Founders Coop

SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

Today Seattle fintech unicorn Remitly (NASDAQ: RELY ) begins its journey as a public company. This is obviously a huge milestone for the founders, not to mention the 1,600+ employees who have joined them along the way. It’s a different kind of milestone for me as an investor: 10 years ago I led the company’s Seed round and joined the board, where I served until the Series C.

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Founders Coop

JUNE 29, 2021

Why did you start Ganaz? My whole career has been driven by the belief that you can build a virtuous cycle between workers, employers and downstream retailers and consumers. I was at Fair Trade USA for many years building that belief into a thriving market for Fair Trade produce. And while I was there, I watched farmworkers adopt cell phones and then smart phones.

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Founders Coop

MARCH 1, 2021

Aviel and I are thrilled to share the news that we’ve just closed a new fund, our fifth, and at $50M our largest yet. In most ways, this is just business as usual. Our LPs, many of whom are founders themselves, love our commitment to being first and fast, writing high-conviction pre-seed and seed checks to the best technical founding teams in the Pacific Northwest.

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Founders Coop

MAY 18, 2020

Last week I spotted this annotated twitter thread from Fred Destin , which he kicked off with a simple question : As founders-turned-VCs, Aviel and I have always relied on the “golden rule” principle — treating founders the way we wish we had been treated when we were in their shoes — when deciding how to build our own firm here at Founders’ Co-op.

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Founders Coop

JULY 27, 2018

Why did you start Outreach? At the core, I’m an entrepreneur and have always been interested in building my own business. That’s what led me to enroll in TechStars’ 2011 class, along with my three business partners. We founded a company that was essentially a marketplace to connect teams of developers to the companies looking to hire them. But we were struggling to handle the volume of prospecting required to build both sides of that marketplace, so we built our own platform to help our sales te

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Founders Coop

AUGUST 2, 2018

I’m thrilled to publicly announce the really poorly kept secret , that after almost 4 years of working alongside Chris DeVore and the rest of the Founders’ Co-op team, I’ve stepped into the partnership with both feet as a General Partner. Going forward the investment team will be myself and Chris, with Rudy Gadre and Andy Sack remaining involved as Venture Partners.

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Founders Coop

AUGUST 7, 2018

With Aviel’s announcement last week, and a new website up at Founder’s Co-op reflecting our new partnership, I thought it was a good time to revisit the themes from my 2013 keynote at the Geekwire Awards: Turtles and Flywheels. Back then I said: “The truth is, it takes time to build anything of lasting value…[t]he better something is — the more powerful and lasting — the longer it takes to build”.

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Founders Coop

AUGUST 9, 2018

As an investor, I care a lot – and I mean A LOT – about founders’ motivations for starting a company. Over the past couple of years, nearly every relevant Bay Area technology company has opened up an engineering office in Seattle and our hometown heroes Amazon and Microsoft are also attracting an unprecedented amount of technology talent to the region, many of whom are itching to start their own companies.

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Founders Coop

AUGUST 15, 2018

As seed phase investors (H/T to Hunter Walk for the term), we invest in companies that spend the majority of their time learning and iterating, and yet when it comes to fundraising conversations too many founders think that what I want to talk about the most is their solution and why it’s going to make a billion dollars. The truth is, while I certainly care about your product in the context of how it evolves towards a big vision, I care a lot less than you think about what you’ve built thus far

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Founders Coop

AUGUST 27, 2018

When Rudy Giuliani declared “Truth isn’t truth” in defense of Donald Trump, I cringed. Not just for the obvious reasons, but because as I absorbed the absurdity of his statement, it hit uncomfortably close to home. How do startup leaders think about truth, especially in the age of Theranos? What’s a true statement in or about a startup? Things move so fast (especially in the really early and high growth phases) that something that is true today often isn’t true tomorrow.

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Founders Coop

OCTOBER 22, 2018

We’ve written a lot about how our investing work at Founders’ Co-op connects to the broader global market for innovation finance (see The Venture Capital Stack or Regional Seed Investing ), but we’ve never said much about where our own fund’s capital comes from. Recent events have shined a bright, and ugly, light on the source of much of the money driving the current Venture Capital boom, and fellow investors and industry journalists are now advocating for greater tran

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Founders Coop

MARCH 4, 2019

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve just led a seed investment (our largest first-check investment to date) in Ally , the intelligent operating system for business execution. Ally helps businesses tightly connect strategy to execution, and leverages ML to orchestrate alignment and transparency throughout an organization. Step one of their mission is to bring a highly effective Objectives and Key Results (OKR) process into organizations of all sizes, through a workflow that engages team members w

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Founders Coop

APRIL 15, 2019

Where does the time go? In early 2008 we announced the formation of Founders’ Co-op. We called it a fund, but at $2.7 million it wasn’t much of one, just some of our own money and some from a few local friends who knew how hard it was to be a founder up in this remote corner of the world. Seattle then was famous for its coffee, for airplanes, and as the home of Microsoft, a once-feared tech monopoly whose valuation had peaked back in 1999, brought low by the one-two punch of the internet bust an

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Founders Coop

MAY 14, 2019

The U.S. spends about twice what other high-income nations do on health care, but with results that are often worse than those countries achieve at much lower cost. In 2009, in a national effort to improve quality and lower costs, the Federal government launched a huge incentive program to drive the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), spending an estimated $40 billion over the past decade to implement this data-gathering technology in hospitals across the country.

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