From Proto, with love
An open letter to angel investors
Dear Angels,
When you invest in a startup, you are investing in a team, and in their ability to execute on an idea. You know full well the countless obstacles that stand in the way of success for these entrepreneurs, and yet you take a leap of faith by extending a monetary lifeline to these dreamers.
Now these people have a bit of cash, and their todo list looks like : recruit a team, develop the product, market and sell the product, operate the company, evolve the offering. Each of these tasks is all-consuming, and yet founders must find a way to accomplish all of them.
Hiring is hard
The fact of the matter is that hiring a great engineering team is hard. Finding great candidates takes time, and convincing them to come work for you takes more time (and energy!). Determining which developers are worth their salt is tricky, which ones are a good fit for your organization is harder yet, and in the age of the Google/Facebook hiring machine, it can seem as though all the talent has already been lapped up by those big dogs. And once you’ve hired somebody, it takes some time for them to come up to speed.
In other words, from the moment you, the Angel investor, write that check to StartupX, a significant period of time can elapse before StartupX is making optimal use of that cash. The delay may be 3 months, or it may be 9 months. But every day a company is not making progress on their business plan by pursuing a better product/market fit or by evolving their product offering is a day that the competition has to get ahead.
We can help
We created Proto to plug that gap so that investors can be assured they are getting great value for their money, and so that entrepreneurs can continue to work toward their vision in spite of a challenging climate for hiring great engineers.
We want to partner with early stage companies and help them succeed by infusing them with a technological shot in the arm.
But we are more than just builders, we are experienced entrepreneurs ourselves, and so we understand the plight of the early stage company. From day one our objective is not vendor lock-in, but the opposite — we want to plan for a transition after a few months where the companies we collaborate with can take over the projects we contributed to. And, we’ll help with the daunting process of hiring a great engineering team. At every step we ask, what can we do next that will provide the most value right now?
Why like this?
To a person, each of us thoroughly enjoys the process of breathing life into a nascent concept. We revel in the challenges of building new products, and we love doing it together. Proto is a way for us to indulge in this penchant for creation over and over.
At Proto we have a great deal of experience designing and building products from the ground up, and our history of working together as a team results in tremendous productivity on any timeframe. Our team comprises experts in scalable architecture, user experience, graphic design, mobile development, cloud-based server development, and a variety of popular web stacks. We’ve started small companies, and we’ve worked for big ones. We’ve been one-man teams and we’ve built highly effective ten person teams.
What’s our model?
Our model is to seek out companies that we believe will succeed, and to select them as investments for Proto — in this way an alignment with Angel investors is a perfect fit. This isn’t to say we work for equity, because we don’t. We work for cash, and we aren’t cheap. But sometimes the gap between what we’re worth and what a promising company is able to offer can be made up with equity.
In conclusion
Think of us as a scalable, plug-and-play startup resource that can help companies you invest in maximize the value of your investments.
I look forward to hearing from you,
