They're all good questions.

This is unlikely, as nothing is too early for us. Most of the companies we have invested in had nothing more than an idea and a team. We aren’t afraid of leading with conviction and betting on people as they figure things out. Once you have the conviction in the problem or opportunity, don’t wait to reach out to us - if you wait, it might be too late for us.

Nope. If you are fortunate enough to have friends, family or people you’ve come to know that want to back you, that’s wonderful. This isn’t a problem for us - about 40% of the companies we funded had capital from other sources.  We love when other investors are equally excited by what you are doing.

If you are still in the process of ideation and customer validation (regardless of product or revenue), we would love to hear from you. We love helping teams identify the biggest market opportunity & customers willing to pay for your solution. If you have moved beyond this stage and have multiple customers willing to pay you, it’s likely you are beyond our stage of investing. You can read more about what we invest in here. 

Every investor has their sweet spot of investing. We prefer investing when you are getting started, without waiting for a product or customers. If you are a kickass team, have unique perspectives on the problem or opportunity, have done some customer discovery or other research to understand the ecosystem you are going into, and you are convinced that you are working on a big opportunity, we would love to meet you.

We are sector agnostic. We like to see the world from the entrepreneurs’ eyes and follow your vision on the largest opportunities. Like most VCs, we look to invest in companies that can grow at “venture scale” in large market opportunities. This includes tech (software and hardware), life sciences, and materials.

We invest in exceptional people, seriously. At the time of most of our investments, the only thing that exists is a founding team determined to solve a need and build their vision. It’s normal for us to invest before there is a product or customer/sales metrics. We look for teams with unique insights and hypotheses about the problems they are trying to solve, teams that have an understanding of market inflection points, and think strategically about how to prove willingness to pay and customer pain points in a capital efficient way.

Big markets follow big problems. We look for bold ideas, not incremental improvements to the status quo. We understand this is a long journey and many things will change so there must be something foundationally new in the idea, approach, or technology.

We look for teams of individuals that are aware of and confident in their superpowers. Great teams are also self-aware on their blind spots and areas where they will need to fill gaps.

You won’t be the first one. Zigs & zags on business model, pivots on industry focus or product, are common. We are very used to this and bet on people that aren’t afraid of learning and iterating. Our role is to provide our perspective, if asked, and if the founders decide to change course, be supportive and resourceful to make the adjustment as less painful as possible.

We invest throughout the U.S. In addition to Silicon Valley, we have portfolio companies based in Brooklyn, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlanta and Toronto, with team members in Denver, Texas, Florida, Hong Kong, Quebec City, and Kenya.  We are based in Silicon Valley, New York and Florida and can bring those resources (access to capital, talent, customers) to our portfolio companies wherever they are based. It's very common for us to invest outside Silicon Valley, but less common for us to make investments in businesses whose customers are outside of the U.S.

We are conviction-driven, selective, and diligent investors. This means our process is thoughtful. We value founders’ time, conduct research between meetings, and maintain transparency on where we are. The duration of the process truly depends on how fast we can get to a strong conviction either to invest or pass. If we conclude that we are not a fit for an investment, we communicate it quickly and with honest feedback. If an investment would make mutual sense, we make an offer and work with the founders to close the investment most efficiently. You can learn more about our process here.

Our entire is involved in the investment process and information gathering. We don’t have a title-driven process, and every investment team member has a significant voice throughout the investment process. Given our different strengths and relationships, this ensures the entire team supports the team in their early company building.

The easiest way to get in touch with our team is to fill out this form. It takes less than 5 minutes, and we see everything that comes through. We guarantee you will receive a response after the team has reviewed the info. This process ensures that no one individual on our team is a bottleneck in getting back to you.

We try our best to make ourselves approachable and reachable via cold emails (thoughtful cold emails are effective), LinkedIn requests, and at the events we are attending or speaking at. Talking to entrepreneurs is the best part of our day, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

We prefer to lead Pre-Seed rounds in capital-efficient founders. These rounds are typically under $1M (occasionally larger in specific verticals). This is usually the capital needed to test critical assumptions and hypotheses, and prepare the company for a larger seed round. We have seen this work out to the founder’s advantage to minimize dilution, stay focused, and build a habit of frugality. Companies can opportunistically raise additional capital over time (at different valuation caps) as the business progresses, before raising a formal Seed round.

Typically our first check at the pre-seed stage is between $300K-$500K, but we’ve gone higher or lower in some cases. As companies scale, we may raise subsequent vehicles to support their growth.

We work closely with our portfolio companies and ask them to consider us an extension of their team even in the toughest parts of the journey. For this reason, with a small team, high conviction, and a hands-on approach, we selectively invest in 15-18 companies a year.

We are conviction-driven investors, and, therefore, like to start with meaningful ownership. We like to own enough of the company to ensure we can dedicate meaningful time and resources to helping you build. We typically target 8-12% ownership, and we work with founders to structure the round in a way that is best for the company (for example, making room for investors that founders really want in the round).

We are happy to work with other funds and investors to help immigrants succeed faster. That said we are also very comfortable leading and have led in 75%+ of our investments. Most importantly, we are comfortable in investing in the best entrepreneurs before others reach their own conviction.

Our goal is to make the investment documentation as simple as possible and we prefer to use a Standard SAFE (post-money) document with a side letter for our investment. We aren’t interested in going back and forth with attorneys, especially at this stage.

That said, we have made investments with SAFEs, Convertible Notes, priced rounds and some things in between. We believe it is important for founders and investors to understand the nuances of the various investment instruments. This allows us to be helpful to our founders as subsequent rounds come together with downstream investors. Our experience from raising money for companies we worked at before and for Unshackled’s portfolio provides us critical knowledge to help founder’s understand cap table dynamics as they raise more money.

