Expedite Ventures Playbook

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We're Expedite Ventures. This is our playbook.
Who we are
Hello! We are Expedite Ventures.
We’re a Business Angel group of CTOs and CPOs. We’re all passionate founders ourselves - some of us are still running startups. We have decades of collective experience in building and scaling technology companies.
We started Expedite to give back and help a new generation of entrepreneurs starting sustainable tech businesses.
We offer a true hands-on mentoring approach, which we think is at least as important as capital. That's why we provide both - plus a perspective that typical business-oriented angels and most VCs simply can’t provide.
We especially encourage those who are already engineering today's technology to get into the drivers seat and start their own journey. We expedite their ventures in their early stages to become profitable and VC-ready.
This is our playbook. It details who we are, who we work with and who we invest in.
This book is an abbreviated encapsulation of our guiding principles and values. As we continue to grow, we hope that these principles will serve each new Angel joining our club and every founder we potentially invest in.
So if you are new to Expedite, welcome. Although the goals in this book are important, it’s the ideas, talent, network and energy of our Angels that will keep Expedite shining in the years ahead. Let’s help others building great things.
This book is a living document. We publish the latest version transparently on our website: https://expedite.ventures​
Our Investment Thesis
We believe in tech. Any founder or team that …
managed to build a first iteration of their product,
has first positive indicators for product/market fit, ideally the first users or customers
… is our ideal fit.
But don't sweat the details — we'd like to meet you. Show us what you are proud of and we will give you honest feedback.
We feel obliged to follow these rules, when making a business decision:
We invest in scalable product companies.
We invest where technology plays a central role.
We require a strong CTO/CPO as a core founder.
We look for ventures with a clear path towards profitability.
We prefer SaaS, Dev-, Productivity- and other tools that elevate technologies to create and transform.
We support open source and community driven projects – if we see a monetization concept.
We are not hype driven, but look for substance to build lasting, profitable companies.
What can you expect from us?
Time and expertise:
Our Angels are experienced founders, and we will pick together with you a mentoring Lead Angel.
Your Lead Angel will dedicate up to 10 hours a month of their time to help you. But only if you want to.
Of course, you'll have access to each of our members when specialised expertise from a certain Angel is required.
We usually invest in the range of €50k-€250k (exceptions may apply). We are also happy to help to introduce you to other Business Angels we trust.
We behave like co-founders, not investors. We have a hands-on approach to help whenever needed in the early stage of a start-up, helping you to avoid the pitfalls that we had to go through.
We help building profitable businesses.
We maintain an active communication with you, as often as you need and not more than you want.
We help you to get VC ready and give you with all the intros you need.
We provide a lean and founder-friendly legal setup for our investment.
How we do it
What makes an Expedite Angel?
We reserve Angel membership for experienced entrepreneurs who know what it means to be in the front-line and make decisions every day. Each one of us is willing and able to spend their time giving back to the community, share their success recipes, mentor our investments, open their personal network — and share our values.
In the end, we are makers, not managers. And we agree with Ferdinand Piëch: „Techniker können genauso gut rechnen wie Kaufleute. Und sie beherrschen die Technik. Umgekehrt geht das nicht.“ ("Technicians can calculate just as well as business people. And they are proficient in technology. The reverse is not true.")
Each of our members will take the role of a lead angel at Expedite for at least one of our ventures, making it „HER“ venture. Every mentoring Angel internally gets an additional amount of shares in her venture to reward the effort of helping with their experience. Furthermore, we expect each member to agree unanimously about the companies that we all decide to back.
How are we different than the others?
We see the current VC landscape as problematic, favouring second and third time founders while neglecting the necessary mentoring and nurturing to make sure new generations of first time founders can emerge.
Sometimes, great founders or great ideas are overlooked or do not receive the required attention, because they don‘t fit the „right profile", „aren't there yet“ or simply don’t have the right connections.
That‘s where we step in: We favour first-time founders, regardless of their gender or background.
