Building conviction in an idea is the most important step in the startup journey. We specialize in helping founders through it.
Pre-idea investing is founder-centric investing. We are more interested in potential than we are in traction.
The low-hanging fruit has been picked. We set founders up for category-creation, not digital co-option.
Great ideas take time. We embrace the messiness of ideation, don’t rush founders, and partner with founders longer than any other investor.
-1 to 0 takes you unexpected places. We take a whole-team approach to supporting the journey—and embed founders in a community dedicated to it.
Both engineers from MIT, Waseem and Jeff co-founded two companies together that were successfully acquired before they helped found SPC. They were instrumental in building the culture and ethos of the community. This dynamic duo left SPC to start Pilot, the first company founded out of SPC to reach a unicorn ($1B+) valuation.
A graduate of IIT in India and employee #8 at Stripe, Anurag joined SPC knowing only that he wanted to take on big problems. He built apps around healthcare, deep learning, and real-time communication, while helping other members with their projects. All this building and feedback revealed the opportunity for Render, a zero DevOps cloud platform Anurag founded out of SPC that has raised $26.75M and become one of the fastest growing tools in the developer ecosystem.
Trisha joined SPC after stints as an early engineer and product manager at Affirm. Clarence joined to explore new topics while writing an O'Reilly book on Machine Learning and Security. They met and discovered a shared interest in security and fintech, eventually graduating to combine their skills and start Unit21, now one of the fastest growing fintech security startups with $47M in funding.
A software engineer and serial entrepreneur, including co-founder of Grouper, Tom joined SPC to explore ideas for a new consumer startup. While in the community, Tom ended up diving into a peer learning group exploring machine learning topics. He graduated to join Google Brain and later OpenAI, leading the engineering team for GPT-3. He has since founded his own AI safety and research company, Anthropic.
After years of collaboration at Asana, these engineers decided to make the jump and found a company together. They joined the Founder Fellowship to navigate the hardest part of the early company-building process: building conviction in an idea you plan to spend years of your life on. Alvaro and Kshitij succeeded and founded Orb, a company changing how the building blocks of the internet run the can’t-fail billing process.
A Penn grad who did computational social science for the World Bank and ACLU while running a successful algorithmic trading side-gig, Kathy came to SPC to develop Code for Democracy. What started as a side project became a non-profit that provides tooling for journalists, researchers, and open-government advocates to automate political watchdogging.
Ashton won gold medals as a decathlete for the US in back-to-back Olympics. After retiring from the sport, he joined SPC to figure out what he wanted to put his talents toward next. He explored systems design and became passionate about engineering, graduating to join Intel as a product engineer.
After serving as a policy staffer in the Obama Administration and later successfully exiting a startup he founded, Bilal joined us to explore how he could put his experiences to use for his community. He decided to bring a data-driven, first principles mindset to politics, becoming the first SPC member to run for office.
When Jaclyn, an experienced operator and investor, and Noah, the founding sales hire at Gigster, met at SPC, they decided to start a company together. The pair were inspired by the world-class AI/ML talent in the community, along with the flexibility and camaraderie of the SPC model. This led to Tribe AI, a collective that connects independent AI experts with companies in search of AI talent.
Second-time co-founders Andrew and Praveen knew how hard the idea phase is after their previous company was acquired. Planning to start a new company but unsure what problem to tackle, they joined the first Founder Fellowship cohort to be deliberate in their process. The result was Ascend, the first modern insurance payments platform that has raised $39M.
When they left Waymo to start a company together, Gavin and Michael had a core guiding principle: find a problem where consumers were being utterly failed and fix it. After joining the Founder Fellowship, they followed this principle right to tax prep. Column Tax was their solution.
.jpg)