Welcoming Pioneer Square Labs

One of our commitments at True is to support not only innovation in our core markets, but also in venture capital itself. When we started True, our goal was to completely re-align the venture capital market to better serve creative Founders. What if the entire venture industry served entrepreneurs first? Our vision for the industry extends beyond just our own firm, and we have long supported other creative firms and entrepreneurs innovating around venture capital itself.

With this in mind, I am proud to announce our investment in a company that is putting their own spin on the traditional venture model by creating a place for the best ideas to gain traction, helmed by a world-class team and with a group of investors ready and waiting to get on board.

Pioneer Square Labs, who announced their funding earlier this month, is a startup studio in Seattle that plans to test hundreds of ideas, and then use its own team to launch companies around the best ones. During the company-creation process, PSL will build product, sign key customers, and actively recruit talented entrepreneurs, technologists and designers to serve as Founders of a spin-out team. PSL’s impressive investor syndicate of 13 venture firms and over 50 angels will be given early and intimate access to these newly created companies, creating a huge benefit for both investor and startup.

We were brought into the PSL fold by fellow VC and entrepreneur Greg Gottesman, whom we have known for almost 15 years. True Partner Toni Schneider first met Greg in 2002 through Ethan Diamond, whose company, Bandcamp, was funded by both Greg and True. Greg was also an angel investor in Toni’s company Oddpost (acquired by Yahoo! in 2004), and has thus been a friend for a long time. Greg, together with his Co-Founders Geoff Entress, Mike Galgon and Ben Gilbert, has put together an outstanding team of developers and designers to build the best ideas coming out of PSL into market-leading companies.

We are thrilled to be among the incomparable group of investors backing Pioneer Square Labs, including our close friends Foundry Group and Maveron, and we are equally as excited to be investing in Seattle’s burgeoning startup ecosystem. We’ve invested in two other Seattle startups—Glowforge and RescueTime—and have seen an incredible amount of talent in the region.

True would like to do more in Seattle, and partnering with PSL gives us the opportunity to more directly connect with the Seattle technology market. We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity.

Greg, Geoff, Mike and Ben—welcome to True!