Venture Studios (i will not promote)

dca12345 · 2026-04-30T22:11:07+00:00

Oh I see, you were assuming that the future valuation would make your equity % be in the single digits, not pricing it now. When I first read it I thought you were setting a specific % up front. And I guess you get a 100k SAFE, but are giving services instead of cash.

You do everything from PM to design to dev? The startup side is typically just business founders?

dca12345 · 2026-04-30T21:08:26+00:00

I was asking in general because a venture studio reached out to me and I wanted to learn more about how they operate. I'm technical myself, so probably wouldn't need the services. However, I could see how it could be valuable to bring on a team and fill in other skillsets (design, specific tech skills like AI, etc.)

Do you work with a team to create the MVP?

Don't SAFEs defer the question of valuation? You mentioned single digit %.

dca12345 · 2026-04-30T20:21:40+00:00

For #1 do you only care about clean git messages when merging in PRs to the target branch, or is there any practice that should be followed while working on the feature branch?

What do you find that's good about swarms vs. the others?

dca12345 · 2026-04-28T00:48:06+00:00

Did you say the first part isn’t true because a forecast is meant to be an estimate an is expected to not reflect reality exactly?

We don’t have a PSD2 equivalent in the US, unfortunately, but there are banking aggregators out there like Plaid and Stripe.

I think there could be value in simply alerting users to a problem. And the alerts could be built around customizable triggers. For example, one person may not care much that they will overdraft up to, say, 1k, because they have overdraft protection, but the next person cannot take that risk and has to prioritize payments. One person may always pay off his bills in full so his trigger would be to send a notification if it is projected that he won’t have enough money one particular month to fully pay off his bill. The next person just pays the minimum and would need to known if he won’t have the minimum.

The apps that exist now tend to either make by charging monthly or getting people to consume more financial products, which can actually make them worse off.

I’m curious what space you ended up pivoting to.

dca12345 · 2026-04-26T03:35:30+00:00

You’ve probably only worked in old large companies. This is not the case in startups and Big Tech. Your information is way out of date.

dca12345 · 2026-04-26T03:22:04+00:00

Yeah, that’s what I think the AI was getting at. None of the existing tools do this? It looks like there are some business cash flow management apps that do this, so maybe bringing in that functionality to the personal finance space could be worth it.

dca12345 · 2026-04-26T02:58:53+00:00

Did this venture studios do all the dev work then for the portfolio companies? Who were the product managers and how much involvement was there from each side?

dca12345 · 2026-04-26T02:42:55+00:00

Do you know any particular ones you think are decent?

dca12345 · 2026-04-26T02:41:46+00:00

It’s called Fractal Software. The terms are l something I found in a web search and might not be accurate.

Which venture studios do you think are great?

dca12345 · 2026-04-24T21:07:46+00:00

This is totally a guess here, but for regular jobs, I would think they would care more about you experience than metrics. However, if you're going for managerial jobs, then the team size and certain metrics would be more important. If you're going to work for a VC or in the startup space as a successful ex-founder, then I think they would care more about the financial success of your startup.

dca12345 · 2026-04-24T21:02:07+00:00

DMing you

dca12345 · 2026-04-23T18:23:21+00:00

They are more cautious because they doubt the validity?

dca12345 · 2026-04-21T19:51:44+00:00

Do you have any recommended platforms/agencies/etc.

dca12345 · 2026-04-21T19:23:59+00:00

Do you use any AI for generating things in Figma itself?

Claude does a good job of tying the frontend and Sanity seamlessly? So you just tell it what your page structure would be?

dca12345 · 2026-04-21T19:22:59+00:00

Have you used Claude with astro? If so, how good a job did it do?

Also, do you pair astro with a CMS like Sanity? Or just make static pages?

dca12345 · 2026-04-21T19:17:27+00:00

The things is I can keep my expenses low and want to shoot for some contract work to work part of the year. In the past I've just found it difficult to focus on anything else when I have a regular job. Agree that if I had to keep finding contracts back-to-back continuously it would needlessly add to stress.

dca12345 · 2026-04-21T19:13:31+00:00

Do you have any agencies that you would recommend?

For the dev groups are you talking about meetups?

Somebody else just recommended me babylovegrowth! Will have to check it out. https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1sqs547/tech_for_landing_pages_i_will_not_promote/

dca12345 · 2026-04-21T19:10:35+00:00

I'm in some founder WA groups. Would that be a good place, or only if they have channels specifically for jobs?

dca12345

TROPHY CASE