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Our Philosophy & Investment Criteria
The FamLabs Approach
If you’re an exceptional entrepreneur building an impactful company to bring joy to your customers, we want to work with you. Our focus is early-stage companies targeting large market opportunities which aim to improve the well-being of families or individuals—from birth to the later stages of life. We look for strong founding teams coupled with well-articulated business plans, clearly identified commercial opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantages. We write checks ranging from $100k to $5mm, and we usually lead or co-lead investments, particularly at the seed or series A stages.
We Are Theme Investors
We do not restrict ourselves to any one sector, but we do look for certain investment features and themes in the startups we fund, and typically back products and services that are well beyond the “science experiment” phase.
What Features Do You Look For In Businesses You Fund?
First and foremost, we look for B2B and B2C businesses with a well-identified “edge” over competitors, or potential competitors. This can be a proprietary/novel technology, a much better product than what currently exists, unique commercial partnerships or relationships, hard-to-replicate data and databases, or it can be having the prescience to be the first-mover in a new market segment where incumbency will be a strong advantage (often driven by network effects, or significant returns to scale).
It’s important to think through what your company’s “special sauce” is, how that provides a competitive edge, and critically how sustainable that competitive advantage is over time.
If your startup has the following features, it might be a good fit for us.
You are building a “category defining” company that will create a new market
You have identified novel market trends on the cusp of widespread adoption that your startup will address
You have found innovative, often tech-enabled, ways to efficiently serve previously neglected market segments
You have disruptively reinvented distribution or manufacturing of existing products
You have found novel, technological solutions or business approaches to meaningful societal problems
Your business exhibits relatively short innovation cycles, where milestones and proof-of-progress are clear quickly
Your business has a sustainable competitive advantage that is growing, not eroding, with time
Your products or services show signs of high customer “stickiness” (often in the form of recurring revenues and low annual churn, multi-year contracts, or deep integration with a customer’s daily life or business processes)
Your startup has a well identified path to profitability while maintaining high growth rates
What If My Startup Doesn’t Quite Fit?
There is no template for innovation or commercial excellence, just patterns and commonalities we have gleaned over our investing and entrepreneurial careers. If your idea doesn’t fit into the prescribed themes and features outlined here, we will still evaluate your investment pitch.
Like all good businesspeople, we as investors are endlessly learning and challenging our beliefs. Exceptional entrepreneurs who don’t fit this mold frequently open our eyes to powerful new themes and investment categories; we are insatiably curious and relish in discovering the new and unknown!
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