Things to know about Beta Boom
We believe that a great partnership starts with trust, and trust starts with good communication, so we try to be as real and candid as we can.
Below are common answers to FAQs (frequently asked questions) about Beta Boom.
What we invest in
We more often invest in companies with some revenue and revenue growth, but we do sometimes invest in companies without any revenue or user traction.
There are many factors that influence our investment decisions, and while traction is important, we also put a lot of emphasis on the founders’ backgrounds, their passion for the problem, the level of insight into their consumers, the market, etc.
If in doubt, apply. You can always re-apply, and we like to keep track of startups to see how they grow.
We do not usually invest in startups headquartered outside the United States at this time, although that is likely to change in 2025.
We do not invest in startups headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
There are tons of funds that love to invest in Silicon Valley startups, but that’s not what we look for.
We do invest in startups based in Sacramento, the Central Valley, SoCal and anywhere else in the United States.
We do invest in founders that went to Ivy League universities, Stanford, MIT and other top schools, but the majority of founders have not graduated from these top-tier universities.
We value founders’ passion, tenacity, and execution much more than their diploma.
Yes! Some of the most successful founders like Melanie Perkins and Tope Awotona were non-technical.
We’re not scared to back founders like you, so long as you are passionate about the problem that you’re solving and know your customer better than anyone else on this planet.
Yes! Tons of research suggest that single-founders are more successful than multi-founder teams.
We’re not afraid to back you and have many companies led by single founders in our portfolio.
We back founders from all walks of life, and many of them are women or BIPOC. However, we don’t have a specific diversity mandate.
Since our beginning in 2017, we have backed tenacious, passionate founders who don’t fit the Silicon Valley stereotype, and that includes folks from all kinds of backgrounds.
If ever in doubt, please apply. It takes only 3 minutes, and at least you will be on our radar.
Having said that, we try to be very transparent about our investment criteria, which you can read in full HERE.
How we invest
Yes. We’re happy to be the first check in or the only check into your round.
We’re conviction investors and don’t really care if you have a lead or not.
Once we invest, we make introductions and are happy to share with other investors why we have conviction in you and your company.
Beta Boom is mostly a pre-seed fund, but we do sometimes participate in smaller Seed rounds.
Usually, we won’t participate in pre-seed rounds in excess of $2 million or valuations or valuation caps in excess of $10 million.
For Seed rounds, we can go up to $3 million rounds at valuations of up to $15 million.
Our average check size for a pre-seed round is about $300K with a range from $250-500K. For Seed rounds, our investment size would be slightly larger.
First, it’s important to know that we evaluate investment opportunities over dozens of dimensions, so there is no magic bullet.
Second, most of the companies that do not make it past our initial review fail to show obvious product differentiation. We recommend spending a lot of time carefully defining how your product is uniquely valuable.
Third, we prioritize getting to know founders who have shown grit, passion for the problem they are solving, and exceptional insight into the lives and needs of their users or customers.
Finally, we get very excited when founders can prove to us that they have built something that users or customers really love, or better yet, can’t live without.
Step 1: Intake Form
We ask that all founders fill out our short, 3-minute intake form, which will officially put your company in our pipeline for review.
Everyone who applies for investment can expect to hear back from our team in less than two weeks.
If you do not submit your information via our intake form, your company won’t be considered for investment.
Step 2: Initial Meeting
We ask a select group of companies to meet with our founders for an hour-long discussion about your business.
During this time, we like to have a dialog with the founders to dive deeper into areas of their business that are of interest to our investment team.
Before the meeting, you will be asked to complete a longer questionnaire, so we can get the basic information about your company and focus on more detailed facets of your business.
Our commitment to you is to respect you and your time by being prepared and asking thoughtful questions.
We do not do the typical pitch meetings that you might be used to where an investor will show up unprepared, know nothing about your business, and check our email while you talk.
We usually get back to founders within two weeks of our meeting to let them know that we’d like to learn more or to respectfully pass on investing.
Step 3: Data Room
After our initial meeting, we ask some companies to provide a data room, if they have one. If companies don’t already have a data room, we might ask for specific documents such as historical financials, capitalization table, IP assignments, etc. If you don’t know what these things mean, don’t worry. We’ll explain.
It usually takes us about a week to review your data room and get back to you.
Step 4: Deep-Dive Meetings
After we review your data room and do additional research on your space, we will often have another two or three conversations to get to know you and your co-founders and to ask further questions about various aspects of your business. We will likely dive deeper into your product development, marketing, and sales.
Step 5: Final Diligence
If we’re leaning toward an investment at this point, we’ll do our final diligence, which usually involves a more thorough legal review, reference checks, etc.
Final diligence usually takes about two weeks.
No, you don’t need a referral to pitch Beta Boom. Anyone can get on our radar for investment, and we don’t do pitch meetings (see above).
In fact, any startup that comes to us through a referral starts at a disadvantage because we give such startups a penalty to compensate for association bias in our decision-making process.
From an initial meeting, our team tries to get to a “yes” within 4-6 weeks, depending on scheduling availability. Sometimes this timeline can get extended due to delays in scheduling meetings or because our small team simply falls behind.
We try to tell founders “no” as soon as we can, so we don’t waste your time if we’re not the right fit.
Most importantly, we try really, really hard to give everyone either a “yes” or a “no” as soon as we can.