Episode 420 | An Alternative Form of Startup Funding
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Einar Vollset talk about their alternative form of startup funding, Tiny Seed. They talk about why they started an accelerator, and some of the key differentiators that separates them from typical accelerators.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob: In this episode of Startups For The Rest of Us, Einar Vollset and I talk about an alternative form of startup funding as well as run through the history of startup funding as we see it. This is Startups For The Rest of Us episode 420.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it, I’m Rob.
Einar: And I’m Einar.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Nice job catching that man. I didn’t brief you in advance that you had to say your name, huh?
Einar: […] is Mike supposed to say something on or not?
Rob: Mike’s not on. For listeners out there, who don’t know you. Your name is E-Y-N-A-R. I call you A-Y-N-A-R.
Einar: It’s close as my wife gets. I think that’s fair.
Rob: Good. You and I have started–we’ve co-founded Tiny Seed together. That’s at tinyseed.com. But folks may not have heard of you. I know that you are a multi-time founder. You went through YCombinator in 2009. You’re a developer as well. You’re a CS professor at Cornell. You’ve done quite a bit of stuff and you, these days, you kind of work in private equity, right? You’re like a private equity scout?
Einar: Yeah, kind of. I sort of got into that space after my last exit and actually have what I jokingly call a service startup investment banker. Most of the stuff I do is help fund their exits when they’ve got a SaaS business or a tech-enabled service business between […], $2 million, and $15 million as ARR, something like that.
Rob: Right. That’s where you and I have connected on Tiny Seed. Folks listening to the podcast kind of already know a little bit of Tiny Seed, it’s the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. We try to give founders a year of runway, it’s a remote accelerator. It’s an idea that has been floating around for years and I never wanted to do a lot of the investor side and didn’t really have the expertise to raise a funding round and that kind of stuff. And then you and I connected back in April at MicroConf in Vegas and this was something that intrigued you to start what became Tiny Seed.
I think folks who listened know why I’m doing it. This is just a continuation of everything I’ve done for the past 15 years or whatever, it’s me putting more money where my mouth has been. But for you, what’s your interest in being part of something like Tiny Seeds?
Einar: I think there’s just a gap in the market there for those kinds of companies. I think in terms of funding structure and in terms of support. The way that I think about this base is it’s very similar to where companies like Y Combinator or First Round were in 2005, 2006. It’s becoming more and more clear to me that there are incredible businesses to be built which can be super profitable and sort of take care of their investors, and their founders, and their employees and everything that sort of fal
