Investors: How can we work together?
We'd love to find ways to collaborate!
We wish we had more time to meet with all the great folks we get connected to, but planning FYSK is like planning a wedding each month. From curating talent and founders, to rehearsing for the big day, to planning the logistics around A/V, catering, videography, and photography – it’s a real production. This leaves us very little bandwidth to do as many investor introductory calls as we’d like. We’ve taken lots of these intro calls to figure out how best to collaborate, and as a result, we’ve outlined some playbooks for how we can build a stronger community together. Please reach out if any of these are of interest to you!
Here are the most productive ways for us to work together:
1. Collaborate with us on investments.
We help your investments succeed faster – especially if they’re our investments too 🙂
We invest a collaborative check size of $100k in first-money rounds, and offer a complementary value prop to funds that lead investments. Think of us as an angel with a very deep network expertise. You invest heavily in attracting and doing diligence on the best founders. We invest heavily in attracting, curating, and engaging job-seekers. Together we can invest in the best founders and help them assemble the strongest teams to succeed faster. We prioritize showcasing seed stage founders that we’ve chosen to invest in because we’ve already spent the time getting to know them and we’re already sold on the fact that they’re great opportunities for community members to consider joining.
Help us pitch you as a potential lead to founders we meet. We meet people before they become founders and are their confidant as they look for lead investors. Give us the best opportunity to pitch you as a lead (and co-investor to us!) by helping us understand what makes you different so we can promote you.
If you’d like us to send you founders in our community who are currently fundraising, fill out this form so we can add you to our spreadsheet. Help us share more context with founders on why you’d be a great partner to them.
2. Co-host/sponsor the FYSK showcase
To maintain our high quality standards for both founders and attendees while making this event accessible and attractive to the very best people, we don’t charge anyone to participate. As such, we rely on collaborations with sponsors to operate the showcase.
If you’re interested in getting involved as a sponsor of an upcoming FYSK showcase, here’s more information.
3. Nominate founders to be featured in the FYSK showcase.
There are two types of companies we like to feature:
Inflecting/ high growth, usually has promising revenue, growing team quickly, open roles across the board
Early stage companies (pre PMF, usually seed stage), exceptional team, hiring a couple key roles (usually engineers), founder is top 1% storyteller. Note: companies that are just getting started may be better off waiting until they hit an inflection point and have a greater hiring need to present.
Topic-wise, we feature a variety of companies -- our community of engineering talent tends to favor software focused areas like AI/ML, data infra, dev tools, healthcare, marketplaces and climate opportunities. We've seen less enthusiasm for areas like crypto and consumer social.
To nominate, use the form on our website. This is the best way for our team to keep track of all the founders that have been nominated as we’re curating for the upcoming show.
We look forward to collaborating
We believe that helping the best teams assemble faster accelerates the pace of technological innovation. We also believe that startups are hard and risky, and strong partnerships make everyone in the ecosystem more likely to succeed. Please reach out if you’d like to collaborate in one or more of these ways.