Investible: Using F4S to identify the world's best founders

Goals:

Help investors achieve a superior financial return by using evidence-based insights to identify and invest in high-potential tech startup founders.

Who they are:

Investible is a leading seed investment group that delivers superior performance by pioneering novel ways to discover, invest in and support the world’s best early-stage technology companies.

Formally founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs-turned-angel investors Creel Price and Trevor Folsom, Investible’s novel approach uses data to distil the complexity of early-stage investment into a comprehensive and consistent process that de-risks portfolios.

Combined with a unique structure that enables its network of investors to co-invest alongside its Funds, Investible is achieving returns in the top quartile of early-stage investors globally. With offices in Australia and Singapore, its mission is to elevate seed investment on a global scale and enable high-potential founders to realise their full potential.

Industry: VC, Entrepreneurial development
Website: www.investible.com
‍Employees: 11-20

The challenge:

By its very nature, early stage venture capital is risky. Globally, 95% of startups fail (CB insights), and with little data to assess the level of risk for the investment, it’s exceptionally difficult to predict which founders will succeed, especially early on in the founder’s journey.

With its belief that the founder is the most important factor in determining whether a startup will thrive or fail, Investible sought a solution that could enable its investment team to make more data-informed decisions and support it in building a more consistent and effective due diligence process.

The solution:

‍With benchmarking analytics based on over 20 years of research, F4S identifies an individual’s or team’s critical blind spots and predicts the likelihood of success by comparing them to the entrepreneurial success factor model.

F4S provides Investible with insights on the potential of the founder and/or founding team and recommendations on how the founders can overcome blind spots and achieve greater venture success.

The result:

F4S plays a key role in Invsetible’s due diligence process and programs, providing useful insights that can be used to create more ‘investible’ businesses and improve investor decision-making.

With F4S, Investible has built a strong portfolio of more than 90 investments, including Canva and Ipsy—both unicorn companies valued over $1B.

The future:

Having now used F4S for more than five years, Investible has gained unique insights into the qualities and attributes that best correlate with venture success at the very beginning of a startup’s journey.

Now, it is using those insights to develop new strategies and solutions to better support founders in achieving their full potential and delivering strong results for investors.

Why F4S:

Collects and builds consistent founder data points to compare and research over time. Investible now has over 5 years of F4S data on its startup founders’ growth and how they make decisions.
Helps portfolio founders and program participants successfully grow and scale.
Assists Investible in developing success factor models. For example, Investible can now identify commonalities between founders who have successfully exited, fundraised later rounds or failed.
The founders of Investible previously used F4S as co-founders, and through coaching over 10 years, achieved an exit of $109M in 2008.