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Dear Friends,
It’s been a minute since our last newsletter, so hoping your January was as productive as ours was. I am so excited for all the possibilities that 2022 holds.
I am especially excited about a big announcement for the SoCal Venture Pipeline program that will be going out via press release shortly. However, first I had to share the news with our key supporters and collaborators.
The SoCal Venture Pipeline brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank is now expanding the program to accept applications from tech startups that are seeking $1m+ of institutional seed funding.
What This Means
If you are a SoCal based tech founder raising $1m+ of institutional seed money, we want you to apply now.
In April 2021, the program launched to help bridge the Series A bottleneck facing our SoCal region. We connected with the top accelerators, incubators, and ecosystem organizations to find the most promising and sometimes overlooked founders that were seeking to raise their Series A round.
We spun up the program, reviewed over one hundred companies, selected 13, provided VC introductions, and two of them already closed their round. Through the process it became clear that many of the startup founders needed help at earlier stages, especially women and BIPOC founders.
Additionally, with the semantic complexity of what defines a Seed or Series A round shifting, and the ever evolving landscape of venture capital progressing towards larger sized seed rounds, it became clear that we should start opening up the program aperture to help these early stage founders.
Successful Expansion
We ran a successful test pilot to validate our thesis. Now, we are announcing this program expansion to our community and hope you can help us share the good news to founders in your network.
The goal of the program is to be helpful to founders. Even if we can’t connect them to investors, we might be able to make an introduction to a corporate partner or potential advisor who could help change the trajectory of their business. Please feel free to refer to this document for social media content to repost.
Making an Impact
We especially want to help underrepresented founders.
According to Harvard Business Review, in 2019, women-led startups received only 2.8% of Venture Capital funding. This was an all-time high. In 2021, that percentage decreased to 2.3%. Despite the fact that women-led businesses are usually high-performing, we are still seeing a big gap in the market.
According to an analysis by Boston Consulting Group, women led businesses on average bring in higher revenue and deliver twice as much per dollar invested. Women now make up more of the workforce than men, yet men hold 80% of C-suite positions. We want to see and support more women leading and building companies.
Those of us who have the power to change this through investing in women are responsible to do so.
Desired Results
The desired results for this program are more SoCal companies funded each year - 10 to be exact. By increasing access to capital, more jobs are created, innovation accelerates, and we grow stronger as an ecosystem. If you are a SoCal based tech founder raising $1m+ of institutional seed money, we want you to apply now.
We must acknowledge our lead sponsor Silicon Valley Bank for their continued support, guidance, and resources for this program as well as Wilson Sonsini and KPPB for additional program support.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to reply to this email or schedule a 1:1 with me here.
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