New website, unchanged promise
I am excited to share that after 4 years with our homemade Wix site, groundup.vc has an upgraded look and feel. We have always viewed ourselves as a startup, and like any good startup, we know when it is time to level-up.
But while our branding and design might feel a little more polished and sophisticated today, our cultural DNA remains as scrappy as ever. Cory and I started Ground Up with the goal of bringing a new energy to the venture capital landscape, where our ability to form meaningful personal relationships with founders and our unrelenting hustle would earn us the right to partner with the best entrepreneurs on their company building journeys. We hope that our new website conveys this message.
The site is still a work in progress but here are 4 intentional design decisions that we’ve already implemented that highlight the type of venture firm we are:
1) Founder Testimonials
The very first thing you will see on our website is a section with quotes from our portfolio founders. The sentiments expressed in these quotes mean everything to us and are what motivate us every day to wake up and go to work for our portfolio companies.
From the early days at Ground Up we told our LPs that we cared more about our NPS than our IRR (we asked Founders for feedback, here’s what they said) because to build an enduring venture firm — and one that delivers exceptional IRRs — we must first build a product that founders LOVE. Venture capital is a reputation business first and foremost. As emerging managers who didn’t come onto the scene with established brands and reputations, we knew that our reputation wouldn’t be built overnight but from delivering value day after day, month after month, year after year.
In a sea of venture firm websites filled with marketing jargon, self-aggrandizement and likely-to-be-broken promises, we chose to let our portfolio company founders do the talking on our behalf.
2) Photos
Throughout the website you will see numerous pictures of us and our portfolio founders outside of the four walls of the office. Our escapades with our portfolio founders have included a Bon Jovi concert, sporting events, improv workshop, overnight in Malibu, Happy Hours, culinary feasts and even the pleasure of attending two of their weddings. Building a company is a long journey and choosing who to invite onto the rocket ship is a big choice. We look for founders with whom we can build meaningful, long-term holistic relationships, and strongly believe founders should do the same when choosing their investors.
We shy away from the power dynamics inherent in the investor-founder paradigm and lean into a framework of mutual partnership. As it says on our website, founders are taking as much of a bet on us as we are on them and it is our intention to learn together, grow together, hold each other accountable…and hopefully have some fun together along the way too.
3) Contact Info
We made it extremely easy to find our contact information. This is not a given on VC websites. There is a lot of debate around the topic of “cold” dealflow. Many websites of top venture firms provide at most links to the team’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, preventing founders from being able to reach out cold over email. Others might include contact info but with a publicly stated caveat that warm intros are really the only way to be considered for investment.
These investors aren’t interested in filtering through massive amounts of cold inbound with a very low signal-to-noise ratio and prefer instead to rely on prior relationships and network referrals for sourcing dealflow. This is a very reasonable position to hold in the name of efficiency and one that — in the spirit of full transparency — even we have considered.
They also make themselves feel better about erecting these barriers with the claim that given the importance of networking as a startup founder, any worthy entrepreneur should be able to navigate their way to a warm intro or else they won’t be successful as an entrepreneur anyways and aren’t worth wasting time on. Philosophically and empirically we do not agree with this.
Admittedly though, managing the top-of-funnel of our dealflow is a lot of work and a process that we are always seeking to improve. Until we — or anyone else for that matter — figure out how to perfect the process, “cold inbound” opportunities will be much more likely to fall through the cracks than deals that come from high signal sources. For that reason, a warm intro is always better. But when not possible, we are absolutely open to cold inbound and have the receipts to prove it.
4) Portfolio Page Filters
The month we closed our first fund I remember reading a blog post from Hunter Walk that made a real impression on me, titled “For VCs, Your Thesis Is Your Portfolio Page, Everything Else is Just Hopes and Dreams.”
In it he describes how in a world where every VC tries so hard to explain why they are different, the only proof of anything is the VC’s eventual portfolio.
I hear, read, see examples every day of investors espousing differentiated theses with regards to why they exist. Why a founder should take their dollars. And why a LP should give them theirs. Sometimes there’s substance behind these statements; others are rickety content marketing or breathless trend hopping. Fortunately there’s a source of eventual truth! Your portfolio page. Your portfolio page is your thesis. It’s where you’ve committed dollars, not just Medium posts. It’s who has actually taken your checks, not the deals you wish you were in.
This is why on our new website we spent a lot of time thinking through the Portfolio page. To really show who we are we wanted to make it super simple to understand the types of investments we’ve made in the past — currently this means allowing the portfolio to be filtered by sector, geography and stage. We hope to add additional data and filtering capabilities to this page over time.
Work-in-progress
So what do you think of our new website? We have more creative ideas in the works but would also love any inspiration from you based on what your dream VC firm website would be. Please drop us a note with your feedback — you know where to find our contact info :).
Ground Up Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in pre-seed and seed stage startups in the United States and Israel.
