"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.

When I was accepted to On Deck in November 2021, I had just begun a new job search and was looking for roles and companies I could thrive in. On Deck Customer Success seemed like a great opportunity for me to grow my career and build a network of peers who were doing the same. 

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

‍Here’s how OD50 Fellow Daniel Gamboa went from founder to finance to energy all the way to web3. 

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.

ODCoS Fellow Kirstie Marsh shares her experience of finding a lifelong community of trusted Chiefs of Staff while living in a country where almost none exist. ODCoS connected Kirstie to a trusted peer network that allowed her to gain confidence in the early stages of her Chief of Staff career.

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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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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.

“On Deck was literally the catalyst that allowed me to leave my job. I felt supported, and I met people who were already on the same journey. It’s really allowed me to take that first step and feel comfortable about it.”

"When questions came up that fell out of the scope that I or one of the collaborators I was working with could answer, my go-to location became the On Deck Health Asks & Offers channel. It was the best search engine in the niche as the results were driven by people passionate and informed about the space."

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"By just putting yourself in an environment with a lot of other interesting people, good things tend to happen."

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.

"On Deck Catalyst was a search to 1) find friends and strengthen that community of support 2)  discover useful insights to improve Pareto and 3) discover new strategic partnerships. Only 6 weeks into the Catalyst programming, I was able to achieve all 3 of my goals." 

"Everyone in the program has a job and a blog, or they are launching a podcast, and maybe also founding a startup, and they’re investing. That sense of ambition is contagious. It’s powerful to be around a community that has a different approach to their own career strategy than the straight and narrow conventional path."

"The size of the network and the curation of the people in it is so active and dedicated to helping each other. It’s like a living thing."

“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.”

"The On Deck community was there every step of the way during my recruiting journey, they connected me to their network, coached me through offer negotiations, and attended my dance party social events."

When I started at SquadCast in August 2020 I had never formally been trained in community building. Harry Duran, one of the advisors of SquadCast who had been participating in the On Deck No Code Fellowship, saw that On Deck had launched the Community Builders fellowship and recommended that I participate. 

"It’s a great place to feel like you’re not alone on what can be the very lonely journey of starting a company."

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.

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.

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.

"[Through Lean Hire] I got to meet with the CEO and CTO and learn about what they were building, why they were building it and their future vision."

"They understand that organic and iterative connection is where the magic happens."

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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"I would describe ODNC as the consistent exchange of belief capital. Even the week before the program starts and you first enter the Slack channel, you see a mountain of introductions and enter a buzzing community with the friendliest, most supportive and engaged people."

"For any founders out there looking for early stage employees, I would highly recommend OD50 and hedging the risk as they are training folks on how to be outstanding early stage teammates to help get to the next phase of your business."

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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On Deck is how I met Sam, who is now my co-founder at Levels.

"The access to people, experts and the expertise has saved us a lot of time in doing research and outreach just by centralizing a lot of knowledge in one place. Given Climate Change is such a broad problem to be tackling, Nestor and I had about 100 areas that we weren’t experts in (grant funding, intellectual property, etc.)."

Everyone in the program genuinely wanted to best serve one another during their time together and most often that took the form of, “Have you had a chance to talk to x yet, I think you would totally bond over [insert topic]. Let me connect you!”

"We talked about the On Deck fellowship and thought that it would help us improve our value-adds for our syndicate. We would be able to add more Climate-focused experts to our network, while also improving our own operational understanding of the field."

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.

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.

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.

"I believe that the fastest way to grow and improve is to give your ideas, products, and models exposure to smart people. ODFintech allows you to gain this exposure in a 10x way, where one conversation changes the vision of your product and introduces you to a host of other people you should connect with."

Time and time again, through chats with other designers, I wished there was a place where designers could come together to learn and level each other up beyond our day jobs. On Deck is precisely that.

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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"One of my biggest beliefs in investing is that a good investor has a general worldview of how the world operates and their investments fit into that worldview like a Lego block snapping into place. Even though you are allowed to have multiple interest areas as an investor, there should still be one unified belief behind why you are making certain investments."

“It was great to be dropped into this community of people that thought like me, and wanted to do the same things as me, and nerded out over the same things as I did.”

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.

One fireside chat in particular comes to mind as far as holding the insights I was looking for. Erik Torenberg spoke about how On Deck went from a physical dinner series and retreat to an online fellowship. He emphasized that you really had no idea what would work unless you went out and tested it. He reflected on how it took 4 years to find the model that worked and how transitioning to a cohort based approach made all the difference. 

“What’s most impressive to us is how On Deck has grown without diluting the brand at all. They’ve kept the bar extremely high, and people love the program (including us). They’ve also fully democratized the network, which is extremely important for tech access.”

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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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.

“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.”

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.

"I want to share June’s playbook going from 0 to 1 as a B2B SaaS startup, including: 

• How we got our first user
• Why you should understand your customer before you building a landing page
• How to implement your user-research findings 
• How to launch on Product Hunt and Hacker News"

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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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.

“We were able to get quick feedback on what we needed to change, or what was going well—some of our initial customers were from the On Deck community who were running into problems that Secureframe could solve. That was super helpful for our progress.”

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 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.

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.