Should you submit your startup to Papa Bear for possible investment?

This section contains detailed information regarding what we look for in companies and founders. The guidance contains much that is specifically relevant to Papa Bear, but also includes good advice for determining if you’re ready to submit to any VC fund.

If, after reviewing the information on this page, you think you could be a good fit to become a Papa Bear Cub, we would love to hear from you. Contact Us with a brief message through the link at the top of the page and we’ll get back to you with an email address to send your deck and other materials.

What types of startups do we invest in?

Papa Bear focuses on capital efficient startups that bring transformative joy or relief to their clients, customers and users. We invest fairly agnostically, primarily in B2B software and software enabled services companies. The only B2B verticals we won’t consider are blockchain related businesses, HR/Recruitment/FoW Tech, Music Tech, hard deep tech (i.e. - materials science, space) or biotech. We do not invest in pure consumer software and generally do not invest in CPG, but will sometimes consider broader niche, category defining brands (think Warby Parker or Dollar Shave Club). We like diverse teams and have a commitment that at least 30% of our portfolio companies have one or more underserved minority or female founders.

At what stages do we invest?

Papa Bear invests at early seed. Generally this means there is a strong initial team in place that has raised at least a Friends and Family round with a product that has launched in the last year and is generating at least $15-30,000 in monthly revenue.

What size deals and checks?

At present, we invest from $25,000 - $100,000 in deal sizes generally ranging from $750,000 to $2 million with max valuations of $10 million.

We do not require that you have secured a lead investor to make a commitment and will sometimes be a first commit.

In which geographies and through which structures do we invest?

We currently look at startups whose founders are based in the United States, Canada, the UK and Singapore that are focused on or immediately appropriate for the US market. Teams can be distributed as long as the primary founder is in one of those geographies and intends to operate from there. The company must generally be organized as a Delaware C-corp.

Why you should become a Papa Bear Cub.

While almost every venture fund will tell you how founder friendly and supportive they are, it’s actually true in our case. Our founder and Managing GP, Josh Futterman, is a 5x founder himself and an arch mentor to 250+ other founders over the last 15 years, many of whom have gone on to meaningful success. He created Papa Bear specifically to bring his love of mentoring together with capital at the stages where he can be most impactful.

Josh has a deep understanding of the early stage founder journey. In fact, the entire underlying investment philosophy of Papa Bear is based on giving personal support and coaching to you from the time we invest for as long as you want and need it. That means helping you to ask the right questions, find effective answers and avoid mistakes. It also means utilizing Josh’s huge set of connections developed over three decades in the startup world to help accelerate your sales, hiring and fundraising. Equally importantly, we have a strong commitment to founder health and wellness. We’ll be there for you when times are great, but more importantly, unlike most funds, we’ll be there when things get tough and you need a shoulder to cry on.

In addition to support from Josh and the fund, you’ll be part of an inclusive community designed to enable our Member-LPs to help where they can and all of our founders to support each other from the time you join us to exit and beyond.

What we look for in a founding team.

We prefer startups with both a technical and business co-founder and a few other people in place, but we will look at solo founders who have been able to inspire initial employees to join them. We generally look for the following traits in the team:

• You know your business and customers inside and out, either because you worked in the industry before or because you took the time and made the effort to really get to know the vertical before launching your startup.

• All team members are highly Coachable.

• The team has demonstrated an ability to Move Fast and Quickly Recover from setbacks.

• The team is Flexible in all aspects of building your startup, committed to testing, and open to making all the pivots necessary to find product/market fit. In other words, you’re not wedded to a particular path and you don’t let your ego get in the way of your success.

We look for the following traits in our founders:

• You have the ability to Inspire others.

• You’re Confident (but not arrogant).

• You demonstrate Creativity and Imagination.

• You’re Resilient.

• You Persevere when others would be stopped.

• You have strong Analytical skills and are able to look at information with an eye to constant improvement.

Our commitment to diversity and community.

Our founder, Josh Futterman, grew up in New York City, quite possibly the most diverse, integrated place in the world, with friends from all races and backgrounds. His mom is a feminist and his dad was a jazz and soul record producer in the 1960s. His immediate family itself is diverse.

The result is that Papa Bear isn’t just committed to diversity, equity and inclusion as the buzz phrase of the moment, but as a core part of who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish. As part of that commitment, Papa Bear Ventures was initially based in Harlem and remains right next door, not in Flatiron, FiDi or Brooklyn. Not only are we dedicated to supporting underserved minority and women entrepreneurs, we’re also perfectly comfortable with LGBTQ and non-binary founders. And we won’t silo you. You’ll be a part of a broad community supporting each other and, we hope, a future venture investor yourself.

In addition to our direct DEI commitment, Papa Bear’s unique new fund structure has been specifically designed to not only democratize venture investments, but to serve as a template for non-traditional fund managers to get their funds off the ground quickly without having to chase old school limited partner money.

How we make our investment decisions.

Because of what we bring to the table beyond a check, we see a lot of exciting startups. As a result, we invest in a tiny fraction of the companies we see. While returns are important, we are not financial investors. We’re rare NYC operator investors. Yes, we look at traction, market size, growth and all the other key business metrics. But once we get past that, we’re really investing in you, the founder. That means we take the time to get to know you personally as a core part of our diligence process.

The information about what we look for in founders and founding teams is above. Beyond those, however, there are some other things that will make it more likely we’ll invest:

• You did a lot of systematized customer discovery before beginning to design and build your product and are constantly testing and iterating.

• You’ve built a good founding team and launched your product on spec or with very little capital.

• You’ve raised friends and family investment, even a small amount. This demonstrates your willingness to take risks and your belief in your venture.

• You’ve been through an accelerator/incubator and made progress.

• You’ve been a finalist in one or more startup competitions.

• Your startup is in an industry you know very well and solves a big, recognized problem in that industry.

• Either Josh or someone he knows has advised you before and you acted on the advice.

• You’ve been involved in launching and running a prior startup for at least a year, even if you failed, or you have experience as an early employee of one or more successful startups.