Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I’ve recently noticed a new trend in firms focusing on moving very, very early stage startups from either an idea or a very early, seed stage firm, to a real, fundable venture. These companies focus on taking seed stage companies — typically with a couple of founders or very early on in developing a product — and building them out to the point that a venture capital firm will fund them. In the process, they might invest some dollars, but the key point generally is they apply their operational experience to the companies to make them fundable. These either take the form of an accelerator organization, or in many cases seed stage angel/VC fund with a very operational (rather than financial) focus.

In the wider venture world, this might be a Y Combinator or a Techstars.  InSouthern California, there are actually a number of companies also pursuing this type of operationally focused, venture acceleration model, including Venture Farm and Momentum Venture Partners. There are also a number of early stage funds which take the same approach–with more operational than financial focus–such as Groundwork Equity, and Great Pacific Capital.

I ran an interview with Sid Mohasseb at Venture Farm Friday, and I’ve also spoken with Andy Wilson at Momentum Venture Partners about their companies.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 8:44 am and is filed under Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.