One of the best parts of our job is meeting with entrepreneurs. We get an opportunity to collaborate with determined people who are willing to go up against the unknown and navigate the hurdles as they come, whether it’s creating a product from scratch, navigating a frustratingly opaque financial ecosystem (yes, venture capital, we’re talking about you!), or managing the morale of their employees through the inevitable ups & downs. These discussions are inspiring, energizing, and, in many cases, elucidating.
In our conversations with founders, perhaps the biggest perception discrepancy that we discovered between entrepreneurs and investors is VCs’ accessibility. While investors often feel they are relatively easy to find and reach, whether through warm introductions or cold emails, we heard from countless founders that their experiences couldn’t be further from this. Time and time again, entrepreneurs shared with us that it’s not only exceptionally difficult to get meetings with investors in the first place but also nearly impossible to get any candid, actionable feedback out of them once they meet.
In response to this pain point, we began holding open office hours in October of 2017. In addition to hosting these meetings at co-working spaces and incubators throughout NYC (thank you WeWork, Alley, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Future Labs, the Yard, and Galvanize!), we committed to blocking off two hours every week to create four 30-min slots for 1x1 “mentor meetings” with founders, originally in our own offices and now via Zoom.
For context, we treat these meetings not as formal investor pitches but instead as a safe environment for founders to broach any questions they might have about venture capital, startups, fundraising, sales, hiring, and everything in between. While we acknowledge that the founders always know their businesses best and encourage them to take any input with a grain of salt, our hope is that our birds’ eye view perspective can, at minimum, offer some insight into VCs’ perception, concerns, and frameworks, and, at best, provide founders with a foot in the door into a financial ecosystem that still remains opaque and exclusive. Though we don’t have the bandwidth to track results across the board, we do know that many of these initial meetings have resulted in introductions to accelerators, VCs, advisors, and vendors, and, subsequently, material investments and partnerships.
A big unknown when we started doing these meetings with no qualification/filter system whatsoever was whether this vehicle would attract exceptional entrepreneurs. Now that we’re 3 years into these meetings, there is no question. While it is impossible to highlight all of them, special shout-out to Ariel Lopez (co-founder, CEO of Knac), Madeleine Barr (founder & CEO of Piecewise), Lyonel Dougé (founder & CEO, Tipsnaps), Gabriela Trueba (co-founder & CEO, Womp) and Avi Goren (founder & CEO, Marqii), among countless others, who turned these one-off meetings into multi-year relationships -- we are so happy to have met you and blown away by what you’ve built.
We also can’t help but highlight that of the 700+ founders we’ve met through these open meetings, at least 45% have been of underrepresented backgrounds (based on gender, race/ethnicity, or both). Seeing the pre-seed founder landscape largely reflect the demographic composition of the broader US population strengthens our conviction that the next ten years of entrepreneurship will look nothing like the last ten and that the funding gap is not the result of a pipeline problem.
On our end, we’re excited to keep doing everything we can to make Laconia and the broader venture ecosystem as accessible as possible to entrepreneurs, no matter their background. If you are an early stage founder who’d like to chat, please grab some time on our calendars; we can’t wait to meet you!
