Every marketplace eventually asks for a piece of what it helps create. Accelerators take six to ten percent. Platforms take a cut of revenue. Matchmakers charge a success fee. We take none of it, and people always assume there is a catch.
There is no catch. There is a reason.
Equity changes the relationship
The moment we own a slice, every conversation becomes a negotiation about that slice. Who decides when to raise? Who approves a hire? Who has to sign off before a founder can move?
Founders stop calling us when something goes wrong. We stop being a friend outside the outcome and become a party inside it, with our own incentives. That is a worse position for everybody involved.
There is also an arithmetic problem. Early equity is nearly impossible to value. Five percent of a company that does not exist yet buys us very little, and it costs a founder something real: the freedom to make fast, clean decisions about their own company.
What we take instead
Three things, and all of them are worth more to us than a slice.
Reputation. If a match works, the people in it tell other people. That has been our only affordable marketing, and it compounds.
The studio. Some of the people who come for free help later decide they would rather pay for a team. That is the business. The community is not a funnel trick, but it is genuinely how clients find us.
Proximity to real problems. We get to watch companies form and stay close to the things that are actually hard for them. That is better research than any survey we could run.
What this costs us
Free matching is expensive to run well, and we are not pretending otherwise. Every introduction takes human judgement, and human judgement does not scale.
So we keep the community deliberately small and we say no a lot. If we cannot help, we say so quickly instead of stringing somebody along for a month.
The rule in one line
We are paid for work, not for hope.
When we build, you pay for the build. When we introduce, we take nothing, because an introduction is not something you should have to mortgage your company for.
Some of the people we help will make us nothing at all. That is fine. The ones that go well tend to come back.
Related topics