Six venture capital firms joined to launch Off The Record, a non-profit organization to provide a facilitated peer network for founders of venture-backed startups.
Founded by Laconia Capital, Nextview Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Differential Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Valuestream Ventures, the initiative recognizes the lack of resources for founders of seed and series A startups, particularly in building a strong peer support network.
Led by Chairman Jeffrey Silverman, also Managing Partner at Laconia Capital, and and Executive Director Joshua Kleyman, Off The Record organizes founders into pods with up to 10 similar entrepreneurs. Pods are designed to connect like-minded founders to provide support in both personal and professional aspects of running a high pressure, venture-backed startup company.
The program provides guidelines and loose oversight of each pod, but ultimately the founders are responsible for guiding the interactions to best fit their needs. In addition to the founder pods, the initiative provides entrepreneurs with speaking opportunities, customer and investor introductions, working groups to address industry issues, and workshops for their team members.
Off The Record has a deep network of corporations and executives who serve as advisors, customers, and partners for the founders, including Carta, Microsoft, Davis & Gilbert, WeWork, Cohn Reznick, Brex, and First Republic who provide generous resources and expertise to our community.
The program was originally launched in early 2019 and was only open to startup executives with investments from the founding venture capital funds. As of January 2020, the program has expanded to welcome the broader startup community and now counts over 100 participating founders and 60 partner venture capital funds, mainly in New York.
Membership for the platform is exclusively for founders and requires startups to be nominated by one of the 60 venture funds affiliated with the organization.
The organization is structured as a 501(c)6 non-profit, independent of the founding venture capital firms. This ensures the organization focuses exclusively on its core mission to support startup founders.
Off The Record currently operates in New York, and has plans to quickly expand to other leading startup cities.
FinSMEs
19/03/2020