Ever dreamt of turning your killer idea into a thriving business? Achieving product-market fit, that magical point where your creation resonates deeply with your target audience, can feel like capturing lightning in a bottle — some may refer to it as the “dark arts”! This journey, though challenging, is far from impossible. As pre-seed investors, we have the great fortune of witnessing founders take their idea and turn it into a thriving business.

Below, I share 5 things founders of Knock, Sam Seely and Chris Bell, did exceptionally well to take Knock from just an idea to product-market fit (and now a $12M Series A led by David Sacks):

1. Sell Before You Build: Forget waiting for the perfect product before testing the waters. Knock’s founders embraced the power of pre-selling, even before a single line of code was written. Their rough sales deck, armed with a clear problem statement, visuals, and pricing, served as a powerful feedback tool. They iterated on their idea based on real-world reactions, shaping their vision before significant resources were invested.

2. Charge Early, Learn Early: This one is counter intuitive — you may think by giving the product away for free you are helping your startup grow fast. And while that may be true, you are actually losing an incredible opportunity to learn (which is what matters most at this stage). Payment is the ultimate validation. Not just a few tire kickers. Knock’s willingness to offer early access at a price gave them valuable insights into who truly valued their solution (vs. just being nice). Don’t be afraid to ask for commitment, it reveals true believers and fuels your learning curve.

3. Feedback Loops Are Your Lifeline: Building a product in a vacuum is a recipe for disaster. The team at Knock always reminds me, “we want it to be as easy as possible for our customers to tell us what they don’t like the product”. As a founder myself, I know it’s hard to hear critical feedback on your baby. But you have to embrace it if you want your baby to thrive! Knock integrated various feedback channels across their product, website, and documentation, even inviting customers to a dedicated Slack channel for real-time insights. This constant flow of feedback fuels continuous improvement and keeps them laser-focused on user needs.

4. Speed Is Your Superpower: In the early days, the ability to ship fast and iterate rapidly gives you a distinct edge. Knock prioritized speed from the get-go, reflected in their development process, company values (”Move fast”), and aggressive goals (at least one changelog every week). They understood that quick iterations based on real-world feedback would lead to a better product faster than perfectionism. There were instances where they fixed a bug within hours of a customer reporting them. And while they were not the first product of its kind in the market, they are the fastest. And speed creates a compounding effect where you lead only gets larger and larger! Their customers recognize this which is reflected in their win rate in competitive deals.

5. Write for Yourself, Not Just Investors: While investor updates are important to keep investors abreast and ask for help, Knock uses them as internal tools for reflection and growth. The process of setting goals, tracking progress, and analyzing results is invaluable for any startup. Treat these updates as opportunities for self-discovery and continuous improvement. In our experience, founders that are willing to hold themselves and the team accountable on a regular cadence (monthly, if not weekly) have a high correlation to success.

Demystifying the journey to PMF was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We curate the flow of founders to investors by only sending the right applications to the relevant people. Investors will see these founders at the same time as Afore sees them, hopefully increasing the odds of founders getting funded. Founders don’t have to give up any equity or pay any fees, and investors don’t need to “pay up” at higher valuations for the best deals as they would in traditional demo days.

At Afore, we are committed to helping pre seed stage founders in any way we can, whether by investing ourselves or helping them get funded. We have been supporting pre seed founders since 2016. Today with three funds totaling $300M, with 80 portfolio companies that have gone on to raise $2B in follow-on capital with a collective market cap of $11 billion, we have the opportunity to help a much broader group of pre seed founders more than ever before.

Since 2016, we’ve seen remarkable growth in the number of pre-seed rounds raised — the stage has gone from 1/10th to one half the size of seed. Founders and funders are much more aware of the term and many founders opt to raise a pre-seed round before or instead of their seed round. By building the common app for pre seed who hope to increase the access to capital even more. We look forward to working with even more pre seed investors and founders in the coming years.

