VALUATION IS NEGOTIATED. VALUE IS EARNED.
Welcome to an Entirely New Model of Venture Capital
Value Accelerator.
In a world of sky-high valuations and abundant funding for innovative ideas, much of today’s news brings us back to a real business truth: value and valuation aren’t equal, or even synonymous. At Sweat Equity Ventures, we’ve built a Value Accelerator, a new type of investment that provides expertise in exchange for equity. We help founders more rapidly achieve their company’s mission and key milestones against three key pillars: Product, Team and Traction.
Collectively, we are a team of highly experienced operators, entrepreneurs and technologists. We are: founders with decades of experience building highly successful companies, launching products used by millions, and creating billions of dollars in commercial value.
We’re deeply invested - with the same common stock as the teams among whom we work that vests as we create impact. We engage hands-on with startups, both strategically and operationally, and our work is both broad and deep.
Founder-first.
As a team of founders and operators, we deeply understand the challenges that founders face at every stage. Fundamentally, all companies are evaluated on the same three things, and while funding is important, smart growth requires the network, talent and access to drive these key ingredients.
A great irony in company building is that when a company is moving from zero to one - or hits a major inflection point in its growth - expert senior guidance is the MOST important, but also the hardest to lock down. That’s why Sweat Equity exists.
Founders get a proven, seasoned team who can help them navigate exactly the challenges they face, without having to spend time they don’t have on recruiting them, paying salary dollars on risky hires, or making long-term bets based on an advisor’s comments over coffee and a powerpoint.
Here at SEV, our work takes on a holistic approach that draws upon the collective experience of our tenured team in all these areas; a team made of individuals both rare and cost-prohibitive to hire.
“SEV helped me amplify Verta’s exec team many-fold; they are like my extended exec team. The kind of experts that they can bring in to help with different parts of company-building is amazing — whether it is a world-class enterprise sales expert or a developer marketing expert — they’ll work with you to identify the right people at your stage of the company. The ability to work with such top-talent early-on has greatly accelerated Verta’s growth.”
- Manasi Varatak, CEO at Verta.ai
Bespoke.
We believe that every company is unique with a set of distinct needs and circumstances. Our model is built around engaging holistically at the most critical moments and applying deep expertise in product and engineering, go-to-market and in talent growth.
The resulting tailored solution helps create tangible shifts in the trajectory of the company - forever altering its course in history. We work in dedicated sprints with our portfolio as part of their team in all these areas.
Invested; playing on the same field together.
Our fund is built as operating capital to provide services. At the heart of how we invest is a deep commitment to the success of our founders. Every part of our engagement optimizes for serving that goal.
And we believe that goal can only be served if we are deeply invested, working alongside our founders.
So far, they agree.
"There's no other firm like SEV. As a founder, you feel like they are in the trenches with you - not just advising, but actually rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty alongside you. What's special is they do this across a broad range of key activities - from engineering to recruiting, strategy and GTM - all under one roof."
- Jennifer Smith, CEO + Co-founder of Colony Labs
2020 Foresight.
As we launch from stealth, we have the momentum of early success and some of the smartest money in the Valley at our back. As a partnership, we have not only unlocked more of our individual strengths, we’ve also jelled from a collection of successful operators to a proven team that gets better with each project.
We get the best of all worlds: the exciting risk and high reward potential of early stage companies, the security of a senior job, and the occasion to make real impact on some world-changing companies - over and over. It’s thrilling.