For Investors

What I Learned From Funding 55 Companies in 16 Months With $10M

By Boris Silver • Dec 5, 2013

Reposted from personal blog

We launched FundersClub on July 25, 2012 as part of the Y Combinator Summer 2012 batch. Since then, I have co-led the Investment Committee, which does the first pass curation of companies for our platform, with my co-founder Alex. In the ~16 months from launch, our community of over 7,400 investors has invested ~$10M via FundersClub to fund 55 companies from both here in the US (Silicon Valley to Indianapolis to New York) and beyond in the Philippines, India, Chile, Brazil, and Canada (yes that’s a foreign country.)

Our investments have spanned a wide range of industries, from ecommerce (Teespring) to bitcoin payments (Coinbase) to recruiting (Talentbin) to enterprise security (Meldium) to consumer hardware (Boosted Boards) and many more. It’s been an amazing ride so far with many lessons learned. The following is a list of some of the lessons I learned that I hope can be helpful to founders (there are as always exceptions to the lessons below).

I plan to save lessons learned for investors for a different day. Short version below followed by longer version.