Antler opening our third US office in San Francisco

Evolution of our Product in the US

With residency programs in 26 cities around the world, we are proud of the scale we have achieved with over $1B AUM and over 1500 portfolio companies worldwide. In the US, we've now successfully run over 27 residencies in New York, Austin, and Boulder, and we are now excited to share that we are officially opening up Antler San Francisco.

One of the questions we've had for a long time is why we waited so long to officially open a location in the Bay Area, and not just externally, we've had tough discussions internally about this topic as well. It is after all the most important ecosystem in all of venture.  

The answer is simple: respect and discipline.

We have an incredible amount of respect for the Bay Area venture ecosystem.  The multiple generations of legendary founders, investors and LPs who built the world’s cradle of innovation.  We do not take lightly entering this ecosystem and out of respect and deference, wanted to ensure we had a product we are truly proud of, and that we believe brings true value to the ecosystem.

The second we will call discipline.  We could have easily subscribed to the “move fast and break things” mentality and just charged into SF guns blazing and figured out who we are and what we have to offer on the fly, but we wanted to take a disciplined and measured approach.  There is still a tremendous amount we are going to learn by operating in SF, but we feel like we have a strong product, and a strong understanding of who we are to ground our decisions and our operations. 

So who are we and what is our product?  This is a question I think is still quite opaque to the outside world. Given the considerable global footprint of Antler, it is sometimes hard to articulate our business in just one sentence, so let me take this opportunity to share how we think about who we are and what we have to offer. 

First, we are an inception stage VC fund - not an accelerator, not an incubator.  We are a VC fund and we operate like a VC fund. 

We are stage focused and sector agnostic. Ultimately we believe the driving force behind incredible companies are incredible Founders, and that great companies can and will inevitably be built in all sectors.  Our focus is on finding Founders at the inception stage. This means they are still figuring out who they are, what they are building, who their customers are, what their team looks like. All of the hard, non-linear problems that companies have to solve early on.

We provide three things for Founders at this stage: Capital, Community and Culture.

Capital

Most people are aware of the unique “residency” structure that Antler offers Founders. Come in and work with us for 6 weeks and we will make a decision whether to provide funding.  We have seen this create a totally new way for us to work with Founders at the inception stage vs. traditional venture. Spending 6 weeks in the trenches with a Founder allows us to build incredible conviction about them as humans, and ultimately to invest in their company before they have the progress and metrics you would traditionally need for a pre-seed round.  

By focusing on underwriting the Founders, we can invest pre-product, pre-revenue, and oftentimes hand Founders a term sheet before they have even incorporated.  This allows us to fill the missing gap of funding that is traditionally filled by a messy, informal “friends and family” round. 

Second, and in my opinion, more important, spending 6 weeks together lets Founders get to know us as long term partners in their company. If all goes to plan, your earliest investors are going to be part of your journey for a decade plus.  We think it is incredibly important for Founders to feel confident they want us on their team before accepting our money, and our residency allows Founders to build this conviction.

To be specific here, when we choose to invest in a team we offer $500,000 up to $1,500,000 through pre-seed and seed rounds in funding and like to own a target of 8-12% of the companies we back through their seed round. We also have the capability through our Elevate fund to lead and participate in Series A through C rounds.

Community

Starting a company is one of the hardest things someone can do. Spending the first 6-12 months of that incredible pursuit alone at home, or locked in a WeWork aquarium office makes an already hard undertaking arbitrarily more difficult. What we offer Founders is a place to launch your company surrounded by other people who are doing hard things.  We have seen over the years the incredible effect this has on Founders success.  

Shared aspiration, a community built around trying to solve the world’s hardest problems. We genuinely believe this increases everyone’s chances of success.  

We extend this sense of community beyond just our residency and offer free office space for all of our portfolio companies to stay “on-campus” with us as they launch and grow, even further adding to the diversity and energy in the Antler offices. 

Culture

One of the things we learned early on in the US market is the best Founders don’t need to be taught things. They don’t need seminars, they don’t need modules or curriculum, they just need support building the right focus and culture into their startup early on. The culture of an effective fundraise, the culture of meeting and closing customers, the culture of hiring talented people, and sometimes just building the culture of being there to talk about what’s not going well.  

Our team prioritizes building deep relationships with the teams we invest in and catering to each team based on what they need at that time. Sometimes this is helping them build out their investor list and making introductions for their Seed or Series A. Sometimes it’s joining a customer call to show support and help craft the sales narrative. Sometimes it's just late night whiteboard sessions lending our experience to solve a tricky problem. Our culture pillar can be many things for the many needs of our companies, but what it is not is a boilerplate “best-practices” that we force feed to everyone.

How do we know these pillars are helping Antler companies succeed? Well, there are three things we measure closely. First is that consistently 65% of Antler portfolio companies in the US raise additional capital at higher valuations after Antler. Second, these rounds are often led by some of the best seed investors in the world. Third is for the last 2 years we have put up 80+ NPS from founders who have joined our residencies. The ultimate success of Antler’s model will be that our winning companies become massive successes, and that will come with time, but for now we are incredibly proud of the product we are bringing to the market.

Building the Right Team

One of the most important aspects of us expanding our presence to the Bay Area was finding the right team to help us do it.  A number of our existing team members have already re-located to San Francisco and bring with them years of experience and institutional knowledge, but we knew it was equally important to have someone from the SF ecosystem to lead our efforts. 

We are happy to announce after a long search we have found that person in Bob Rosin, who has officially joined Antler to not only launch our SF office, but to help Antler across the US and globally continue to get better every single day. Bob will be joined by our Partner Ryan Sommerville who has been with Antler US since day one, and Rio Hodges who was recently promoted to Associate Partner and relocated to SF to further support our efforts.

Bob is a seasoned founder, operator, and investor. Taking three startups from zero to one, Bob understands the hard work, conviction, and personal sacrifices involved in building a company and has the skills to identify great founders and mentor them along their journey. After his third startup was acquired by Skype, Bob proved himself as a world class operator on the leadership teams at Skype, LinkedIn, and Stripe. And Bob is a proven investor into multiple unicorn companies and understands the venture ecosystem from both sides of the table.

More important than his accomplishments and accolades, Bob embodies the culture that we hold so dear at Antler. He is incredibly hard-working and capable, but blends that with a palpable sense of humility, patience and thoughtfulness that has been so critical in getting us to where we are today.

“It’s an incredible privilege to join the Antler team and to help open the Antler residency program in San Francisco,” said Bob. “I’m thrilled for the opportunity to work with world-class founders from inception stage, and to build Antler’s presence in the Silicon Valley ecosystem.”

We are incredibly excited about Bob joining the team and look forward to him and our SF team building our third location in the US and 26th location globally. We very much expect SF to be the most important and impactful location of our global footprint and are confident we have the right leadership team in place to make that a reality.

Looking Forward

What’s next?  Well, now we get to work.  Applications for our Fall residency in San Francisco, Austin and New York City are now opening and we look forward to welcoming our next batch of incredible Founders. Mostly from here we will go heads down and focus on delivering an incredible experience and product to our Founders, bringing high quality deal flow to downstream investors, and creating benchmark beating returns for our LPs.

The next time you hear from us will be once we've put in the work and have clear results to share with the world. This evokes one of the principles we have followed since day one building out our US presence - “show, don’t tell”. So from here our focus will be showing the ecosystem who we are.