🤩 Issue 1. Welcome to The Community Fund’s newsletter!
A monthly newsletter for community-driven founders, funders, and friends.
The Community Fund is an early-stage fund that invests in community-driven companies. We believe companies with community at the core will become unicorns and produce outsized returns. Learn more about us on our site here.
Welcome to The Community Fund’s newsletter! It's been a busy first 6 months (happy half birthday to us!) and we want to tell you all about it. But before we do, there's a couple of goodies we think you'll be interested in.
Resources | Check out this +200 Community-Driven Founder Resources page
Community Club | We welcome all to the community builders community
Community Investor Slack | If you’re an active community-driven investor and want to join our investor community Slack, let us know
Now that we have that out of the way, let's pull the TCF curtain back and invite you into our 6-month journey.
Team
From a 450+ applicant pool, we landed on an investment partner team of 13 operator-investors back in October 2020
Jesse and I welcomed Aaron Samuels (Blavity), Cheryl Campos (Republic), Calanthia Mei (Fast), Dave Salvant (Squire), Elias Torres (Drift), Hassan Bhatti (Snowflake), Kara Weber (Brud), Melissa Moore (All Raise), Mike Swift (MLH), Sonia Nagar (Angel), and Songe LaRon (Squire)
Investment partners
77% of our investment partners are people of color
46% of our investment partners are female
Our investment partners represent the West, Mid-West, and Eastern regions of North America
Representing 8 sectors: Finance/Fintech (4), SaaS (2), Connection & Belonging (2), Future of Work (1), Human Capital (1), Martech (1), AI (1), Enterprise Software (1)
Investments
Had our first 4 valuation increases
Our 15 investments span across 9 cities: NYC (3), SF (3), LA (2), Franklin (1), Dubai (1), Karachi (1), Austin (1), Nashville (1), and Miami (1)
Representing 5 sectors: Connection & Belonging (5), Creators Economy (4), Fintech (3), Health & Wellness (2), Future of work (2)
Founders
80% of our new investments were in companies founded by people of color
53% of our new investments were in female founders
Plan to make 30-33 investments in 2021
Community
Launched @thecommunityvc on Twitter which passed 3.2K followers
Published 11 blog posts on Medium
Launched our newsletter
Held 5 Clubhouse events
Back-office
Wrote-up the TCF playbook
Featured in Crunchbase, Techcrunch, Forbes, and more
Generated LP interest for TCF Fund II
None of this could have been possible without the community. So, thank you!