We announced Worklife a little over a year ago, a specialized firm backed by founders aligned to our mission of making work more creative, flexible, and ultimately more human for individuals, not institutions.
We started with a $10 million dollar debut fund, which includes a few of the fastest startups to unicorn status: Hopin, Clubhouse, Public.
We backed technical teams leaving Affirm, Airbnb, Palantir, Plaid, and the last generation of breakout companies, in many cases we invested before they left their last thing 🤫.
... and mmhmm. Our investors were a little confused with the name of this one 🧐.
Our mission is grounded in a fundamental shift in how individuals define success: creative expression, online influence, and extreme optionality ie: remote work, side projects, and "no code, no problem" startups are changing how we live and work.
In our first year, we built a new experience for founders, a community of operators and sector-aligned founders, and invested alongside a new breed of investor we call triple threats who are operators and helpful angel investors who have started companies or crossed over from other industries.
We invite founders, celebrities, athletes, and operators known for a specific thing who can deliver the highest CS:H (check size to helpfulness ratio) to every company we back. On average, we invite 10 angels to invest alongside us.
Our strategy:
We’re a hands-on partner from Formation to IPO.
You’re never too early. We meet founders early, typically before they leave their last thing.
Many of our investments have come from 6-8 months of collaboration on product, go-to-market, and building the bench for the first round.
We lead and co-lead early stage rounds.
Our target check size is $1-3 million dollars, but we occasionally write smaller checks to help teams from the very beginning.
We love friends and family rounds just as much as a traditional seed.
Our first check is flexible because round sizes vary based on founding team composition and prior startup experience, sector, traction, and other factors that we work through together.
We’re occasionally late. We play the long game and back companies irrespective of company stage.
If we missed your last round, put us to work before your next one.
We measure our success based on our ability to deliver value and earn larger allocations over time.
In many cases, we meet teams in between rounds and operate as an extension of the executive team
We're founder-friendly in a non-traditional way.
We offer future founders liquidity to leave a company and start something new.
If you're equity rich at someone else's company, we buy employee shares so you can buy a house, start a family, do "life" things before you start something new.
We look more like a startup than a traditional venture firm.
We allocate a large % of our management fees to community and education.
We hosted over 50 community events in 2020, many served as customer-facing events for early stage companies to meet executives from Cameo, Patreon, Twitch, Spotify in a safe and trusted environment to socialize what you're building, without the pressure of a formal sales pitch.
- We host weekly discussions and invite-only conversations for Worklife founders
- We host round table discussions for early stage companies to learn alongside executives. Our first People & Culture event featured in the Washington Post:
- We host monthly workshops and quarterly bootcamps to help technical founders with go-to-market strategy including growth engineering, sales and customer success, and tactics for building a community from the ground up.
Self-serve growth 101: how to build your first growth engine with no sales team
Self-serve analytics 101: creating, deploying, and governing the right systems for KPIs
Sales & Customer Success 101: building your first Sales & Customer Success strategy
Worklife Now, Next, Next. It's like SXSW meets Sun Valley.
Our annual meeting is a three day event spanning the worlds of business, venture capital, and culture.
Traditional venture firms host behind closed doors conversations exclusively for their investors, we chose to build a new experience for founders to meet new customers and creators to discover new tools to get the business of their dreams off the ground.
- 15 original events: live talks & invite-only culture events for Worklife partners & journalists from Vice, BOF, NYT
- 1,500 attendees from Figma, Notion, Peloton, Patreon, MSCHF & values-aligned companies for customer introductions & future portfolio company hires
- A platform for cultural leaders including internet creators, artists, mixologists & no-code builders to show off their work
