The Notation Community Fund
Broadening access to Notation and venture capital by opening up Notation III on AngelList.
We founded Notation in 2015 with a simple thesis — That betting on founders uncomfortably early, pre-product market fit, and in many cases pre-product, would create outsized rewards. We called this “pre-seed” funding, but really it was just a moniker for something that is as old as venture capital itself — investing in passionate people with a dream. Six years later, we believe this simple thesis is working well, creating unique partnerships with founders at the earliest stages and top decile returns for our LPs.
We also believe (and have since the beginning) that the community built around Notation is critical to our success. Notation, boiled down, is just a network of aligned members — The founders we partner with, our part-time partners and advisors, the many close relationships we’ve built in the startup community over the past decade-plus, and the LPs (our investors) that enable us to do what we do. Our LPs include both large long-term oriented institutions, and by design, a number of individual “community LPs,” who invest smaller dollars but have an outsized impact on our community and success. Transparency is one of our firm’s founding principles, so you can see all of our investors on our site, as well as our operating manual on github.
Today (finally!), we’re going one step further and opening up Notation so that a much broader group of people can invest in our Notation III-A community fund on AngelList. Unfortunately, due to SEC restrictions, this is limited to accredited investors, but our hope is that we can open up Notation to everyone over time. As we announced a few months ago, we raised $41M from institutions for Notation III. Notation III-A is a sidecar fund, which invests pro-rata in all of the same companies, and has all the same rights and privileges as the institutional fund. The fund is about adding people to our community, not about the capital, and is limited to $1M in total size.
Historically, we’ve raised our community funds from folks we’ve worked with before, but today that changes. We believe strongly in the democratization of financial capital, that open systems are better than closed, and that venture capital should not only be reserved for institutions and the very wealthy. We invest in this belief through many of our core areas of interest — including open source software, financial inclusion, blockchain and crypto, open marketplaces, among others. So why shouldn’t we hold ourselves to the same standards? Our hope is that by opening up access to Notation III-A, the very networks that we credit for our success will become stronger, more diverse, and more interesting.
Normally, venture capital funds have large minimum investment amounts, in many cases $250k or more. You can invest in Notation III-A with as little as $2,500, and if you’re interested in participating and want to invest even less, we’ll try to accommodate that.* We hope that you’ll join us, as we continue to build Notation for many years and funds to come, and we’re grateful for our community’s support, which is now stronger than ever.
*You should not invest what you can’t afford to lose.
