Startups are hard. We know.
Operator Exchange invests in startups with a collective of experienced operators and founders.
What does a startup need? A great team. A product that works. A way for people to notice. All that and more.
But a founder doesn’t do that on their own. In successful startup ecosystems, a community helps them get there.
Paying it forward
A big part of that community is the people that have done what the founder hasn’t done yet. They’ve built successful companies or worked there in the early stages. They share their experiences with anyone who’s starting out. They also put their money where their mouth is, investing the wealth they’ve accumulated along the way.
It’s groups like the PayPal Mafia who sustain a community. They went on to found, fund, and operate the next billion-dollar companies such as Tesla, Youtube, and Uber. In contrast to most institutional investors, they had first-hand experience to share and invested with their own cash.
These operator angels define the success of Silicon Valley but are less common in other tech hubs. Take for instance our home country, The Netherlands. It has one of the largest metropolitan regions in Europe, comparable in population size and economic importance to the San Francisco Bay Area. Dutch startup jobs grew by 19,700 to 108,000 in the last two years, creating more than €44 billion in economic value.
Yet it is home to only one private company worth over $1 billion, versus 238 in the US. Whenever an exit or IPO takes place in Amsterdam, there’s almost no increase in investment in startups. Rarely do operators become investors. It’s that mindset that needs to change in every tech hub worldwide.
Better together
Today, we’re announcing Operator Exchange. We’re a community of operators and founders that invest in startups. It was started by Jelle Prins, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, Robert Gaal, and Stef van Grieken.
We’ve individually invested in companies like Framer and others that grew fast. Sticking together allows us to help them with a variety of deep knowledge on how to build a startup.
While most of us are Dutch, we’ve also funded startups in cities like London, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco. We invested together with VCs, late or early stage, as well as angel investors outside of our group.
Thanks to this group, we made our first four investments in the last six months: Adelee, Origin, Stark, and Walter. (Unfortunately, that’s more than some European seed funds.)
Ultimately, we want to be the investor we would go to for funding.
Empowering founders
In the process, we’ve empowered founders by sharing our experience. We helped scale teams, raise funding, design products, sell to customers, and much more. This helps us sharpen our skills and give back at the same time. When we can’t help, we connect talented specialists and experts in our network who can.
We try to invest in the most founder-friendly way possible. That means we’ll decide in a week or so, no longer. We usually invest up to 50k (euro or dollar) per person.
Just the start
Our current community is still small. We’re reaching out to more successful founders and operators to join our group in the coming months. We’re also planning to form a syndicate, allowing us and limited partners to invest up to 500k together. More on that later.
It’s a great time to start a company. We’re looking to support startups in Europe, Silicon Valley, and worldwide. Tell us about yours.
