Request for Startups is a series of posts outlining a few specific theses that we feel are likely to hold good business opportunities for founders that are aligned with our goals. It’s a list of ideas, some less polished than others, and isn’t prescriptive on what problems should be solved or what products should be built. […]
For the last six months, I’ve spoken to 100s of world-class founders, investors, and operators. One question I have asked them all is to tell me their thoughts on mentorship: what worked and what didn’t from either side of the table. Not all of them had a strong mentor relationship in their journey, but all […]
Six weeks ago Earnest Capital soft-launched by posing the question: could we build a funding model for bootstrappers? We had been working for months on the technical details of an early-stage investment structure that aligns an investor with a founder who wants to build a sustainable, profitable, calm company and doesn’t want to raise traditional venture […]
We received a ton of good hard questions about the Earnest Shared Earnings Agreement, particularly around “how do the numbers actually work?” Well, we’re building a fancy web calculator for it, but I thought I would just pop the hood on the Google Spreadsheet (click here to access it directly) we’ll use for it and let […]
I really enjoyed this live-streamed discussion with Justin Jackson. Justin peppers me with questions about Earnest Capital and certainly caught me with a few I wasn’t prepared for. For some amazing background on the problem we’re trying to solve with Earnest, read Justin’s excellent, honest piece on the Bootstrapper’s Paradox.
Huge thank you to Joe Wallin, Kevin McArdle, and Rich Thornett for their help with this post and project. This is a post about the technical decisions we’ve made on a new “funding structure for bootstrappers” and a call for feedback from the founder community. But first, we need to talk about The Problem.
