Start@Spark

Our friends at Spark today announced Start@Spark, a seed program designed to support earliest stage entrepreneurs. We applaud Santo, Bijan and the team at Spark for this move. This is a fantastic development for earliest stage entrepreneurs, because Spark is a talented group of people that bring real value to their companies. We’re co-investors together at SendMe, and we like and respect the folks at Spark a ton. They are a welcomed addition to the earliest stage ecosystem, that (in our opinion) needs more capital and attention.

True has long been dedicated to the seed stage model because often, the best entrepreneurs need just a few drops of capital to get started. Smaller checks free up entrepreneurs to think more creatively, because for many reasons, the psychological expectations of a few hundred thousand dollars are so much less than a few million. This creates excellent alignment between investor and entrepreneur, provided the investment fund is large enough that the small check can be viewed and treated like extremely high risk capital. What’s more, today’s capital efficiency means that any dollar in the hands of a sharp team goes very, very far.

At True, we seek to maximize market, product and timing risk to create outstanding investment returns. We do this by investing small amounts of capital up front with people we know and trust. These teams are empowered to take dramatic product, market, timing risk, and to change courses mid-stream, because success is never a straight line.

We think the seed model is essential to reinventing venture capital because it encourages and structurally enables entrepreneurs to take the kinds of risks that our world and economy need right now.

For all of these reasons, we applaud the arrival of Spark to the earliest stage market. This is a great development for entrepreneurs.