Startup Studio
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Startup studio eFounders has a portfolio valuation of $1 billion
European startup studio eFounders has shared some metrics about its portfolio companies. The startup studio has launched 23 companies with a focus on software-as-a-service enterprise products.
While eFounders might not be a familiar name, some of the companies in its portfolio have become promising startups with impressive growth, such as Front, Aircall, Forest, Spendesk, Mailjet and others. Front is also company No. 85 in Y Combinator’s list of top 101 companies of all time.
And the big new metric is that the total valuation of all 23 companies has now reached $1 billion. Of course, eFounders is just a shareholder in those 23 companies, so eFounders itself isn’t a unicorn. But it’s still an impressive number.
At the end of 2018, eFounders’ portfolio valuation was at $541 million. At the end of 2017, the same metric was at $385 million.
Overall, eFounders companies have raised $254 million from VC funds and business angels, and employ 1,000 people, mostly in Paris, San Francisco and New York. And when you add up the annual recurring revenue of all those startups, they generate $107 million in ARR together.
If you don’t know the eFounders model, it’s quite simple. At first, the core eFounders team comes up with an idea and hires a founding team. In exchange for financial and human resources, the startup studio keeps a significant stake in its startups.
After a year or two, startups should have proven that they can raise a seed round and operate on their own. This way, eFounders can move on to the next project and start new companies. Up next, eFounders is already working on five new companies.
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A startup factory? $1.2B-exit team launches $65M super{set}
Think Jack Dorsey’s jobs are tough? Well, Tom Chavez is running six startups. He thinks building businesses can be boiled down to science, so today he’s unveiling his laboratory for founding, funding and operating companies. He and his team have already proven they can do it themselves after selling their startups Rapt to Microsoft and Krux to Salesforce for a combined $1.2 billion. Now they’ve raised a $65 million fund for “super{set}”, an enterprise startup studio with a half-dozen companies currently in motion.
The idea is that {super}set either conceptualizes a company or brings in founders whose dream they can make a reality. The studio provides early funding and expertise while the startup works from their shared space in San Francisco, plus future ones in New York and Boston. The secret sauce is the “super{set} Code,” an execution playbook plus technological tools and building blocks that guide the strategy and eliminate redundant work. “Our belief is that we can make the companies 10x faster and increase capital efficiency by 5X,” says Chavez of his partnership with {super}set co-founders Vivek Vaidya, who acts as CTO, and Jae Lim who manages the fund.
The {super}set team (from left): Tom Chavez, Jae Lim, Jen Elena and Vivek Vaidya
Perhaps the question isn’t whether the portfolio startups can scale, but if the humans behind them can without breaking. It’s stressful running a single company, let alone six. Even with the order of operations nailed down, each encounters unique challenges and no plan is one-size-fits-all. But after delivering 17.5X returns to their past investors, Chavez et al. have proven their power to repeatedly recognize what enterprises need and build admittedly boring but bountiful products in customer data management, and advertising yield.
The studio’s playbooks cover business plan formation, pitch strategies, go to market, revenue, machine learning, management principles, HR processes, sales methods, pipeline measurement, product sequencing, finance, legal and more. There’s also shared engineering code it provides, so each startup doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. “I don’t think you can systemize it but I do think you can accelerate and de-risk the path,” Chavez explains.
{super}set Code
Today, the first {super}set company is coming out of stealth. Eskalera helps enterprises retain top talent by tracking diversity and inclusion stats of employees to engage them with career growth and community programs. Chavez is the CEO, but plans to install a new one shortly so he can focus more time on founding more startups. There are 55 employees across the first six companies, with two already generating revenue and most ready to emerge in the next nine months.
The funding for Eskalera and other {super}set companies comes with unique terms. Because Chavez and the team aren’t just board members you hear from once a quarter but “shoulder to shoulder with the entrepreneurs” as he repeats several times in our interview, the startups pay more equity for the cash.
The hope is having seasoned leadership aboard is worth it. “We’re product people first and foremost,” Chavez tells me. “What are you going to build? Who’s going to buy it? Why? What’s the technical moat? We’re not people doing jazz hands.” The {super}set team has plenty of skin in the game, though, given Chavez himself put in a big chunk of the $65 million, and the fund sticks to a standard management fee.
Eskalera
To supercharge the companies, {super}set brings in expert staffers in artificial intelligence, data science and more, who then align with the most relevant companies in the portfolio. They get equity grants to incentivize them to work hard on the startups’ behalf. “The worry I have about these larger funds is that they have an incentive disconnect where they work for the fees” Chavez says. His fund hopes to win through follow-on funding of its winners.
