Joe Famalette

We invest at Pre-VC and Pre-Seed, and then help our founders find a Seed round when they're ready. Here are 27 Seed investors that we *know* are active right now. Blue Moon Bonfire Ventures Chingona Ventures Flying Fish Partners Foothill Ventures Great North Ventures ground game HealthX Ventures InsurTech Venture Partners KCRise Fund Las Olas Venture Capital Leva Capital Maven Ventures Monte Carlo Capital Moonshots Capital OneSixOne Ventures Oval Park Capital Pixel Perfect Ventures Range Ventures Revolution SNAK Venture Partners Startup Capital Ventures Supernode Global Susa Ventures Trilogy Equity Partners True Ventures True Wealth Ventures

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You can turn $100,000 into a $50 million business through acquisitions. This is closer to capital allocation than traditional entrepreneurship. Here's the deal structure. First, the capital stack. You buy a business the same way you buy a house. Equity in, bank covers the rest. With SBA loans: 90% loan, 10% equity. A million dollar business might require $100K to $200K down. Target companies with $1 to $3 million in earnings. Go to sellers that are NOT at market. Brokered deals are competitive and sellers want cash at close. This only works off-market. Here's what you propose: Seller keeps 20% equity in a new entity. Asset sale, their company moves into newco, they keep running it at fair market salary. You write them a check for 60% via bank loan. Remaining 20% is a seller's note: 10% straight note, 10% performance earnout. From the bank's perspective, you created 40% equity. The truth? It's really only 20%, and it's the seller's. Your money in? Approaching zero. But you own 80% of Enterprise Value. Why would a seller agree? Tell them: my goal is to make your 20% as valuable as the 80% we're giving you today. What are the odds you double the value on your own in 3 to 5 years? Now stack earnings. $2 million average per company. Buy 10 just like this. $20 million combined earnings under one entity. Centralize marketing, accounting, HR, governance at HQ. You bought each at 4 to 4.5x. A $20 million earnings business sells for 7 to 7.5x or more. That's multiple expansion, just by combining them. Close the first one. Negotiate the next $100K for the next business. Then newco sells to PE for 7, 8, 9x your $20 million in earnings. That's the path from $100K to $50 million. If you're considering buying a business in the next 12 to 24 months, we built Acquisition Lab for exactly this. walkerdeibel.com

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Here's a problem we see all the time in early studios: they copy-paste a VC fund's operating cadence and wonder why nothing feels right. Weekly deal flow reviews. Portfolio monitoring calls. Valuation-focused LP reports. All borrowed wholesale from a fund playbook. But a VC fund's primary activity is deal selection -- source, evaluate, check, board, wait. A studio's primary activity is venture creation -- generate, validate, recruit, build, launch. Those are fundamentally different jobs. When you run a studio like a fund, things break in specific ways: Your meetings are wrong. You're reviewing deal flow instead of venture build progress -- milestones, blockers, resource allocation. The work is building, not sourcing. Your team is wrong. Studios need builders at every level -- operators, designers, engineers. Not just investment professionals. You can't build companies with a team designed to pick them. 📉 Your metrics are wrong. Entry valuations and markups don't tell you anything useful. Cost-to-build-a-venture, time-to-market, and venture survival at 18 months -- those are the numbers that actually measure whether the studio is working. Your LP reporting is wrong. Report operational progress -- what's building, what's launching, what's been killed and why. Not just portfolio movements. Here's the lesson -- the studios that struggle most are the ones that adopted VC templates without modifying them for fundamentally different work. The portfolio companies don't exist until the studio creates them. Not a fund that happens to build things. A builder that happens to have a fund. The operating rhythm should reflect which one is primary. 🎯