As many VCs in Europe and Angels are being run by business people, they intrinsically tend to support e-commerce and service businesses. We find it problematic that tech founders don‘t get the necessary attention and understanding they deserve, because as we all know: „Software eats the world“. Therefore, our collective strictly invests solely in tech companies.
We intend be an important addition to the existing ecosystem to support people who wouldn't be heard otherwise. We work collaboratively with other angels who aim to grow technology startups.
(Smart) VCs are our friends to help our ventures grow a later stage. We embrace cooperation with them and nurture our VC relations all the time. We actively work with them and help nurture companies applying at a VC who are not VC-ready yet: we expedite them and bring them back into the deal flow of the VC world when it‘s the right time. VCs even often ask us to a joint board seat, help them portfolio management and tech due diligences to collectively help the ventures to grow further.
In the end, we want to fulfil the promise many Angels and VCs do (but don‘t keep): We don’t just commit money but we rather behave like a hands-on co-founder — to help on topics like company culture, product, tech, HR, legal setup, or strategic steps.
How to pitch us
When you decide to pitch us, keep in mind that all of us share the desire to help — but we‘re also busy people. That‘s what you can expect — and what we expect from you:
We are non-elitist, nerdy and approachable. Our door is open to everyone, but be sure to use our time wisely. You should come prepared as best as you can.
We promise you to answer you as soon as possible with a realistic timeline, when you can expect further feedback on your submission.
Your slide deck should be short. We like Guy Kawasaki‘s 10 Slides Template.
We strongly prefer your pitch deck as PDF, sent via e-mail to [email protected]
What we even like more than pitch decks are product demos. It doesn‘t matter how raw your prototype might be — we can’t wait to see it and understand how it‘s built.
We will only invest in people we like (and who like us).
If you‘re not yet pitch-ready and don't have a deck or a demo, don‘t worry. You can always talk to us at one of our community events and share your ideas. Prepare to be challenged.
We aim to be radically transparent: we promise to always give clear and brutal honest reasons, if we decide not to support your company. That's the least we can do and the least you deserve.
Investment process
Here's how we decide whether to invest or not:
After we have received your pitch deck and we're interested, we'll try to schedule a call with one or two Angels to get to know you for less than an hour. We would like to learn about your company in your own words and get to know the whole team.
If we believe we could be a good fit for you, we'll pick the best experts from our side who should talk to you in a next call. There we'll get way more into the details: We'd like to see source code, roadmaps, financial details, etc.
Additional calls might happen until both feel we've learnt enough about each other. If possible, we always appreciate a meeting in person over lunch or dinner.
If we finally see fit for both, we'll write an investment memo and present it to the whole team. If there are no vetos, we'll schedule a final call with most of our Angels, so everybody gets to know each other. After this call, we will do out final unanimous vote.
Then we're clear to invest and clarify the legal details (convertible, share deal, etc.)
Our values
We really dislike politics. We believe in honesty, loyalty, radical transparency, directness and open communications/feedback. By being open about as many things as possible and making information public, we can reduce the threshold to get in touch with us and make collaboration easier.
It won't work without collaboration, kindness and sharing — it's impossible to know everything. And we don't forget to say thank you as well as saying sorry. We discourage ego, but help others not to fail and rather enjoy other succeed.
For everybody we're involved with, we're — and that should go without saying — clear Anti Harassment and Discrimination policy against everybody — we believe in diversity. No matter the method of communication, it is expected that everyone will contribute to an inclusive and collaborative working environment and respect each other at all times. No form of sexual harassment, discrimination regarding Age, Disabilities, Race, Religious beliefs or Sexual orientation will be tolerated at anytime and will lead ultimately to a termination of this relationship (at all cost).
This document is © 2022 Expedite Ventures GmbH.
Last modified 12d ago
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Outline
Who we are
Our Investment Thesis
What can you expect from us?
How we do it
What makes an Expedite Angel?
How are we different than the others?
How to pitch us
Investment process
Our values