We’re a Company Builder and Investor
About Us
We’re best described as an incubator or company builder. Our business is to come up with new ideas for businesses to build, validate these ideas, and then when we think we’ve identified a business opportunity in a big market where we have unique expertise, we invest resource to build early product and acquire customers. It’s never been cheaper to start a company - with mature tools for company setup, market testing, analytics, etc. And ideas are prolific. Our thesis is that if you can get very good at the 0 to 1 of idea generation and validation, you can quickly gather signal and identify opportunities for new businesses with relatively little resource. You can then double down on the best of these.
Many of us are also former Amazon. We believe that there are methods - born out in Amazon’s incredible success at launching hundreds of incredibly successful businesses - that can be open-sourced and applied to launching our own companies. These are methods like the PRFAQ, working backwards process, the recruiting and bar raiser programs, etc. Company builders have launched Affirm, Snowflake, Hims/Hers and outcomes are accelerating. Our vision is to build companies of this same scale but at scale, as Amazon has proven to do repeatedly.
We are a team of exited founders of venture backed startups from top investors (LSVP, Khosla, GGV), former VP level team members (Facebook, StubHub, Houzz), and angel investors. Ours is a small ‘two pizza team’ with expertise across the core functional areas critical in the early days - design, engineering, product, business development, etc. We’re backed by top investors including Tiger Management, BloombergBeta, early founding team members at Amazon, and others. We’re organized as a fund with capital to operate for three to five years as we prove out the model.
It’s important to note as well that we’re operating in quasi-stealth as we start to build a flywheel of company validation and development. We have a great team and world class investors, but we’re not advertising, as we want to lean forward with great businesses we develop before we share more on our vision and methods. You’ll be joining a well capitalized team with big ambitions and lots of upside, and you’ll be doing that as an early member of the founding team.
Our Team
We’ve intentionally started as a small team. As a small team we can move fast and operate with lots of trust.
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Founder. Former Amazon. Former co-founder of Founders Factory, a $200MM venture fund and accelerator in the UK; Former co-founder of Evolv, acquired by CSOD; former co-founder of InvestRx. Expertise across B2B and consumer in a dozen companies.. Deep network. San Francisco, CA.
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Co-founder. Founding team of StubHub, Former senior leader at Facebook and founding team at Houzz. World class experience on scaling consumer products and a deep network of investors and subject experts. Palo Alto, CA.
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Co-founder. Former rising star at Amazon. Incredible multi-disciplinary business athlete. Former founder. Expertise across B2B and consumer. New York, NY.
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Design and customer research. Deep experience in design and customer research at Pivotal Labs and Grab. Leads activities around early product strategy, customer development and design. Los Angeles, CA.
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Engineering. Former engineering leader at NewRelic, Community and Invision. Incredible communicator. Special balance of full stack engineering and emotional intelligence. Plenty of evidence of building world class products from 0 to scale. Portland, Oregon.
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Engineering. Former Amazon prototype engineer where he personally built three separate products that became $B+ business units. Focus on backend. First class honor graduate from IIT. Toronto, Canada.
Our Culture
Much of our culture we take from Amazon. The best articulation of our culture is visible in our Operating Principles that you can view here.
Our Method
We have structured guardrails for company creation that drives much of our method around company creation. We have what we call ‘search areas’, which are areas of opportunity where we have deep problem empathy in big and growing markets. Our primary search areas are:
Boomers - building products and services to support a generation aging at home and $71 trillion in wealth transfer over the next 15 years.
Fractional Work - evolving trends in how people fractionalzie their work across multiple employers and job types. Given our focus in search areas, we have a network of experts and potential customers we engage as we identify new opportunities.
We work backwards from customer needs in developing new products, drafting PRFAQs and building early prototypes. We drive traffic to these prototypes and iterate. And when we feel we’ve identified a significant opportunity we engage investors and our broader network. We begin to go deeper on product development as we build a team that will ultimately run these businesses from early product in market to scale.
The Role
We’re a small startup team in a box. This means we wear a lot of hats. We have two parallel areas of focus in our work. First, we’re building new companies. Over the next three years we want to build 6-9 companies and we’ll scale our company building over time. In our first year we plan to launch two companies and we currently have three in active development. Our efforts are focused on validating ideas, getting early customer feedback, and then iterating product as we recruit leadership teams to then take over ownership of these companies and drive scale. Second, we’re building the scaffolding of a company builder, where with each new company we build we get better and more efficient at the 0 to 1. We do this by continuously improving our methods for company building and developing a bench of capable advisors and domain experts while building out the core team. In this way, the role is both about building great companies but also building the capability to eventually build companies at real scale.