Potential customer interviews and customer development interviews – I did a lot of that with my On Deck cohort. I used the ODF community as a source of oxygen in the early days.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

“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 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.

“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.”

“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.”

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

"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."

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

"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."

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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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"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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 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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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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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.