Focus: We invest in the things that make life worth living. This is 3 areas of focus: Wellness, Sustainability, Learning/Work/Play.
Pitch Advice: The biggest thing I look for in an investment is signs of customer love and product engagement, so emphasize those areas when pitching me.
Focus: I'm 100% focused on B2B software - developer tools and infrastructure, vertical SaaS, productivity and operations, B2B FinTech.
Pitch Advice: Very happy to receive well-researched and interestingly-written cold emails! Please do the research though in terms of what I invest in, stage, etc. Lots of info on our website.
Focus: eCommerce infrastructure and future of work
Pitch Advice: I look for businesses with both a grand vision and a focused, narrow go to market strategy. It’s okay if there’s a gap between where you want to be and what the next year will look like, but you have to have both.
Focus: We're generalist investors with a portfolio split equally across enterprise and consumer companies.
Pitch Advice: We invest in good people with great ideas, so it's important to us to get to know you. At the same time, it's critical for founders to demonstrate keen financial acumen, even and especially at a company's earliest stages. And, our community matters hugely to us, so we'll want you to be a strong addition to the group.
Pitch Advice: I'm a former founder/CEO and software engineer so be real with me! Tell me about your operational challenges and what you need help with. Show me how you work with customers.
Pitch Advice: Not surprising: you must be able to describe what your startup is doing in 1-3 sentences. We VCs have a very short attention span. We hear hundreds of pitches each month. Succinct.
Focus: Generalist but current themes are SaaS products built on recent developments in AI, products that get data into the hands of more people in an organization, infra that makes web3 actually work and modernizing the healthcare stack.
Pitch Advice: Include as much information as possible so investors can self select if there might be a fit without wasting lots of your time.
Focus: Deep tech! All hardware and wetware in climate, life-sci, and aerospace.
Pitch Advice: KISS! At least for the teaser deck. Complicate it when you've secured interest and have a VC realtime. The pre-read should be children's book simple!
Pitch Advice: Most Seed-stage founders present their current wedge into the market and short-term plan (ie. what they’ve done to-date and what they're going to do over the next one to two years). But to make the pitch even stronger, share a "10 Year Vision" slide on how you plan to take on the bigger market / competitors over time.
Pitch Advice: Be sure to talk about founder-market fit and why you are the right team to work on this problem. I also prefer founders who are direct and address key risks and competition head on.
Pitch Advice: We like to have a good answer to two questions (1) what is your fundamental insight, why is it not obvious, and why is now the time? (2) why is your team the team that will win?
Pitch Advice: The tighter, the better. If you need more than 10 slides to tell your story, you are not crisp enough on the opportunity and what you plan to de-risk with the incremental capital.
Focus: Network effects as a whole. For me, specifically focused on companies and networks building something that is uniquely enabled by crypto or uniquely leverages crypto.
Pitch Advice: Create a BriefLink! It is totally private to the founders until they send a link to me or another person... like DocSend or DropBox would be but designed for startups. That will help me and other investors take a look at the metadata and decide whether it makes sense to take their time with a meeting. Like moving straight into a second meeting rather than a generic intro.
Focus: Consumer + Consumerization of Enterprise. Thesis areas we're spending time on right now: eCommerce infrastructure, consumer subscriptions, mental health, climate tech / sustainability. What won't be invested in? Probably not the best fit for something in infrastructure software, security software, or deep tech.
Pitch Advice: We like to see some early signs of product-market fit - e.g. a handful of customers who are raving about the product, a distribution channel that seems very promising - and will rarely invest pre-launch.
Focus: Climate, Insurance, Commerce Enablement and Supply Chain
Pitch Advice: Don’t pitch, find partners for your business that don’t need the market explained to them. Those will be the investors that will have true conviction in you and will add the most value over the life of your company.
Focus: We typically don't invest in pharma, healthcare, medical devices; areas we do like: real estate tech, FinTech, e-commerce, marketplaces, robotics and computer vision, DeFi, interactive entertainment.
Pitch Advice: Warm intros always best, but fine if a cold intro - research who we are, blogposts we've written, LinkedIn posts, etc. to determine whether something you're pitching is a fit for areas we've been publicly exploring; furthermore, send a punchy deck and bullet pointed email with major insights into team pedigree, product / industry, any relevant traction numbers from a beta, etc., are included.
Focus: We focus on the following verticals: Enterprise Software, Fintech, Marketplaces and Healthcare IT. Within those spaces, we are excited about enterprise tech that has strong product-led adoption, insurance and payments within fin tech and delivery models and businesses that support the movement towards fee for value (instead of service) for Healthcare IT. We won't invest in commerce brands and social companies. Ad-tech is unlikely too.
Focus: Everything climate, especially the really early stage stuff where we can be catalytic.
Pitch Advice: The word pitch is too one sided - I want to have conversations with founders where we discover the unfair advantages each of us can bring forward to save the world.
Focus: Enterprise Software aligning with the FABRIC framework (fast, addictive, bold, rewarding, integrated and community driven).
Pitch Advice: Be human and be your authentic self. These are long journeys so the more an investor can get to know the real you (and vice versa) the more you will know whether the partnership makes sense!
Focus: Pre-seed and seed stage companies building companies to modernize our critical industries such as AI, defense, aerospace, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, cybersecurity, and robotics.
Pitch Advice: Spend time talking about the customer problem you are solving and what customers have been saying in early discussions about what you’re building – a founders ability to get to the right customers and listen results in a great and defensible product in the long run.
Focus: I concentrate on consumer, while our fund SignalFire's core sectors include dev tools, cybersecurity, healthcare, and vertical SAAS — all with an emphasis on AI and infrastructure.
Pitch Advice: Tell us your superhero origin story. What makes you determined to solve this problem and gives you the superpowers to win. And if you hire strong talent, our Beacon AI data platform that helps us source investments will spot you!
Focus: I focus on founders who understand our website (https://root.vc) - which ends up being a lot of developer tools, software infrastructure, AI and machine learning, tools for data scientists and data engineers…and other hard problems in software.
Pitch Advice: I want to have a conversation, not be talked at or presented to. The deck is a good background for me to read ahead of time, and maybe it’s a good outline for you while we chat. I think your pitch is the story of what you’re doing, who you are, and an argument for why I should invest.
Pitch Advice: Warm and cold intros both welcome. I'm looking to learn from and have powerfully informative conversations with founders. You should be the expert in effectively communicating the value proposition to the customer and TAM of the pain point. Highlight strong indicators of product-market-fit (ie no/low churn + proven, scalable, and economical go-to-market) or, if not quite there yet, illustrate what customer discovery you've done to get to conviction. Finally, tell me why you and your team are the right ones to do it.
Focus: Solutions that sell into technical audiences including AI/ML, data, open source, developer tools, infrastructure, and security
Pitch Advice: We recommend emphasizing your story and why you have founder-market fit for the product you are building. What is the unique insight you have that others don't know yet?