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We were recording a podcast episode last week and the question came up: why do studios actually fail? I expected the conversation to land on bad venture selection. That's what most people point to. But three quieter patterns kept surfacing — and they're the ones that actually kill studios. Sequencing failure. Doing the right things in the wrong order. Raising before you have a track record. Hiring a full team before validating a single venture. Everything looks productive — you're shipping, hiring, raising. But the order is wrong, and the compounding works against you instead of for you. Incentive misalignment. The studio operator wants equity upside. The institutional sponsor wants de-risked innovation. The founder wants autonomy. None of those are wrong. They're just different objective functions in the same room. The misalignment doesn't surface in year one. It surfaces the first time someone has to make a hard call — and the people in the room realize they want different outcomes. The governance gap. Studios start lean, which is smart. Then they stay lean on governance, which is fatal. No kill criteria. No stage gates. No framework for when to double down or shut down. Death by accumulated decisions that nobody had the structure to stop. What stuck with me after that conversation: all three of these are invisible from the inside. Bad company selection is loud. These are silent. And by the time you feel them, they've been compounding for months.

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Check out the latest funding news from across the Techstars portfolio. → Zipline (Techstars 2011), a drone delivery and logistics startup, raises more than $600M in new funding, boosting its valuation to $7.6B, as it expands commercial deployments. → Language learning startup Preply (Techstars 2015) raises $150M and becomes the 23rd known unicorn from Techstars accelerators. → Hydrosat (Techstars 2019) raises $60M in Series B funding → Tive (Techstars 2017) receives a $20M investment, valuing the shipment-tracking systems developer at slightly more than $500M. → Parambil (Techstars 2023) raises an additional $6M in seed funding ($8M to date). → Seasats (Techstars 2021) receives $24M in Department of War APFIT funding to accelerate the fielding of its autonomous surface vessels. → Hawaiian Airlines’ newly announced $600M Kahuʻewai Hawai‘i Investment Plan features a strategic investment in Ampaire (Techstars 2018) to support hybrid-electric aviation in the islands. → Fintalo (Techstars 2025) secures $500K+ in oversubscribed Pre-Seed funding. → PraxisPro (Techstars 2024) closes an oversubscribed $6M seed round. → Samara Aerospace (Techstars 2024) closes $10M seed round to help bring more stability to sats in orbit. → MyARC (Techstars 2022), a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, secures £1.5M investment. Massive congratulations to these incredible portfolio companies!   🔗  Read more at https://lnkd.in/dxtCTvrg 

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QSBS change is great news for early stage investors! The One Big Beautiful Bill brought with it changes to QSBS (Qualified Small Business Stock) which is great news for founders and early stage investors. QSBS allows for early stage investors to qualify for federal tax exemptions on gains from investments in private companies. Key Changes: Tiered Gain Exclusion- previously, investors who invested in an early stage company, had to wait 5 years to qualify for QSBS tax exemptions. Now there is a tiered system: 3 years: 50% exclusion 4 years: 75% exclusion 5+ years: 100% exclusion Increased Gain Exclusion Cap- the cap is moving from $10 billion to $15 million and is adjusted for inflation starting in 2027. Higher Company Threshold- companies previously qualified if they were valued at $50m or less, now its $75m. Overall these are all positives and something all early stage investors should be aware of. Qualifying for federal and in some cases state tax exemptions (depending on your state of residency) on gains from investments in early stage investments is a Huge Opportunity.

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There’s a lot of conversation about how AI is concentrating capital. That’s real. But I’m also seeing how it’s expanding what small teams can build. At ThriveLink, AI has allowed us to move faster, reach more patients, and build technology that helps families navigate systems that were never designed to be easy. We’ve been able to do with a small amount of capital what used to require entire teams and millions in funding. The tools are changing. The mission isn’t. Thankful to the Los Angeles Business Journal and Plug In Ventures for highlighting the changing venture landscape and what founders like myself are navigating right now.

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If you look at the early-stage fundraising funnel, conversion rates are tightening, but the companies that do raise are doing so at higher valuations and with larger checks. The market seems to be betting on fewer winners, but those winners will be bigger. I’m not convinced. I do believe the very biggest winners will be larger than ever as AI expands the reach of technology, largely by replacing labor. But I don’t believe there will be fewer winners overall. Most B2B solutions are moving toward verticalized, specialized use cases that deliver superior value compared to generalized horizontal platforms. That shift should create more winners. While these vertical players may not reach the scale of the horizontal mega-winners, they can still generate the kind of multibillion-dollar outcomes that venture is built to fund.

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