Employee-VC Alignment

Ownership, via employee stock option plans, has been a powerful tool for incentivizing talented people to dedicate their skills to building startups in Silicon Valley. While this model has been extremely successful, it hasn’t been accessible to all, constrained by geography and legacy financial infrastructure, among other factors. One result is tha... See more

There are some phenomenal products in some of the companies that were overfunded and are haunted by past decisions. The valuations at which these companies raised capital set them on the wrong path - a path that fails to attract and reward critical talent, a path that incentivizes excess expenditure for growth at the expense of structuring a busine... See more

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

Sure, macroeconomic conditions change and the cost of capital underpins everything loss-making, high growth start-ups are valued on. It just feels a bit tough on founders like Teo, who now had to fire 44 people to fit a growth profile that, until two months ago, was likely the apple of her VC investor’s eye.

To put that another way, Venture Capital has always treated LPs as their customer and their investments as their product while ignoring that in a two-sided marketplace, value can easily move the other way. What if the Limited Partners, the funders, were actually the product that Venture Capital could sell to founders at startups to win deals?

From our perspective, we see this increased bottom-up competition for the services radically improving the unit economics of venture capital in favor of founders and communities.