{super}set co-founder Tom Chavez
If portfolio companies hit hard times, Chavez says {super}set will stick with them. “My first company had multiple layoffs and a major pivot. We had an enterperenur that walked away. They lost conviction, but we brought that company to an $180 million exit after people said there was no effing way and that felt really good,” Chavez says of staying the course. “The good entrepreneurs have that demonic energy.” But if everyone involved agrees a project isn’t working, they’ll shutter it. “It comes back to opportunity cost of people’s time.”
Chavez has respect for studios taking different approaches, like Atomic in consumer startups, Science in e-commerce and Pioneer Square Labs, which maintains a larger fund staff. “What excites me is moving entrepreneurship a step forward. Why couldn’t we franchise this in other cities?” He hopes {super}set can attract top talent that “just want to work on cool shit” rather than getting sucked into a single company.
Can {super}set keep all the plates spinning and really lower their risk? “If we’re wrong there will be a giant orange plume streak across the sky. The early returns are promising but we have to prove it,” Chavez says. But after accruing plenty of wealth for himself, he says the thrill that keeps him in the startup game is seeing life-changing outcomes for his teams. “I have spreadsheets showing the wealth generated by employees of companies I’ve built and nothing makes me happier than seeing them pay for tuitions, property, or retiring.”
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Pioneer Square Labs is invigorating Seattle’s startup ecosystem
Three miles from Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood — better known as Amazonia to locals — sits Pioneer Square. The original heart of the city, the area has managed to hold on to its decades-old charm as other parts of town are besieged by Amazon-contracted architects.
On a mission to champion Seattle’s unique entrepreneurial DNA, startup studio Pioneer Square Labs has not only adopted the neighborhood’s moniker but established its fast-growing HQ at its center.
Pioneer Square Labs, or PSL, cropped up in 2015 to create, launch and fund technology companies headquartered in the Pacific Northwest. Operating under the startup studio model, PSL’s team of former founders and venture capitalists, including Rover and Mighty AI founder Greg Gottesman, collaborate to craft and incubate startup ideas, then recruit a founding CEO from their network of entrepreneurs to lead the business. The team uses an innovative method of rapidly ideating, testing and, if necessary, scrapping ideas, dubbed its “validation engine.”
The model differs from an accelerator or incubator. Y Combinator, for example, admits existing business into its months-long program, deploying its expertise and capital to bolster early-stage startups. PSL, on the other hand, creates startups and provides would-be founders with a derisked platform for company building.
“It’s a dream job,” PSL co-founder Greg Gottesman told TechCrunch. “If someone would say to you ‘hey, you can come into work every day, think about all the problems that are interesting to solve, all the tech that’s available and you have the resources to build companies,’ that’s just a dream come true … It’s just been a very fun ride.”
Xiao Wang, the CEO of Pioneer Square Labs spin-out Boundless, pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017
The startup studio model is working for PSL. To date, it has raised $27.5 million in equity funding to build out its platform, in addition to an $80 million fundraise for its debut venture fund, which invests in PSL companies and other Pacific Northwest businesses. Of the 13 companies to emerge from PSL in the last three years, all have raised follow-on rounds from venture capital firms at an aggregate valuation of $200 million. According to PitchBook, PSL companies comprised 14.3 percent of all early-stage VC deals in Washington state in 2018.
Among PSL’s portfolio companies are cloud security compliance platform Shujinko, which closed a $2.8 million seed round from Unusual Ventures, Defy Ventures, Vulcan Capital and more last year. Plus, Boundless, a platform that facilitates the process of applying for immigrant status in the U.S., and Tally, a sports-prediction app spearheaded by football star Russell Wilson. Other recent spin-outs include Remarkably, a marketing and analytics software provider, and Attunely, a debt-collection-tech platform.
Meet the team
Pioneer Square Labs’ growing team of former operators, VCs, data scientists, engineers and more
Greg Gottesman, a former managing director at Seattle VC fund Madrona Venture Group, and the founder of its startup studio Madrona Venture Labs, leads PSL alongside a team of seasoned Pacific Northwest investors and entrepreneurs.
Rounding out PSL’s team of managing directors is Julie Sandler, a former investor at Madrona; Geoff Entress, a former venture partner with Voyager Capital and Madrona; Mike Galgon, the founder of the Microsoft-acquired digital agency aQuantive; and T.A. McCann, a serial entrepreneur behind Google-acquired Senosis and BlackBerry-acquired Gist. Ben Gilbert, who runs product at PSL, is another Madrona alum.