Founders — apply to Afore Alpha: https://www.afore.vc/afore-alpha

Investors — join our network: https://airtable.com/shrHVR6MxnT1xgKqa

Follow us on Twitter — @aforevc

The Common App for Pre-Seed was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Afore Alpha is the best-in-class pre-seed offer available to any founder, anywhere in the world, no matter how early they are. We invest $1m on a $10m post-money SAFE into tech companies just starting (no traction or revenue needed). Alpha is not an accelerator — we like to think that startups in this program are in a cohort of one. Afore works closely with Alpha founders on recruiting team members, getting their first customers, and raising their next round (around 64% of pre-seed founders that Afore backs skip their seed round and go straight to Series A).

We recently looked through the 1,300+ applications we received within the first two months of launching Afore Alpha and wanted to share some highlights. Founders from 40+ industries, 81 countries, and 40 states applied and came from a wide variety of backgrounds (from recent college grads to early professionals to executives that have worked at a range of companies, including Stripe, Uber, Robinhood, Facebook, and more). Read on for more details!

Applications from startups in 40+ industries

Afore invests in companies across industries utilizing technology to solve real problems.

At Afore, we’re a generalist fund — we care more about the problems founders are solving than the strict category they may fall into. We love to see startups that leverage technology, and we invest in both applications and infrastructure, consumer and enterprise, etc. The applications we received reflected this — founders starting companies in over 40 industries applied. The top five most common sectors of companies that applied were enterprise software, fintech, marketplaces, web3, and community, followed closely by healthcare, entertainment, and real estate startups. While we love investing in these sectors at Afore, almost half of all Alpha founder applicants fell outside of these top nine industries. So we encourage founders to apply to Alpha regardless of the industry in which they identify.

Afore Alpha is a global program

We invest globally and are excited to see founders from all over the world applying to the Alpha program.

Afore has made several investments in international founders, and we plan to continue to invest in founders that leverage non-obvious insights to tackle problems in big markets. Often, these big problems and markets are outside the United States, and we recognize that. We were very excited to see founders from 81 countries (representing all continents except for Antarctica) apply to Alpha in the first two months after the program’s launch. Founders outside the United States — we love reading your applications and encourage you to keep applying!

Founders across the United States

Not only did founders across the globe check out Alpha — but we also received founder applications from 80% of states in the US.

We recognized that great founders can come from anywhere, not just in states like California and New York. We’ve invested in founders across the US and are excited that Alpha applications reflect this. So if you’re a founder and don’t see your state represented here, not to worry — we can count the weeks since the Alpha program launched, and we’d love to hear from you.

Alpha sees a mix of new and experienced founders

Founders from varying levels of industry experience applied to Alpha, ranging from current and recently-graduated students to experienced executives.

Afore backs talented founders regardless of age or prior experience; we look for founders solving big, meaningful problems. We saw Alpha applications from founders that were in school or recent college grads (the biggest category of 57%), early-career professionals (36%), and experienced executives (7%). Alpha founders had previously founded other startups 34% of the time, and the remaining chunk of applicants were working on their first startup. We’re excited to see applications from founders of all backgrounds!

Founders had previously worked at a diverse range of companies

We received Alpha applications from founders who had previously worked at companies like Stripe, Uber, Robinhood, Facebook, and more.

Alpha founders had previously worked at (or were still working at) a wide range of organizations including big tech companies, fast-growing startups, government organizations, museums, banks, army divisions, and more. Oftentimes these founders had experienced the problem they were solving firsthand, and that helped them find clarity around their target customers and market. There’s no specific background we’re looking for, and we encourage founders from all backgrounds to apply to Afore Alpha.

Summary

At Afore, we feel lucky to have such a diverse range of founders applying to the Alpha program. We continue to encourage tech founders who are just starting out to apply no matter what industry, geography, or background they may have. We’re excited to keep reading more Alpha applications and learning more about the amazing founders and startups that are applying. The Alpha program is just getting started!

To read more about the Afore Alpha program, please visit our page at https://www.afore.vc/afore-alpha. Here, you can apply and also find answers to frequently-asked questions.

