“Let me know how I can be helpful.”
That sounds like a friendly offer, but for those deep in startup world, it’s a punch line too. The phrase, spoken from investors to founders, often unintentionally amounts to lip service.
It may seem trivial but the topic matters because founders have so many more options for approaching funding today than they had five years ago — secondary markets for private equity, crowdfunding, bootstrapping, minimally-dilutive capital, micro-investments, and factoring. So founders who do approach VC investment often seek more than just cash. They want investors who align with their vision and, well, help.
And many do want to help. Ex-founders and early-stage employees-turned-investors especially understand the grind, and sit on a trove of wisdom and expertise. As Alexis Ohanian put it: “I truly believe the future belongs to those who can assemble and activate their cap tables to be a league of super contributors.”
There are two problems, “founders are busy and can’t put tasks on a silver platter, and investors want to help but don’t want to step on toes,” explained Brian Murray, an investor and Partner at Craft Ventures, in a Product Hunt Maker Story.
So Murray and his co-founder, Fahim Ferdous (who also co-founded AdQuick), built Cabal.
Cabal is an all-in-one platform to help founders and teams surface what they need from investors and make it easy for them to contribute. The tool combines an email client, an e-signature product, a lightweight CRM, and workflows.
In a demo, Murral illustrates some of the tools including one of Cabal’s workflow features, the Ask tab. Here, founders can share a page with advisors that shows which companies the startup is targeting, and people the advisor knows at those companies. Startups can draft pre-written emails that advisors can use to reach out to the contacts.
Check out the demo video to see other ways investors can be helpful.
After building a high-end audio company used by the likes of Radiohead and Coldplay, maker David Brown is launching Tula Mic to allow anyone to capture professional-quality sound on the go.
Tula Mic is a pocket-size USB microphone that connects to your computer, phone, or tablet and is capable of up to 12 hours of recording using its own internal battery and memory.
WorkOS is a modern identity and user management platform that enables B2B SaaS companies to accelerate enterprise adoption. Free up to 1 million MAUs, WorkOS brings a modular approach to B2B Auth with enterprise-ready features like SSO, SCIM, and User Management.
The APIs are flexible and easy to use, designed to provide an effortless experience from your first user all the way through your largest enterprise customer.
Today, hundreds of high-growth scale-ups are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom.
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