The world is being rocked by COVID-19 and founders, like all of us, are trying to adjust to the new reality. We hope that you’re being as safe as possible, and staying at home, through these times. While personal health and safety are paramount, all of the founders we work with are also seeing their […]
Part of launching any new financing instrument is increasing the number of investors that are comfortable using it for investments. We created the Shared Earnings Agreement (SEAL) because we felt we needed a financing agreement that aligned investors with founders building calm, sustainable, profitable companies. As part of the process of helping more investors understand […]
I’m excited to announce that Earnest Capital has invested in Un-Ruly & Yeluchi by Un-Ruly. Un-Ruly is the pre-eminent beauty blog dedicated to black hair and Yeluchi by Un-Ruly provides at-home professional hair styling services for women of color. At Earnest, a core thesis is that there are many overlooked and underserved opportunities for technology-enabled […]
Introduction What follows is a public draft of the investment memo for Earnest Capital’s second fund with as few redactions as possible. This is an extension of our experiment in radical transparency, beginning with our open-source process designing our funding for bootstrappers investment strategy and Shared Earnings Agreement investment structure.
An interesting aspect of running a fund is that I am both raising money from high net worth individuals and institutional investors and speaking to founders who are raising money from investors like me. One upside of that is I get to learn fundraising best practices from smart founders and then test and deploy them […]
I incorporated my first real business entity in 2010. Every part of the process of setting up a business—incorporation, opening a bank account, setting up payroll, etc—was a horrifically inefficient and expensive experience to me. Over the past decade we’ve seen a number of startups emerge to put to modern customer experience, often by using […]
One of our primary areas of focus at Earnest Capital is software as a service built by and for specific industries. We’ve made several investments in the B2B SaaS space and feel it’s a great market that aligns with our model. One of our more recent investment was in Junglebee, software for connecting local tour […]
The theme and purpose of the inaugural Founder Summit is: having the conversations we’re not having. As founders we are fire-hosed with tactical and strategic advice on acquiring customers and building products. We have enough books, blog posts, and podcasts to fill every waking moment with tips for building a company. But there are still […]
At Earnest Capital, we are big fans of platforms that enable entrepreneurs to build profitable, scalable, remote-friendly businesses. MemberSpace enables nutritionists, personal trainers, educators, and entrepreneurs of all kinds to build a membership business on any website. Although the category of enabling members-only sites is not particularly new, we think MemberSpace is unique in a […]
These days it’s common for venture funds to raise an “opportunity fund,” a separate fund that sits alongside the main fund so they can invest more cash the performers in their portfolio. These funds are about opportunities for the fund. I want to talk about opportunities for founders. We are designing the Earnest Opportunity Fund, […]