Yes. We are the only VC with immigration attorneys as partners. We take care of everything immigration and employment for our portfolio founders, including visas and green cards. The exact solution varies for each individual, and our team work for portfolio founders to make sure immigration doesn’t slow them down, while maintaining complete compliance with U.S. immigration laws.

Immigration is personal to us since we started Unshackled with our experiences building companies while on a visa. We understand the critical role immigration plays in people’s lives, and are here to make it as less painful as it can be.  The objective is to allow you to innovate and build what you want to build - whether that means you do that as our employee or of your own startup.

We have made over 230 immigration filings across 13 different categories of work-authorization to ensure immigrants can start a company while on a visa, with a 100% success rate. Our immigration team also stays constantly engaged with portfolio founders throughout the journey, as your life and work situation changes.

Yes, as part of our immigration support, we help the founding team secure their green card without legal cost. We have done this through various pathways, including extraordinary petitions like the EB-1. Our team works with portfolio founders to identify the fastest paths to visa independence, evaluate eligibility in different ways, and guide what needs to be done to become eligible if there are gaps in eligibility.

We welcome all immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. to reach out to us, irrespective of where their journey started. Our portfolio founders were born in 30+ countries (across the 6 inhabited continents). Our portfolio truly respects the global diversity of ethnicities and cultures.

Our current focus is to work with founders who are already in the U.S. Occasionally, we partner with founders who may be outside the U.S. but are in the process of moving here

Immigration is part of our core values and a part of our investment. We will never provide immigration services for a cash fee. Immigration support is a way for us to make our portfolio more valuable and support great entrepreneurs, by solving a major time-sink in the early days of a company.

Yes, we’d love to learn more. As you may have read, we are on a mission to create 100,000 American jobs. If we believe our involvement in your company helps us achieve that, we would love to get to know you.

Our level of involvement is as much as the team requests. We know founders' time is valuable, and we trust our founders will request our support when needed. We support our founders actively in fundraising, hiring, and strategic planning for their next key milestones, both in product and business.

Most importantly, we are comfortable and willing to be wartime investors. In other words, we commit more time to portfolio companies when things are not going well, and have found that our time to be more effective than our dollars at those times.

Yes. We work hard to build a strong ecosystem of founders, angels, VCs, and advisors who spend time with our founders when they reach key milestones and are ready to fundraise. Our teams have raised over $700M post our investment.

We provide a variety of resources available to help you along the way. From pitch deck creation, founder-to-founder advice, and constant feedback from industry experts, we give you the time.

We think we can be valuable in a lot of ways here, but have noticed the biggest values are in sharing hiring opportunities with our networks and using our experiences to help close critical hires at your business. As previous executives at a high-profile tech company (backed by a16z, First Round, Floodgate, etc.), the team at Unshackled has a strong network of talent in a variety of industries that trust their judgement and deal sourcing. This has been meaningful in identifying key hires and advisors that help immigrant founded companies succeed faster.

We have started companies as immigrants and built a venture fund for immigrants. We try to be the best source of friends and family capital immigrant founded teams can have. We also are the only fund (that we know of) that provides full immigration support for our founding teams. As part of our investment, our team will help secure work-authorization all the way to your green card, at no extra time or financial cost to portfolio founders. This is because we have brought on an immigration partner into our General Partnership.

Additionally, our thesis is founded on identifying people with greatest upside. We put in the effort to discover the talent outside of systemic biases & immigration limitations and provide them with a stable platform to unleash their full potential. This can be summarized by our conviction, composure and community.

Conviction. Our willingness to go early, make our own decisions, and amplify an immigrant founder’s time provides a unique access point. We have led 90% of the initial investments, being the first money in 70% of them. In fact, we are more comfortable leading than following and don’t worry about social signals. This isn’t helpful for immigrants.

Community. The difference between success and failure is who you know, when. This is even more valuable for immigrants who may have limited reach within the mainstream startup ecosystem. Solving this paradox has been one of our core pillars from the start. We host events regularly, have created a founder series workshop (i.e. small think tanks with founders of AppDynamics and ThredUp), make 1-on-1 connections and can feature you in our newsletter and our annual meetings.  We put the effort in to identify the right matches and think this level of customer service is what makes funds like Andreessen Horowitz stand out.

Composure. We know building a company is hard. We know it's even harder for minorities. Recognizing that, we stay patient and composed when our portfolio companies are going through adversity.

At our stage, we are investing in people, not businesses. Founders need time to ‘zig and zag’ and are already under significant pressure. Adding any more pressure is detrimental. As we learned to be composed, and support portfolio founders more with our time when they need it, we have seen their adversity muscles shine while their economic upside grew with limited financial downside.

No, we do not require or ask for a board seat. We believe our relationship with our founders is more valuable at this stage than a formal board relationship. That said, we have accepted board seats at the request of portfolio founders.

Of course! This is a significant part of our community element, with all team members supporting our Head of Community & Culture. We have an active Slack channel, host events regularly, and set up a founder series to enable organic relationships and knowledge flow.

Depends. As companies scale, we may reserve capital or raise additional investment vehicles to support them as they grow from the initial check. Our decision to follow-on our investment is at the discretion of the partners and is based on our experience and relationship working together up to that point.

Our office is located in Sunnyvale, CA

You can check Unshackled's current openings here, plus our portfolio jobs here.

Our fund is backed by some of the most influential institutional investors & families in the country. Our limited partners are a core part of our work and a great resource to access networks. Many of our limited partners are also active investors in our companies directly.