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Reflecting On Three Years Of Laconia Mentor Meetings...
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!
Portfolio Spotlight: Marpipe
We’re thrilled to publicly announce Marpipe, the world’s first platform for end-to-end multivariate creative testing -- and the newest addition to the Laconia portfolio.
In May of 2019, we had the pleasure of meeting Marpipe’s founder and CEO, Dan Pantelo, through our amazing former intern, Paola Delgado. When she introduced the company as an adtech firm, we were a bit hesitant to get excited right off the bat. Although we have seen great success in the past with our fund investment in PromoteIQ (acq. Microsoft) and legacy investments FreeWheel (acq. Comcast) and TripleLift, we tend to approach this sector with caution given its highly saturated nature and somewhat limited liquidity options.
When we first met Dan, he was building a fast-growing digital marketing agency that was delivering exceptional results and insights thanks to the proprietary technology that his team had built. In working with both brands and agencies, the Marpipe team had discovered that they could use automated multivariate testing and machine learning to discover, create, and analyze the best-performing creative content for brands, products, and services. By generating thousands of creative files that isolate and measure visual variables, marketers can pinpoint with data-driven certainty exactly what visual stimuli audiences react best to, allowing them to rapidly narrow in on audience/creative fit that can scale. For the first time, marketers can understand not only which creative outperforms but why.
Though we were impressed with the underlying technology, unique value proposition, and early traction, we went back and forth on whether this functionality was a “nice to have” feature or an essential piece of the overall creative workflow. We also had hesitations about the managed service business model. Dan’s collaborative attitude throughout these conversations became readily apparent. He never became defensive toward our questions, opinions or suggestions, and he continually impressed us with his rigor and thoughtfulness.
As is the case more often than not, we ultimately passed on the investment. Side note to any founders reading this: a “No” from a VC isn’t necessarily set in stone. In some cases, an entrepreneur’s ability to receive and incorporate constructive feedback, along with demonstrated progress, can convert that “No” into a “Yes”. In fact, this has been the case with our last three investments, which we ended up proudly coming back to lead or co-lead alongside strong syndication partners.
After we initially passed, Dan continued to reach out for our feedback and kept us updated on the firm's progress. In the following months, he made meaningful progress in evolving the company’s business model, refining the product roadmap, and establishing strategic partnerships that enable scalable growth. His continued execution combined with his communication style and collaborative nature only increased our confidence in his vision and ability. After a particularly exciting catch-up meeting in November, we issued our term sheet in partnership with TIA Ventures, and in January 2020, we closed the deal.
Fast forward to today -- and the real highlight of this post -- Marpipe has now publicly launched the first self-serve platform enabling multivariate testing for ad creative. With market-leading companies like Segment, Mars, and Tubi already using Marpipe, users across the entire platform (including 700+ lucky firms with beta access) discover new ads that perform over 200% better than their average.
With the launch of the public beta and freemium plan, now anyone growing a brand can sign up for Marpipe and get started in minutes. We couldn’t be more excited about Marpipe’s momentum. Their platform is a game-changer for the creative marketing industry.
To learn about how Marpipe is increasing marketing efficiency with their data-driven approach and get started, check out their latest release and their launch on Product Hunt today!
SportsRecruits X Veo Partnership
SportsRecruits is embarking on a new partnership with Veo! This partnership continues to help teams make video even more accessible in the recruiting process! With the combination of Veo video and the SportsRecruits platform, your players can create profiles, share their video with every college coach in the country, and track which coaches are watching each video.
AutoFi Shifts Into High Gear Due to Market Growth in Online Vehicle Purchases
A silver lining of the COVID-19 cloud has been rapid innovation within the automotive industry despite showroom closures. Car dealers have quickly responded to consumer preferences for a low-touch buying experience. Digital car sales and finance platform AutoFi (www.autofi.com) has seen its customer growth increase by 125% so far in 2020. To support this expansion, AutoFi is adding four technology and auto industry veterans to its leadership team.