In this episode, Hall welcomes Samara Gordon of Hyperplane Venture Capital. Hyperplane Venture Capital is an investment firm focused on exceptional founders building machine intelligence and data companies. They partner with exceptional founders who are leveraging machine intelligence, sensor technology, and cloud computing to solve the world’s hardest problems uncovering the underlying structure for each problem and creating solutions at the nexus of perception, communication, intelligence, and insight.

Before joining Hyperplane, Samara worked in Strategy Consulting in New York and Product Management for a venture-backed fin-tech startup in Boston. Samara was Founder and CEO of The Faster Times, a predictive analytics startup that built betting markets for global CPGs.

In this episode Hall and Samara speak about what she finds most exciting at the moment in fin-tech as well as her advice to both investors and startups in the space. For investors she advises that if you are going to invest regularly, try to commit to a strategy around a check and round size and sort of the target ownership that you're going after. For startups, Samara says it's never too early to think about the business fundamentals and the go-to-market strategy and sales, even in the early days.

I’ve talked with numerous startups who has a founder that no longer works with the company and has taken their equity with them.

One solution to this problem is called Founder Vesting

Many startups choose to structure the founder shares as restricted stock.

This reserves some shares which must be “earned back” by the founder over time.  The longer the vesting schedule the more shares the founder earns.  The corporation holds the restricted shares until vested.

Vesting founder’s shares incentivizes them to stay with the company and remain engaged with the business. 

If the founder leaves early, then the unvested shares could be used to compensate their replacement.

Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.

Let’s go startup something today!