We invest in Seed and Series A startups because we know how to win early.
In our experience, the three toughest obstacles during the early stage are:
Team: Adding rock star technical talent.
Customer meetings: Getting enough conversations to validate your insight.
Traction: Fostering evangelical users and a beachhead market.
Achieving these milestones means you’ve cleared the hardest part of your journey. But time is your scarcest resource. Having a partner who knows the map and can carry some of the weight will speed you up and keep you on the path.
That’s us. We’re the only venture firm focused entirely on the early stage journey for entrepreneurs that combines this type of expertise with real, hands-on resources to build your team, tell your story, and achieve breakthrough growth.
Unusual Expertise
We invest in enterprise and consumer technology companies, and focus exclusively on accelerating founders through their toughest early challenges. Our partners have built multi-billion dollar companies from scratch (AppDynamics) and backed dozens of category-leading startups (DataStax, Mulesoft, Nimble Storage, Nicira, Heptio).
But that’s not where our strengths end. We’ve built out an operating partnership that’s unprecedented in early stage venture with top minds in recruiting, sales, marketing and finance – all of whom go to work for the startups in our portfolio:
Recruiting and closing candidates
Generating dozens of customer prospect engagements
Crafting messaging that works
Building a best-in-class back office
We Don’t Just Advise — We Deliver
Our approach is based on ‘doing’ vs. ‘advising.’ And we’ve backed this up with two major innovations for early stage venture – Unusual Academy and the Unusual Get Ahead Platform, both designed from first principals to equip entrepreneurs with best practices and hands-on execution building their companies at the early stage.
Unusual Academy
The only customized program that equips founders with the tactics, network and funding they need to get from early insight to a repeatable sales process:
Seven sessions hand-picked to tackle the most important challenges: finding early customers, crafting your initial go-to-market, fundraising, hiring, and leadership.
Deep engagement with master practitioners like AppDynamics Founder Jyoti Bansal, Adam Grant, Wealthfront CEO Andy Rachleff, and Executive Coach Maggie Hensle, who provide bespoke mentorship and tactical tools.
Highly interactive workshops that put your challenges at the center.
Investment capital (up to $1M) to jumpstart your company.
Get Ahead Platform
Unusual employs top experts and makes them part of your team to help you accomplish 4 critical goals:
Hiring remarkable talent.
Getting in front of 50+ customer prospects.
Crafting a story you can use.
Building out a world-class back office.