The World’s First Nano-Fund for Startups*
A global exclusive launch from Unicorn Ventures
Today is a great day as we can finally announce the exclusive launch of the world’s first ever $400m (£280m, €350m) nano venture fund for startups. We will be putting $1 into 400 million new startup ideas over the next 3 years. We’re so excited to tell you what it’s all about and how can you get your startup involved.
Joining as General Partners will be some amazing serial entrepreneurs, including (but not limited to): Philip Wilkinson (ex Kelkoo and now LittleBlueTribe), Doug Monro (ex. ebay and now Adzuna), Ivan Mazour (Ometria), and Kiyan Foroughi (ex. Bottica). Also joining us are 3 ex-Google VP’s (who we can’t name right now for obvious reasons), 2 Apple Senior Managers, and one from Microsoft (who we don’t like to talk about).
The funding environment has gone through massive shifts in the past few years and every fund is looking for a new angle to bring value to startups and compete with each other to get the next big thing. We’re still so far away from the early high’s of the year 2000 and we can change all that, starting today.
So, how does the world’s first nano fund actually work?
Our strategy is to go in the earliest we can and give everyone £1 for any startup idea you have. You don’t need a team, a business plan, or have shown any traction. All we need is a single paragraph about what you’re doing, and as long as it’s not totally crazy, we’ll invest £1 for 1% of your business. No complicated paperwork (we put it in as a convertible loan and the agreement is 1 page of A4), no board seats, no investment rights…
We want to believe in you and the idea and get in before any other investor gets their eager chops into you.
There are only a very few, nano caveats to this:
- You need to submit your paragraph pitch on high quality paper, written by hand. This shows you’ve really made an effort and care enough about getting us involved. We also have a machine learning algorithm that can analyse your handwriting to make sure you’re not a crazy person
- No gambling or adult businesses. That’s for our later Nano-Vice fund.
- It must be an unoriginal idea. There is no time or place to come up with something original that hasn’t been tried yet — that takes far too long and costs too much money and effort
- You cannot get an office until your first big funding round. You have to work at home and only use Skype, Slack, and Email.
- We have a sponsorship deal with Microsoft — so please only use a Windows Surface tablet for all your work.
- Finally you need to network and go to every meet-up, event, talk, and conference. Use all your time this way rather than wasting effort physically building it — we’re sure that will take care of itself.
- Of course we embrace female entrepreneurs too (as long as you have a beard).
So that’s it — amazing times! The launch of Unicorn Ventures — the world’s first ever nano-fund. Send your pitch paragraph to: Unicorn Ventures, 120 Fairy Land, Shrekville. APF OOL.
We look forward to working with you!
What’s Next?
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‘* Just in case you didn’t pick up on it — this is an April Fool’s Joke (or is it….) as this article was written on Friday 1st April, 2016. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as we had fun writing it.