After nearly two decades investing in early-stage startups at Madrona, Gottesman made a peaceful exit with ambitions to launch a scalable startup studio independent of any existing VC firm. Madrona, alongside an additional 13 venture firms and Seattle angel investors, like Jeff Bezos and Zillow -founder Rich Barton, bolstered PSL with seed capital right off the bat.
The validation engine
Pioneer Square Labs’ network of entrepreneurs
To differentiate itself from competing company builders and maintain a high level of efficiency, PSL uses a proprietary strategy of rapidly testing and validating business ideas dubbed its “validation engine.” Its special sauce, PSL leverages digital marketing to validate customer demand before they begin real work on any of their ideas.
Long-time marketer Peter Denton leads the effort. Denton, who joined PSL in early 2017, manages day-to-day market validation, growth strategies and market research for the firm’s portfolio companies.
“We joke in some ways [Denton] is the grim reaper,” PSL’s Ben Gilbert told TechCrunch. “He’s responsible for much more kills than anyone else.”
Among the validation engine’s strategies is to build a website for a “company” to test demand for a potential product. Denton and his team market the website to target customer segments through a variety of digital channels, then measure customer resonance with the messaging. They ask potential customers if they are interested in learning more about a new concept or product when it “becomes available” to help understand how much interest a potential business might have before PSL allocates additional time and resources to a project.
To date, PSL has killed more than 100 ideas.
“A lot of studios ultimately won’t be successful because they don’t kill things fast enough,” Gottesman explained. “We kill nine out of 10 of the companies we start. Most of our ideas don’t make it to the promised land.”
In a sense, they are catfishing potential customers, luring them in with a new idea that more than likely will never come to fruition. But the strategy saves PSL the heartache that comes with investing a lot of time into a business idea that never finds its market.
This way, when an idea does pass the tests posed by the validation engine, PSL and its team of engineers and data scientists are ready to build with knowledge of market demand in tow.
By the numbers
A glimpse of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood where Pioneer Square Labs is headquartered
In three years, PSL has spun-out 13 companies, ideas for six of which came from the PSL team and seven originated from founders in the PSL network. All of those companies have secured venture funding — $71 million in total for an aggregate valuation of $200 million.
“The most important lesson we learned is it’s all about the people and the talent,” Gottesman said. “If we have an A-plus idea and partner with a B team, the company isn’t going to be successful. On the other hand, if we partner with the best talent, we are likely to be successful even if we fail on other dimensions.”
PSL’s goal is to invigorate the Seattle tech ecosystem and given the aforementioned stats (PSL companies comprised 14.3 percent of all early-stage VC deals in Washington state in 2018) they are well on their way. In 2019, PSL hopes to spin out between six and nine additional businesses.
“We believe we are building the center for early-stage tech innovation in the Pacific Northwest,” PSL’s Julie Sandler told TechCrunch.
Seattle, home to two of the most valuable businesses in the world, has not created as many founders as anticipated. Amazon’s entrepreneurial culture has succeeded in keeping top talent from pursuing their own businesses. PSL’s derisked platform, the firm hopes, will entice those founders, like Boundless CEO Xiao Wang, a former senior product manager at Amazon.
“The studio model lends itself really well to people who are 99 percent there, thinking ‘damn, I want to start a company,’” Gilbert said. “These are people that are incredible entrepreneurs but if not for the studio as a catalyst, they may not have [left].”
Venture capital investment in Washington state is increasing year-over-year, reaching a high of nearly $3 billion in 2018 across roughly 400 deals, per PitchBook. The Seattle tech scene, given its proximity to tech heavyweights and a growing number of satellite engineering offices, only has room to grow.
“We do think Seattle is the most exciting market in the country because of the amount of technical talent you have,” Gottesman said. “You have to believe that if engineering is at the heart of these startups then Seattle will ultimately be a key city in the world in terms of creating great technology startups.”
“We think part of the issue is a lack of capital and a lack of help,” Gottesman added. “If we can provide a little bit of both of those things, we can really put Seattle where it deserves to be, should be and will be.”
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Google launches its own AI Studio to foster machine intelligence startups
A new week brings a fresh Google initiative targeting AI startups. We started the month with the announcement of Gradient Ventures, Google’s on-balance sheet AI investment vehicle. Two days later we watched the finalists of Google Cloud’s machine learning competition pitch to a panel of top AI investors. And today, Google’s Launchpad is announcing a new hands-on Studio program… Read More
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