Incubator.Fund is about to bring its first incubated startup to market. We are not offering investment opportunities at this time.
Incubator.Fund short-circuits the startup paradigm.
The initial poverty, lack of business knowledge, and high risk inherent in startups has kept many extremely capable people from ever becoming founders, and many viable companies from inception or success. Most people can not endure a year without salary while developing and raising funds for their company. This particularly hurts people with children or little savings. We wonder if, by correcting the problem that founders are subject to such instability, we could help remedy the dearth of female CEOs.
By eliminating the instability that founders are subject to, Incubator.Fund can utilize the people that others miss: We hire officers on salary, with health care and other benefits, and equip them with a working multi-company-shared back-office with all operational, legal, and personnel services; We build their business plan and raise their funding, and provide them with the advice of a stable of successful founders. If a founder would be a better CTO or Chief Product Officer, we provide a seasoned CEO.
By providing the founder with experienced staff and officers, and business coaching by experts and previous founders of similar businesses, we bootstrap the company without the typical period in which founders grope their way into an understanding of how their sort of business should operate. This is to the investor’s advantage, because the founders spend most of their time developing product, rather than filling all of the early roles in an underfunded business, from HR to Janitor.
What’s the catch? We retain a majority ownership of the companies we found. In contrast, founders who go through the conventional venture capital path can end up owning close to twice as much of their company. This is the price that the founder pays for drastically reduced risk and stress. And our founders still get a lot of their company. Founders will self-sort to either the conventional path or ours.
Because we own more of the companies we found, we can make a good return on outcomes that would be less satisfactory for a conventional venture capital company, or an accellerator like Y Combinator.
Our founder is also one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software. Thus, we pursue building commercial companies to monetize Open Source programs that are taking hold in business, by providing a proprietary addition or service related to the Open Source software. We also source company ideas from founders who come to us, and through “think tank” sessions in which we invite experts in an industry to speculate on the possibility of future developments, which we develop and pursue.
Incubator.Fund may achieve a social good by lowering economic barriers that keep certain classes of people from being business founders. This is inherent in the business plan and is consistent with the goal of producing income for our investors. Perhaps we can do well and do good.
Partners and Advisors
Bruce Perens, General Partner
Bruce Perens is a partner at OSS.Capital and advises the startups that fund has invested in. He was Senior Global Strategist for Linux and Open Source at HP, an early hire at Pixar, VP at Sourcelabs, and is a consultant to many companies. Mr. Perens is one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software. Besides being an investor, advisor, strategist, and corporate officer, he is highly qualified in software and electronic hardware design, including wireless. Wikipedia. IMDb. LinkedIn.
Information for Investors
Incubator Fund is not currently soliciting investment. When we do, we will do so under SEC Regulation D rule 506(c), which allows advertising, but requires verification that each investor passes the SEC rules for an accredited investor. Verification is by a third-party and we do not see your financial data.