equity crowdfunding (Jobs Act, 2012)


• Cryptonative crowdfunding via token sales (2013)

While many of these efforts were successful at generating a greater supply of passive capital for founders, the... See more

For example, say you’re building a product for a niche market worth “only” $50 million. Who will invest in you?- VCs won’t touch you because the math doesn’t work out — they need investments that have a shot at returning the portfolio.- Banks won’t touch you because they only know how to underwrite going concerns — businesses with operating history... See more

This is never how it actually happens, but you get the idea. Startups should receive risk capital to literally derisk certain aspects of the business.

However, over the last decade or so, something shifted. Traditional venture funds that specialized in early-stage risk started to add buckets of “growth equity” that were supposed to be utilized for ... See more