Background

Fun fact story time! Foolishly, David and I spent most of our initial energy on Lynx, 2+ years ago, on creating decks. This is of course, Not The Thing. (The Thing is listening to customers and scrappy prototyping.) However, one benefit of this is that those decks serve as an interesting time capsule.

David and I have considered Investors as a key player in the sweat equity marketplace from the very beginning. Look at this first deck for Lynx, from January 2022, over two years ago:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zT693-ErceuuZ7ORobiiGvoIBG-yN0B2/view?usp=drive_link

That one is actually fine, it (overly verbose and densely) at least hints at this one idea — startup studios are one way of trying to make winners instead of pick them, but what if market dynamics selected talent and any investor could invest in that talent?

This one is just egregious, an investor and fund concept-specific deck from a few months later:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yX2KoUwlZ52DABuGjZlSn5XgtsOAsraE/view?usp=sharing

All to say, we’ve been thinking and circling about this problem for some time — now we take it head on.

Category

Recall our Category Thinking:

• The problem is… Most startups fail.
• The category is… Startup resource marketplace — all the whitespace from incorporating, funding, staffing and building, to selling.
• Our point of view on the market is… Venture sucks. Why the fuck are we okay with 9/10 startups failing? Venture is dumb and slow and holding us back. The Lynx Category allows venture stakeholders to align incentives, operate & invest efficiently, share in returns, and win big.

We started building the category on the beachhead of a problem/category pair of “Sweat deals are hard to find and paper” / “Sweat equity marketplace” and now we grab land from there.

The mandate of a startup resource marketplace is get talent and resources to founders and ideas in a way that reliably ends in market fit. There are an unlimited number of problems to solve in the chemistry of synthesizing ideas and resources into fit. This is our domain.

We specifically reject that venture capital alone is the best vector to deliver resources to ideas to create fit. It empirically fails 90% of the time. However, capital is an inextricable catalyst in the synthesis of resources and ideas into fit. This research brief is to address capital’s role in the startup resource marketplace.

Hypothesis

Our specific hypothesis is… The methods, attitudes and tools of venture funding contribute to a huge market inefficiency. There is a present but high effort opportunity to disrupt one or more of those critical factors and improve startup outcomes. This thinking leads to several sub-hypotheses:

• Venture is inflicted with a pervasive attitude that winners can be picked instead of made
• Pattern-matching prevails in early stages as the primary funding method