Yesterday, I celebrated my birthday (which included a surprise Zoom party from the team)! 🍰
As I turn another year older, I’m reflecting on how building and expanding Conscience has challenged me to change and grow in ways I never thought possible.
Especially as an emerging manager, but also a founder / solo GP, I’m so grateful to have many wonderful, supportive friends and colleagues accompany me in this thrilling (and at times fear-inducing) journey. Together, we can do anything!
In particular, the rapidly growing Conscience family continues to teach me how we can best surprise and delight startup founders. ✨
We’re constantly seeking ways to continue scaling up our founder value-add as a team:
(1) Implementing innovative systems to serve portfolio founders that aim to solve and pre-empt their pain points and needs. These initiatives span knowledge sharing through our virtual events, personalized feedback through open founder office hours, and a jam-packed 170+ resource goodie bag.
We want our founders to focus all their energy into changing the world.
(2) Protecting founders’ valuable time through streamlined pre-screen and initial call processes. We review and discuss decks before calls and have strong intention around who we meet and what we are looking for.
Our first meetings instead seek to understand the heart and mind of the founder — we really want to see what makes our future partners and collaborators tick. We love to leverage async email communication to ask our more in-depth questions, which helps founders develop FAQs for other investors, and explore the nuances of their own business in new ways.
(3) Taking opportunities to develop our founder relationships at every touch point. We aim to serve, and this includes founders outside our portfolio.
If requested, we customize feedback post-calls to help founders think through critical business aspects and access new resources. We have also made customer/partnership/investor intros where appropriate, as we keep the relationship open.
(4) Establishing partnerships for non-dilutive capital. One great example is a webinar we’re hosting with InteliSpark on Wednesday, April 6th to guide our advanced technology startup founders through how to access federal grants and other government research funding programs.
We do this to help founders gain more credibility and financial backing early on in the game and continue to protect ownership of their ideas.
(5) Establishing a hands-on community of ~200 members, who are friends and family of the firm, available to serve founders and others in the community across tactical advice, talent, helpful resources and more. We’ve been blown away by the generosity and genius of these members, who span exited unicorn founders and tenured investors.
With these initiatives and other stealth ones in the works…I have no doubt that this will be another high velocity but also “high service” year.
Excited to be on this journey with you all. 🙂