If you have any questions about Afore’s Alpha program, follow us on Twitter to stay updated on our next recurring Alpha Office Hours event, where we’ll give attendees the floor to ask questions. You can also email alpha@afore.vc and we’ll try our best to respond (note that due to the high volume of incoming applications and emails, we may take around a week to get back to you).

Finally, if you’re a pre-seed angel or a pre-seed VC and are interested in collaborating with Alpha in any way including deal flow sharing, please fill out this three-question form with your contact info. We’re working on something here — more details to come soon!

A full summary of the highlights discussed is displayed below.

Full infographic — snapshots from over 1,300 Afore Alpha applications (July 13, 2022)

Thanks for reading!

Snapshots from over 1,300 Afore Alpha applications was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Afore was founded just over 5 years ago to build something missing in the VC landscape: a venture firm that won’t tell founders that it’s too early — or too risky– to invest.

We started the firm after years spent as institutional investors. We came to VC having served as early product leaders at Twitter and Google’s Android, giving us a unique understanding of how to shape a promising idea into a world-changing product.

As investors with strong product backgrounds, we made a conscious choice to focus on pre-seed. We’re passionate about supporting founders in that formative “zero to one” phase when there’s little or no product, no traction, and no revenue. Pre-everything. Pre-obvious.

In 2016, pre-seed was an outlier, with a small number of investors writing mostly small checks. Today, there are many more investors–from massive investment firms to the tiniest micro-fund– chasing alpha in pre-seed, where the risk and rewards are greatest. And today’s pre-seed round looks nothing like it did then.

Still, while many firms now dabble in pre-seed, few make it their focus or invest in pre-seed systematically. To many, pre-seed is a convenient way to get an early look at promising companies; it’s a means to an end. At Afore, it’s all we do. That focus has helped us become the investor of record for entrepreneurs raising their first institutional funding.

We have built an enviable portfolio of more than 80 companies, with a collective market cap that already exceeds $11.5 billion. Afore is proud to have been first –and quite often the lead– investor in breakout companies like Modern Health, BetterUp, Petal, Overtime, BenchSci, Hightouch, Flatfile, Neo Financial and Retain, among others, and to have led more than 80% of the rounds where we’ve invested.

To date, Afore-backed companies have raised more than $1.8 billion in follow-on capital. Nearly 85% of Afore’s portfolio companies have gone on to raise an institutional follow-on round; 64% of them have skipped straight to a Series A. And we’re just getting started.

Now, Afore is opening our next chapter. We have raised a heavily-oversubscribed third institutional fund, totaling $150 million. More than 85% of this new capital is from existing LPs that have been with us since day one, and we’re lucky that many of our incredible founders are also now joining as investors.

As with our first two, this fund will be dedicated entirely to pre-seed stage investments; we’re tripling down on pre-seed. With the addition of this new fund, we have now raised more than $300 million dedicated entirely to pre-seed investing.

Incredibly, our new fund represents more than a third of all pre-seed dollars raised in 2021. And as this analysis shows, nearly one-quarter of the more than $1.18 *billion* that pre-seed firms have raised since 2016 has gone just to Afore.

This new capital will allow us to invest even more resources in our team, so our eight-member team can move even faster to give founders the funding and the support they need.

Despite the market embrace of pre-seed, too many founders still hear “you’re too early.” Data shows more than 90% of today’s venture dollars flow to later-stage companies that have already reached product-market fit. Accelerators and other early investors aren’t set up to provide dedicated help and are unwilling to commit meaningful money. So instead of getting the capital they need, founders are too often offered minuscule investments at comically low valuations.

The harsh reality is that in today’s market, and at today’s prices, accelerator-level capital barely covers the cost of getting started. With just a few months of runway, founders end up on an endless fundraising and demo-day treadmill, leaving little time to build a viable product — let alone bring it to market. The bottom line is that you can’t fly a rocketship with a few gallons of gas; founders need fuel, not fumes.

