Welcome to our first weekly update. We are committing to sending weekly updates to
Reduce information asymmetry between all the stakeholders in our community
Act as a forcing function to improve analytics across the board
Make it easier for our community members to help us grow
To provide feedback on these updates (including what you’d like to see more or less of), please feel free to
Comment directly on this doc
Reply to the email you received linking to this doc
Comment on the Slack thread for this update
Highlights
We have closed the first deal since transitioning our deal structure from RUVs to SPVs. The experience is the same for investors and smoother for founders. It also makes future monetization much easier. But, the change required a complete redesign of our deal process. Our first deal resulted in a 6 page checklist that we are working to automate.
We’ve published v1 of our dashboard
North Star
Our current North Star is “Deals Published”. We define this as an SPV going live to the community with a top tier memo. Once we have this capability mastered, we will switch our North Star to “Deals Closed”. We define this as the SPV having signed docs with the founder and wired funds to the startup.
Deal Pipeline
We have 21 deals in our pipeline. We have created SPVs for 17 of these deals and are finalizing their deal memos.
We have two sourcing mechanisms: member referrals and member requests. We are currently focused on processing member referred deals. This is where a member who has invested in a company proceeds to introduce us to the founder. We launch these deals live without securing soft commits from the group.
After we have optimized our deal launch process, we will launch the ability for members to soft commit to deals in advance of us reaching out to founders.
Investor Pipeline
We are currently at 1,270 investor members. We define investor members as those who have opted in to receive deal notifications via email.
Talent
We are currently recruiting for two contract deal leads (job description). I’d greatly appreciate any referrals
Legal
We have incorporated our management entity (a Delaware LLC) which will act as the advisor/sub-advisor to the SPVs. I am working on onboarding the entity onto AngelList as well as other logistics.
Financials/Monetization
More to come on this in next week’s update
Podcast Appearances
I was recently a guest on the Inside Startup Investing podcast.