A boutique venture collective for cash flowing startups.

Glad you asked! We're a loosely affiliated group of founders, angel investors, and tech talent that works together to help founders though investing, mentoring, design, development, and product. We are not an agency, dev shop, or VC, although we do overlap in some of those areas.

We make money in two ways: 1, we invest money like a VC fund and get returns when companies have exits, and 2, we charge for the work we do. Unlike a dev shop, however, we do not charge exorbitant fees and aim to align our incentives with our portfolio companies by charging prices that are comparable to what early startup employees would get paid with an equity incentive.

Sometimes we just make investments (usually SAFE notes). In other cases, we invest time instead of money or charge fees for work without taking equity. It really depends - it's always case-by-case based on what the startup needs and what we are able to offer.

We've worked with a lot of VC-backed startups, a few of which have even been aquired! We find that the venture-studio / technical-co-founder-as-a-service thing works best for cash-flowing startups that aren't necessarily VC-scale, since most VCs will want to see full-time technical co-founders anyways. We're big fans of enterprise B2B SaaS companies, but we've done a lot of customer apps as well. Often we work with CEO founders who have not yet found a technical co-founder, help them get to product-market-fit, and then help transition over to a full-time CTO once they find the right person.

We don't really have much to offer on the sales, BD, and marketing side. We also don't think our model makes sense for super complex, deep-tech, and moonshot ventures - things like crypto, hardware, biotech, etc - we find that those kinds of companies need to raise a bit more money than generally makes sense for the types of startups that we like to work with.

We prefer not to sign NDAs. Thoughtful itself will never sign a non-compete, but our team members may be willing to if they join your startup directly. If we end up doing work beyond investing, our contract has a built-in NDA. If it's absolutely necessary to sign an NDA, there will need to be a clause that makes it clear that the NDA would in no way prevent us from working with other companies, including ones that might compete with you. (Look, we gotta look out for ourselves here.)