RareBreed Ventures

Investment approach

Thesis

You can find amazing startups anywhere in the world. There are amazing entrepreneurs everywhere with great ideas, building dope companies. Not just in Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. Some of these entrepreneurs are building products and serving communities that many traditional VCs do not understand or are not willing to understand. This leads to many missed opportunities to fund great companies. Many VCs focus so much on getting deal flow from traditional sources that they don’t take the time to look beyond those circles. This also leads to missed opportunities to fund great companies. Investing in pre-seed stage companies is a skill and requires a lot of conviction. You cannot use the traditional metrics to evaluate a company or, more importantly, the founders themselves. Sometimes founders at the pre-seed stage aren’t as polished, don’t know all the VC lingo, don’t have an amazing network, or don’t know how to construct a pitch. Still, they are just as amazing as founders who have raised tons of money and have deep networks. $50,000 is enough to get great founders started but not enough for them to fully execute to get to the next level. They still need to pitch to angel investors, go to pitch competitions, join accelerators, and do anything and everything else they can do to get additional funding along the way. Amazing entrepreneurs with truly original and unique products, serving industries that haven’t had innovation in YEARS, do exist. There are two types of founders that get us excited: those who have thought a lot about and executed on customer acquisition, and, those building products in markets that are often overlooked. These founders are out-of-the-box thinkers, which is critical to success. Making pre-seed investments, you write fairly small checks relative to all of venture capital. But even small checks are life changing for some entrepreneurs, which can lead to amazing returns.Source (opens in a new tab)

Eligibility

primarily outside of large tech ecosystems

Investing status notes

We write checks of up to $250K as the first or one of the first investors in exceptional startups.