Today, we’re launching Afore Alpha, a new product that offers founders something better. It distills everything we’ve learned since 2016 into a single, standardized product designed to increase founders’ odds of success.

Afore Alpha sets a new standard for what a pre-seed deal should look like in 2022 — one that gives “pre-everything” founders the runway and personalized resources they need to reach traction and raise a substantial Series A:

• Afore Alpha offers founders a $1 million lead investment via a $10 million post-money SAFE. That’s five times more capital, at five times the valuation, than founders can get from even the best accelerators — and unlike those options, Afore’s funding comes without MFN terms.
• With Afore Alpha, you’re in a cohort of one. Every single investment is paired with stage-specific guidance and dedicated 1-on-1 support with a laser focus on helping founders reach meaningful traction within a reasonable timeframe. It’s a world apart from short-term programs offering generic support and one-size-fits-all advice.
• We know what it takes to go from gestating a raw idea to a billion-dollar outcome because we’ve done it. We leverage that track record to get founders everything they need, from help with product strategy, recruiting, go-to-market strategy, and business development to customer introductions, investor introductions, and PR. We partner with product inventors on the trajectory-changing product invention and market discovery work that needs to happen to set the company on its path.
• Afore Alpha is available to any founder worldwide. Entrepreneurs from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere are increasingly seeking the same type –and same level– of resources available to their North American peers. And rightly so. With Afore Alpha, founders will get the same generous terms, whether they’re in Singapore, South Africa, Spain, or San Francisco.

With Afore Alpha, founders can now raise one meaningful upfront round and spend their next year actually bringing their products to market and actually reaching traction. It’s a winning formula that has worked time and time again for our portfolio companies. Now, we’re making that same playbook available to founders everywhere through Afore Alpha. If this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you — apply here and we’ll get back to you within a week.

We are thankful to the investors who have believed in Afore and joined in our journey, and honored to have met and worked with so many talented and inspiring founders over the past few years. The best is yet to come.

Afore is Tripling Down on Pre-Seed was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s no secret that a massively diverse array of industries experienced disruption through the pandemic. One particularly striking and less-discussed transformation, however, was that of the resale economy. Reselling goods isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, as evidenced by the past success of marketplaces like eBay and StockX, but the pandemic brought a new wave of entrants to the space– particularly in secondhand clothing.

As people increasingly turned to the web for clothing purchases, there was a spike in demand for a digitized thrift store experience. Companies serving this function have experienced a boom in usage– accompanied in many cases by lucrative exits. Depop was recently acquired by Etsy for $1.6B, while The Real Real, Poshmark, and ThredUp are among a recent flurry of public filings and IPOs in the resale space.

Gen Z’s preoccupation with sustainability and ethical production has also been a major driver of the trend, with many members of the younger generation preferring to forego the products of fast fashion as they build their wardrobes. A new slate of secondhand clothing sellers has sprung up in response to meet the needs of a growing customer base. ThredUp’s 2021 Resale Report estimates that of the country’s 52M total secondhand clothing sellers, nearly 70% entered the market for the first time in 2020.

While most people who resell clothing only do so occasionally as a side-hustle, a growing contingent are morphing into “power sellers” who generate most or all of their income from curating and reselling high-quality clothing collections across the major secondhand marketplaces.

Enter Flyp, which enables these power sellers (an estimated population of 400K+ and growing) to streamline their operations and more effectively source items for their online storefronts.

Flyp has developed two core solutions aimed at facilitating the resale process. The first is their AI-driven platform (the first and only of its kind) which enables consumers and businesses to offload their used items to power sellers, who can then sell those items on behalf of the original owner via marketplaces like eBay and Poshmark. The second is a suite of eCommerce automation tools that allows power sellers to significantly reduce the amount of time they spend on inventory management and cross-channel sales operations. Both solutions have been a huge hit since the company’s launch in 2019. The number of items resold with Flyp increased by 400% in 2021. The number of resellers using the tool also doubled by the end of Q1 in 2022; the platform now boasts over 17,000 power sellers as members. $1M of goods are resold every month on Flyp, contributing to 160 metric tons of textile saved from landfills around the world.

