The smaller you get, the less you have. By the time you get down to very small companies, in the US, they're sending checks; in the UK, they're copy-and-pasting from payslips into their bank account one by one, paying things manually. It's a time consuming, laborious, painful process. And there just hasn’t been a way to automate it. It's been assumed that nothing can be done until those businesses are bigger.

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Vance Roush and Kyle Woumn share their experience building Overflow, a company that inspires generosity through technology by making donations frictionless across every major asset class. With the help of On Deck, Vance and Kyle built the network they needed to take Overflow to the next level and raise a $10M Series A to empower people anywhere to give to causes they care about.

I was like ‘wow’ this is the tribe I belong to. These are the kind of people I want to be surrounded with. This is where I belong. I was talking with a lot of like minded people and fueling that burning desire. It inspired me to go and quit my high paying job at Facebook.

We saw an opportunity that we could create a product that connects seamlessly with your calendar and turns on whenever you speak in meetings. It then would give you personalized feedback in real-time and after the meeting where it provides you with tips and lessons, evaluating things like your confidence, clarity and empathy.

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We initiated remote-first before it was popular, so before the pandemic. I'm a strong believer, as a leader, that finding talent wherever they are, and enabling people access to a startup environment, regardless of geography, is really important. And it allows for a better team.

On Deck helped me raise $750k for my startup, 1v1Me, but then we raised an additional $1.25M a month or two later. Now, my foot is on the gas scaling 1v1Me 24/7. However, what I will say is I always make time for On Deck.

It's really hard to filter through all the startup advice available on the internet since there's so much outdated and low quality content mixed in. On Deck does a great job at filtering who gets in, so searching through the Slack meant 1) the advice was recent, and 2) it came from qualified people.

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In science, there’s a multi-trillion dollar data loss problem because of a lack of software and infrastructure, which leads to disaggregated and unsearchable data. This has always been a massive problem, but it’s come to the forefront with COVID-19... We saw an opportunity for a tool purpose-built for the scientific community to eliminate inefficiencies and foster more innovative research.

ODF created a powerful flywheel for me and my business. Now my mission, and what I want Inward to be, is extremely clear.‍

Contractors who care about their teams want to go invest in things that make them safer. What is missing from that equation is that the companies which support these businesses: their financial services, their insurance companies, their lenders, their banks, are not currently creating a model that says, hey, if you do these things, we're going to give you credit for improving the risk profile of your business.

"When I was new to this ‘Founder World’, I had no community, I had no people to talk to you. I didn't understand the legal, the HR, the tech, the coding, the fast iteration, the rapid pace —I was overwhelmed. So I went to On Deck seeking community where I could meet with and talk to other people in a similar stage.

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co-op is a platform that helps independent brands partner together, acquire customers, and scale. We build tools to support upsells, cross-promotion, audience exposure, and intelligent insights. The idea is that we can facilitate every imaginable brand-to-brand interaction.

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For a project like this, you just have to start and dive in headfirst. You have to put an initial prototype together — evaluate properly, understand what the baseline is. Then you create an optimization framework, and iteratively work to reduce errors to get to a point where you match and exceed current human judgment. That’s surprisingly within reach.

I thought, I'm a French person who doesn’t have a college roommate in Stanford who happens to be my co-founder and is passionate about the same things. So I guess... On Deck might be the best serendipity maximizer.

At On Deck, I attended intimate sessions with other founders about both their successful and unsuccessful journeys. I got so much energy from writing code for the hackathon (I built OfficeTogether’s MVP in Airtable!) and I also met so many people in 1:1 meetings who had just made the leap. My experience at On Deck gave me the courage to leave my job and start my own company, which was hard given how much I loved Coinbase.

I met a lot of amazing founders at On Deck, people that I still talk to this day about different things. One of them, Kyle Woumn, just raised his $10 million round with Overflow, and we talk all the time.

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Being able to present to different investors through the On Deck Angels First Look program, meant we not only honed our pitch, but found many advisors and mentors as well. One of our first angel investors was Bill Silva from Bill Silva Ventures.

I figured if you could fix the sexual assault and harassment problem, the second-order effects of it would be so huge. It would mean that women could have confidence and profound support entering workplaces they didn't historically populate.

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Structuring the round was really interesting. In our cap table, we have investors that are super focused on climate. We have investors that care about the biotechnology. We have investors that care about the future of food. We have investors that are principally supporting our go-to-market strategy (with experience investing in other similar products like Impossible, Beyond, Blue Bottle) that can help us get there.

Small businesses with fewer than 10 employees make up about 90% of the businesses in the world. But they answer the phone only 35% of the time. The reason is very simple — they're busy. They're doing what they know. They're serving the customer in front of them. They're unclogging toilets. They're hemming a dress, They're fixing a shoe. Whatever it is they do, they're doing that. And they prioritize it over the inbound phone call. We’re here to help them pick up that call.

“Our goal with Hellosaurus is to provide a safe and fun space where kids can pretend to be whatever they want today, so they can develop the skills to become whoever they want to be tomorrow. Through a pretend play lens, children will be able to learn about the world, different opportunities, and topics while also developing critical skills like creative thinking and communication.”

As I was building, the next stages felt less like a black box, because I was constantly seeing people right ahead of me and right behind me. The person who's ahead of you — you can learn from them. When you're past that stage, you can be helpful to the people behind you.

It meant a lot of VCs started reaching out to us on Twitter and said, “I saw your Demo Day presentation, and I would love to have a conversation about what you're building.” Plus, the founder of Bubble was part of the judging panel on Demo Day and mentioned that I had created an ‘Impressive build.’ It was super validating considering I had just taught myself Bubble.

On Deck is an amazing community of like-minded builders who don’t want to just be a cog in the wheel. They want to make the wheel. I’m grateful to be tapped into the broader community.

One of my main challenges was growing a team quickly. I had a few people in my Mastermind group that had thousands of employees at different parts of their career and they were able to give me advice throughout the process. Without On Deck I could have made some hiring and firing mistakes.

“Make every decision knowing that you're going to be okay — that 10-20 years from now this is going to work out and you're going to be successful. Make every decision without that fear.”

On Deck has been the perfect place to be in transition. The rare – and precious – spirit of service upheld by those in the community has helped me tackle harder problems than I previously thought possible.