Orientation Week in Tulsa with our Visionaries
Private and confidential and not for further distribution. Please note this is not a Visible Hands newsletter, but communication with our advisors, funders, and investors. You are receiving this e-mail because you are either an investor, a funder, a fellow, or an advisor to us here at Visible Hands.
Dear ,Fourteen weeks ago, it became real. We charmed and convinced a whole lot of people (although we did get plenty of no's!) starting in the summer of 2020, that we were the right team to manufacture privilege to the earliest-stage of founders overlooked in venture capital with financial, social, and inspiration capital. Then, we had to prove it.
We chose 51 founders working across vastly diverse industries, from pre-idea to prototype, across the country, to put their trust in us in supporting one of the most vulnerable things anyone could ever do—start a company.
Fast forward 14 weeks, and we are concluding our three-and-a-half-month fellowship this week. We are proud. Moreover, we gained even more confidence in our team and in our model to help launch the next generation of enduring technology companies that just so happen to be founded by women and people of color.
In our inaugural year, we learned a great deal that will inform us on how to be even better in the next year, as our team values documenting any improvements we can make both big and small. We will share more about our learnings in our next update after we take the holidays to decompress, prioritize, and incorporate our learnings into an official plan in the new year. We will also share survey results once we collect responses.
So, what happened in the last few months in the fellowship and across the organization?
Visionary Joanna Linton with GP Justin Kang at the Doula Expo
Ten Insights
The biggest value we expected for our founders was the cohort itself. We were right. Bringing together these 51 founders—all exceptionally talented in different ways and universally kind—is our advantage. Hosting orientation in-person in Tulsa—while nerve-wracking—set the foundation of camaraderie amongst our cohort. They mentored one another. They championed one another. They had fun together. Their ability to self-organize their community, their own feedback sessions, trips to Mexico, or monthly meetups in San Francisco is a beautiful thing to observe. This is our biggest accomplishment: we found and selected the right people and that made all the difference.
We hosted 104 events for our founders across the 14-weeks. Fireside chats, workshops, masterminds, and everything in between. Overall, the attendance averaged over 25 (half of our cohort) in the first couple of months which was excellent. It dropped off in the last couple of weeks, and we expect it was some Zoom & event fatigue. Next year, we will likely front-load all-cohort events (workshops, fireside chats) in the first few weeks and then transition to more office hours and curated events during the back half of the fellowship.
We wanted to experiment with running an internal agency of designers and business strategists for our founders. We accomplished around 120 projects ranging from design (social media ads, clickable prototypes, brand books) to strategy (competitor analysis, market sizing, value proposition). We even did some recruiting. This year our scope was intentionally broad to learn patterns on what we did well and what provided value to our founders. Next year, our focus will likely be around design and recruitment.
Our team is incredible. They played the role of relationship manager, event planner, designer, recruiter, analyst, coach, and friend. They worked on weekends and late nights with a smile on their face, going to great lengths to provide excellent service to our founders. Next year, we will have a majority of our full-time staff focused as relationship managers, and hire contractors and other FTEs to focus on project support and event planning.
All of our founders—all 51 of them—are planning to continue to work on their companies. This is a pleasant surprise when you consider most of them were at the pre-idea or idea stage. To support their process and learning, we organized feedback sessions for them with over 30 VCs and investors which lead to 169 meetings / pitch sessions across 4 days.
At least 7 of our founders are expected to close their next round of financing by early next year and many more throughout 2022.
We codified ourinvestment process in how we evaluate and decide additional investment for our founders. As a reminder, we provide $25k investments to our companies at the start of the fellowship. Each has the opportunity to request additional investment starting in December and every two months on a rolling basis. This includes market research and a scorecard conducted by our staff, a self-assessment done by the founder, and feedback from one of our advisors. We received 13 requests for additional investment for our December investment committee meetings.
Not only did we launch our inaugural fellowship for our founders this fall, but we also piloted Visible Designers and Visible Engineers. Long-term, we want to create adjacent talent communities for our founders. To do so, we are operating professional development programs for people of color and women that are up-and-coming talent in the technology sector. We accepted 32 designers and engineers out of a pool of 90 applications and hosted 15 events across seven weeks including speed-dating sessions with our founders. We received positive feedback and look forward to expanding this program next year.
We are fundraising, always. We anticipate closing our fund ($10m) early next year with several promising and qualified conversations.
We have also seen success fundraising for our public benefit corporation (which underwrites a majority of our operating costs) with a recent $250,000 contribution from Bank of America. This is in addition to their anchor investment in our fund. We concluded our 2022 budget planning process with a stretch fundraising goal for our public benefit corporation around $1.8m. We believe around $1.25m of that is reached with existing commitments and likely renewals. This is big progress from a year ago when many of us were unpaid.
Three Asks
In 2022, our big goals will center around our own Marketing, Platform (what we call Ecosystem), and HR & Culture. We welcome any conversation with anyone interested to brainstorming and being a sounding board on the following objectives next year:
Last year, we found the most success in direct sourcing to reach 911 applications. It was the biggest referral source for our cohort. To reach more applications, direct sourcing is not scalable and we need to create a more strategic one-to-many strategy with our marketing tactics.
Next up is Platform. We need to organize our networks to best serve our founders. We piloted our Visible Designers and Visible Engineers which we will refine and scale. What else?
We went from zero employees to nine full-time staff members. That requires thoughtfulness in ensuring our internal culture and the policies that reflect our values are implemented and that our team knows how much we respect them.
We have built a lot of relationships with dozens of VC funds, particularly in the seed stage. We want to complement this network with more angel investors and angel networks to better support our founders and the stage that they are at in fundraising.
Finally, as mentioned, we are always fundraising and are closing in on Fund I. We welcome introductions to hit our $10m goal in early Q1 as well as strategy feedback as we slowly begin to think through Fund II.
It is surreal to believe we made it to the last week of our fellowship. Thank you, thank you, and thank you once more. We would not be here without you. We look forward to growing and improving next year in partnership with you.
Our team will be offline starting next Wednesday (12/22/21) and will return to the virtual office on January 10.
Happy holidays and talk to you all in 2022!Justin, Yasmin, & Daniel
