Hi! I'm Sergio, one half of the Beta Boom founding team along with Kimmy Paluch. This is the story of how it all started. Hope you enjoy it!
Part 1: The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back
I still vividly remember sitting on our brown couch in Oakland, California on a windy fall evening in 2017 and reading the story about Juicero on TechCrunch.
I was disgusted.
For those of you that don’t know the Juicero story, it was a paragon of Silicon Valley excess and lemming-like group-think and underlined how completely out of touch Silicon Valley investors and innovators were.
Juicero was a “smart” internet-connected juicing maching for those urban elites that loathed having to put actual fruit in a juicing machine because it was too much work and too messy.
The hilarious thing about Juicero was that a human hand was better at squeezing juice out of the “convenient” fruit packets than the $400 dollar connected device. Once people figured out this inconvenient fact, the company crashed and burned.
Juicero - The straw the broke the camel's back
The frustrating part of the story was that Juicero raised more than $118 million from top Silicon Valley investors such as Google Ventures (now GV) and Kleiner Perkins.
And Juicero was just one example among countless others of useless innovations aimed at elite, very homogenous consumers. At the same time, other startups solving real problems for the other 99% of the U.S. population couldn’t raise a mere $100K from these same Silicon Valley investors.
The people I grew up with needed solutions to real, pressing problems, not AI-powered juicers or $800-dollar smart locks. They needed help solving basic problems such as finding work, learning new skills for better careers, managing their finances, and accessing healthcare and better education for their children.
It became clear to me that I no longer wanted to be a part of that world, spending my time building things for a tiny slice of the population.
I confessed my feelings to Kimmy, who was my wife and business partner for more than a decade. It turned out Kimmy felt exactly the same way.
Part 2: Beyond the Bubble
We knew technology could be a tool for solving real problems, not just convenient or trendy ones. But we felt stuck in a world that kept building the same things for the same people.
As soon as we started looking outside The Valley, we realized how naive and ill-informed we were. Amazing founders were building huge, impactful tech companies in every corner of the United States, from Milwaukee to Miami.
Not only that, the innovators with whom we were talking were much more diverse than the typical founders that we were seeing lauded in TechCrunch. The founders we were meeting outside the Valley were also very different from the ones we kept seeing covered in TechCrunch. More varied backgrounds, more varied paths to entrepreneurship. Many had never worked at a tech company. Many didn't go to the schools investors usually look for. They were solving real problems and building rapidly-growing companies, but they felt ignored by most investors.
However, over hundreds of conversations, we noticed that nearly everyone we spoke with lamented about their lack of access to funding (pretty obvious, especially in smaller tech hubs) as well as lack of access to operational expertise.
For example, a founder building a company in Kansas City does not have the same access to startup marketing and product expertise as someone who spent their career inside Silicon Valley tech companies.
That’s a huge problem because human capital is much more important for a startup’s success than money.
We realized we could solve both problems. We could bridge the access gaps to both capital and operational expertise.
What’s more, we were perfect for the part. We had spent more than a decade helping build product, engineering, and marketing teams for dozens of top startups and brands like Google and Bank of America.
Part 3: A Crazy Experiment
On MLK weekend in 2018, Kimmy and I decided to sell our house in Oakland, move to Salt Lake City, and launch Beta Boom.
We would back founders who didn't fit the usual VC mold. Founders building in places most investors weren't paying attention to. And we would work alongside them every day, as an extension of their team, to jump-start their growth and connect them to the operational expertise that they will need to be successful in the long term.
There have been some hard-earned lessons along the way, but we’ve grown and fine-tuned our model a lot. Overall, our original vision has been successful beyond our wildest dreams. And we’re just getting started.
Part 4: The Future
The founders building the next generation of companies are going to come from everywhere. Different cities, different backgrounds, different life experiences. That's already happening. The investment world just hasn't caught up yet.
Yet while the face of tech entrepreneurship is rapidly changing, the investment models and firms that back them have hardly evolved since the 1960s and even the late 1800s, when venture capital funded whaling expeditions in New England.
We believe the way investors find, evaluate, and support founders is overdue for a rethink because the next generation of innovators is unique.
Our goal is to find founders who wouldn't make it through a traditional VC filter, back them based on what they can do rather than who they know, and help them build companies that actually matter.
Let’s go!
– Sergio
P.s. Although the little spark of an idea started with me, the flame that has grown since is thanks to my #1 partner-in-crime, Kimmy. Thanks, partner, for letting me tag along on this crazy ride!