We’re proud to count Afore Capital among the company’s seed investors, and are excited to share that the company recently closed a $10M Series A led by Asymmetric Capital Partners where we will be doubling down on our commitment! Huge congratulations to the whole team.

Building the infrastructure for the resale economy, meet Flyp was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s not very often that in the first meeting you learn about how the founder was kidnapped at gunpoint when he was 11! Meet David Akinin, the fearless leader of JABU, our first pre-seed investment in the continent of Africa.

The African startup landscape provides a compelling opportunity for VC investment; the continent’s 1.35B population is characterized by young, educated populations who are eager to lean into a digital transformation.

One major market opportunity lies in the informal retail economy, which lacks the tech infrastructure needed to effectively scale and serve communities. In southern Africa, 67% of commerce and 80% of jobs are attributed to the informal retail sector; this accounts for a $200B market. In the same region, however, local merchants are still reliant on taxis as transportation to far-away markets, where they stock up on whatever goods they can carry. It’s difficult for them to keep track of their inventory needs and provide sufficient stock to meet local demand. Merchants are also often making razor-thin margins as they struggle to finance this burdensome method of procurement.

Enter JABU — a last-mile B2B e-Commerce and distribution marketplace serving the informal retail sector in Africa. The company recently launched in both Namibia and Zambia with the mission to address the most common obstacles faced by the countries’ informal retailers. JABU partners with major brands like Coca-Cola to purchase wholesale products that they resell at affordable prices to local merchants via an eCommerce marketplace. The goods are delivered by JABU drivers on-demand, for free, to shops, bars, restaurants, and market stands across the country. By digitally mapping the urban landscape, JABU is reinventing the way retailers order, stock, and receive supplies for their shops in southern Africa.

Since Afore invested in early 2021, JABU has grown 45X in monthly GMV while increasing average transaction volume by 5X.

JABU: Our first (of hopefully many!) investment in Africa was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The status quo in insurance is to cover catastrophic risks such as earthquakes and car crashes. These events don’t occur very often but when they do, they are catastrophic. They are underwritten by long-tenured domain experts, guided by actuarial tables, and sold through brokers and agents. The conventional wisdom in the insurance industry is that minor, everyday risks are uninsurable. According to them, small risks that consumers take every day such as ordering food that might arrive late or buying shoes that can’t be returned are not worth insuring because their actuarial tables don’t exist and consumers can’t be served profitably.

There’s nothing quite like young tech founders to question the status quo. They see opportunity where others see problems. Zack and Bill, co-founders of Seel (fka Kover), passionately believe that you can indeed profitably protect consumers against every day risk — they call it high frequency, low severity risk (HFLS). So, two years ago, they started to build out a whole new system of managing risk — a system that can ingest massive, unstructured, online consumer data (images, text, time series of web sessions, etc), to price risk programmatically, and distributes them using APIs.

Today, this platform, while still early, enables Seel to underwrite risks that actuaries couldn’t price before and sell coverages at a scale that was not possible before. It’s what enables Seel to price and sell thousands of protection plans a month for their breakthrough, initial, e-commerce product — Returns Assurance — without a single actuary, agent or claim adjuster.

As original Pre Seed investors, it gives us immense pleasure to see the script turn into the movie. But Seel has only just begun and the full movie is yet to play out. With Lightspeed leading Seel’s $17M series A we hope that the best parts are yet to come!

Seel — Questioning the status quo was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the months since our initial investment Overtime has caught fire with high school sports enthusiasts and young people, broadly known as Generation Z, who demand greater control over their content. These fans use Overtime to create and remix sports media in unique and engaging ways. The content is then distributed everywhere digital natives live – — Instagram, YouTube, and even TV. Overtime combines a breakthrough product with a unique distribution strategy to challenge the status quo of traditional media platforms. Overtime breaks the mold when it comes to cost structure, content formats, and most notably in how it reengages an audience typically lost to incumbents.

