At Trellis Ventures, we believe that our unfair advantage comes from the strong fit between our strengths and opportunities, our principled approach to building companies, and ultimately: our people.
Here's how we see each of these factors playing out.
💪 Strengths
- We are Tech Forward Builders - Studio’s co-founders are 10X engineers with a strong track record as leaders, so we’re well equipped to build in-house solutions and product teams.
- We are Fast Executors - Proven ability to simplify, urgently decide, and opt for well-tested technology to speed up development iterations, which in turn speeds up our learning cycles.
- We are Independently Bootstrapped - We have complete autonomy and power to do what’s right for the business over a time horizon of our choosing, enabling us to be more closely aligned with the incentives of our co-founders.
🎯 Opportunities
- Dominated by Legacy Tech - Outdated practices, high complexity, or technologically dated software is the norm there.
- Slow to Change - Due to regulatory factors, dominant traditional incumbents, or high fragmentation in the market that makes broad changes slow or unlikely.
- Underserved - Largely ignored by major investors, VCs, and Venture Studios who are typically on the lookout for unicorns rather than profitable medium-sized businesses.
Principled Approach
🏗️ Building Value
Our products will deliver direct value to a given customer from launch day, and from that immediately start generating revenue. We avoid building products with deferred value delivery, uncertain monetization paths, or unclear business plans.
🎍 Renovation > Innovation
We’ll build modern software products to compete with outdated products in the given markets we enter, and as a result get market share by meeting a known and well understood need. We avoid being first to market, or building products for unproven markets or hyped tech trends.
🤝 Equals in Partnership
We’ll partner closely with industry experts as co-founders of the companies we build, pairing their deep insights with our tech-forward capabilities. We avoid entering markets without partners that give us unique insights and a material distribution advantage.
This principled approach reduces our time to revenue, lowers our execution risk, and promotes cohesion withing our portfolio company teams.
People
🌱 Culture
We set out to create an organic, casual, and equitable culture that guarantees our people are both empowered and well incentivized to deliver. We believe that will make us an extremely attractive place for employees to build their careers and co-founders to build their companies.
💚 Co-founders
Our biggest people asset are our co-founders. Because of their unique positions in their industries, they bring complimentary insights as well as a community network to enable efficient distribution. With them, we are better equipped than other startups in a given space.
🌍 Global Talent
Finally, we have an outstanding global network of engineers, product managers, designers, marketers, and business operators that we will draw upon to grow our studio with truly cream-of-the-crop talent, making up highly trusted and integrated product development teams.