As Pre-Seed investors we spend most of our time diving into the early product and postulating how the company can build a moat around itself. This moat is what separates a company from the competition. And what draws customers near is the castle — — a product that delivers an amazing user experience. In Overtime, not only did we find a moat and a castle, but we also found a knight, or rather two knights, in founders Dan Porter and Zack Weiner.

Dan, Zack and Overtime are just getting started. It is a company of this generation and we are so glad to be a part of their journey!

It’s Overtime! was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Afore Mentioned is a monthly newsletter about the goings on at Afore Capital, a Pre-Seed stage venture fund based in San Francisco. Afore invests in companies at the very early stage, typically “too early” for most funds. We invest in about 15 companies a year — leading rounds for startups that raise under $1M to get moving.

Since late 2016, we have invested in 20 companies. Most people don’t hear about these companies until they raise a Series A, so we wanted to shine a light on some of them via this newsletter. Let us know what you think and forward to friends and colleagues who might be interested too.

Thanks for reading,
Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji

Company Spotlight: Overtime

Overtime is building the sports network of the future. Their product has caught fire with high school sports enthusiasts and young people, broadly known as Generation Z, who demand greater control over their content. These fans use Overtime to create and remix sports media in unique and engaging ways. The content is then distributed everywhere digital natives live — Instagram, YouTube, and even TV.

Overtime combines a breakthrough product with a unique distribution strategy to challenge the status quo of traditional media platforms. The company is just over one year old… about the same age as Afore Capital :)

Jeff Jordan from Andreessen Horowitz recently led Overtime’s $9.5M Series A.

Portfolio in Focus

We have a growing roster of portfolio companies. In each newsletter, we’ll spend some time sharing more about what these teams are cooking up.

Boxbot is a sidewalk-based robot focused on parcel delivery, cofounded by engineers from Uber and Tesla. With the growth of ecommerce, steep costs for last mile of deliveries, and increased package theft, Boxbot is a perfect use case for autonomous robots.

We believe that sidewalk robots will be one of the first mainstream applications of autonomy. In fact, several cities have already approved this technology, including Walnut Creek. Read more here.

Bulletin is WeWork for retail space. This startup builds premium retail spaces and leases space to brands for a monthly membership fee. Bulletin’s co-retailing model is disrupting traditional retail by selling space for as low as $300/month and allowing online brands to access physical retail stores flexibly and affordably for the first time. Brands apply on Bulletin’s platform and get their products in stores in less than 5 days.

Even as pundits predict the total demise of retail, we believe offline retail is here to stay. In today’s world, traditional retailers are forced to buy inventory upfront and are never compensated for providing live experience and exposure to brands and products in their stores. Bulletin’s model fixes this. Instead of buying inventory upfront, brands are charged a monthly membership fee and take all inventory on consignment. By skipping ownership of inventory, Bulletin can be extremely reactive to their customers needs and doesn’t get stuck with products that don’t perform.

Learn more about Bulletin with their profile in The New York Times.

BetterUp offers personalized coaching to employees at companies like LinkedIn, Salesforce, Deloitte, Capital One, and even Johnson & Johnson. Employees meet virtually with expert coaches to work on skills related to collaboration, stress management, and goal-setting. Traditionally “counseling” and executive coaching have been siloed with separate providers. BetterUp’s approach is to combine these services into one outstanding coach and have the employer pay for it.

Recently the company held its inaugural Shift conference — a two-day event that brought together leaders from Deloitte, Fidelity, McKinsey, Netflix, VISA, and many more to discuss the importance of developing imagination, meaning and purpose in the modern workplace. With today’s office in the midst of transition, BetterUp is demonstrating the path forward as a category leader with the Shift conference.

In Other News…

Word of Overtime’s Series A has spread far and wide as they reimagine the future of sports entertainment.

Read more in Variety and TechCrunch.

Petal, the simple no-fee credit card, recently announced their $13M Series A led by Valar Ventures.

Pre-Seed investing has risen in prominence in recent months, yet conversations around the topic often come with preconceived notions about these companies and investors. Afore Capital breaks down the top 5 misconceptions here.

BenchSci made waves with their recent survey touting how AI will transform Pharma and BioTech. Learn more in these two Forbes articles, AI in Drug Discoveryand Lab of the Future.

Join the conversation and follow the Afore Capital journey. On Twitter @AforeVC, and subscribe to our newsletter here.

Afore Capital’s portfolio companies are hiring. Apply at AngelList now.

Welcome to Afore Mentioned was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Inaugural Pre-Seed Summit

In April Afore Capital hosted the inaugural venture conference focused solely on pre-seed and early stage investing. The Pre-Seed Summit brought together over 150 founders, investors and LPs in venture for a half day packed with deep insights, exciting conversation, and time for attendees to mix and mingle at The Battery in downtown SF.

The morning kicked off with Marco Zappacosta, Co-Founder & CEO of Thumbtack. Marco discussed the sky high expectations put on startups and the need to give companies more time to grow and develop. Like many successful unicorns, Thumbtack started with a pre-seed sized round ($500K in their case), built a long lasting culture of scrappiness, and only raised big rounds of funding once they had product-market fit and were ready to scale.

Later the crowd welcomed panels of VC and LP investors to share their perspectives. Read more about the Pre-Seed Summit here.

Portfolio in Focus

FaunaDB is the only Mission-Critical NoSQL Database, guaranteeing data correctness without operational complexity. Scalable, secure, transactional, global, multi-cloud, multi-tenant, temporal, and highly available, FaunaDB is designed to support digital enterprises in the 21st century and beyond. Verticals like financial services, ecommerce, gaming, and SaaS have deployed FaunaDB to support identity management, distributed ledgers, shared services, mobile APIs, and other use cases. Founded in 2012 by the team that scaled Twitter, Fauna is based in San Francisco and Boston, and funded by Point72 Ventures, CRV, Data Collective, and Quest Venture Partners, with strategic investment from GV (formerly Google Ventures, a division of Alphabet), Capital One Growth Ventures, and LINE Corporation.

Capital One Growth Ventures recently announced FaunaDB’s $25M Series A.

Cushion is a consumer-centric technology company focused on safeguarding people’s money. Their custom tech does work on behalf of the consumer to help them not only rectify financial mistakes, but also prevent them from happening again in the future.

To start, Cushion is going after the $200 Billion that consumers pay U.S. banks in fees and credit card interest each year. Their bot, called Fee Fighter, automatically disputes those charges on behalf of Cushion’s users. When it is successful, Cushion retains (at most) a 25% cut of the found money. That way users never pay for the service out of pocket.

Cushion’s long term goal is to democratize access to financial help and automate 70% of basic finance management — helping consumers avoid costly fees, save money, and live financially healthier lives.

Learn more at Cushion.ai.

In Other News…

Petal partners with WebBank to launch card for ‘credit invisibles.’ Read more in American Banker.

Learn more about Visor as they aim to coach and train up video game players to become superstar gamers. TechCrunch featured the company in their roundup for YC’s demo day one.

Read about Thumbtack Co-Founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta at Afore’s PreSeed Summit. 10 years in and at a $1.3B valuation, Marco understands the value of the long game. He said, “The time frame to get stuff done is much longer than these narratives we create around businesses.” Read more in Pitchbook.

Overtime taps Marc Kohn, Formerly at Barstool Sports and Bleacher Report, as Chief Content Officer. Check out the story in Variety.

Afore’s Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji talk about the emerging Pre-Seed niche with Pitchbook. Jain said, “Seed funds used to be pre-product-market fit, now seed funds want to wait for a product-market fit. They want to see enough meat on the bone, and then that’s when they want to invest.” Read on here.

Stay tuned for more events, follow us on Twitter @AforeVC, and subscribe to our newsletter here.

Afore Capital’s portfolio companies are hiring. Apply at AngelList now.

Afore Mentioned — April Newsletter was originally published in Afore Mentioned on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.