Why we are changing our name to Simplexity
sim-plex-i-ty
definition
- the state of or quality of being when complexity is reduced to its most important and immediate components.
- the application of collaborative science, startup support services, and battle-tested wisdom to help founders succeed.
As a play of words on the old saying about pilots, “there are old founders and there are bold folders, but there are no old, bold founders”. We beg to differ.
We aren’t quite young and we still love the boldness and audacity of startups. And today we are pleased to announce our name change to Simplexity.
Around a year ago, Entry Ventures and Team Group joined forces. We’ve worked hard to learn and build on the wisdom of our Chairman Michael Slater’s pioneering philosophies developed at Entry Ventures on how to invest and profoundly help startups. And we’ve continued to broaden and improve Team Group’s array of startup support services.
Along the way, we had the epiphany that the common element in how we help startups (both from our fund and from our service platform) is reducing the never-ending bombardment of complexity to help founders focus on what’s truly important. It is from this deep conviction that our new brand Simplexity is born.
While the brand Simplexity is new; we aren’t. We’ve been active founders, investors, and venture catalysts for a long time. We’ve formed dozens of companies; we know the triumph of startup victories (strong exits, going public) and we know the pains of startup life (the frustrations, the honorable but painful exits). We’ve been through many booms and bubbles. At our core, we believe in teams and our passion is to help other founders.
We help founders through two Simplexity business units: Simplexity Ventures is a venture studio and fund where we make investments in early stage software companies — often times, we essentially become co-founders. And Simplexity Services is a service organization dedicated to helping founders sleep at night by handling all of their finance, accounting and administrative matters. Simplexity Services empowers founders to spend their energies on building their teams, creating products, delighting customers and optimizing their business models.
Our approach at Simplexity Ventures is different. We aren’t a traditional venture capital fund. We are four founders (fortified by our Chairman and advisory Board) who become extended co-founders in the company’s we back. We work to be force multipliers and we back idea “napkin stage” companies and we also back companies with product-market fit that are almost ready for venture scale. We have developed our own proprietary methods to unlock potential including WeQ™, a collaborative science and assessment tool that we use to bring out the best of teams. In a world where larger venture firms value traction and proven metrics before investing– we help idea-stage founders to launch and get out of the gate. For founders who have achieved product-market fit, we invest our time and money to optimize their strategy and teams so that they can attract the major follow-on capital necessary for scale.
In the past year, we’ve made a bunch of investments. Notably, we’ve been very proud to help the team at Agentology in their quest to build the best lead engagement in the world and we’re honored to help co-found OmniSlash to create the best eSports media platform on the internet.
Simplexity Services now helps over one hundred founding teams. We handle the full-range of startup support services (including handling all of the accounting, cash management, investor reporting, and HR compliance). We aren’t a “fractional CFO” platform as we’ve found that most fractional CFO services are too expensive and fail to delight both the entrepreneurs and their investors. Instead, we lead with an experienced team of Controllers and a bench of qualified bookkeepers, payroll specialists, and HR personnel. We aren’t just accountants who look in the rearview mirror; our entire team is dedicated to looking ahead, and to provide the insights and reports to founders that help them make better decisions. We love to support founders starting when they raise angel and friends & family funding — and we support companies well into their post Series B. When our clients are ready, we help them to build their own internal finance teams.
Simplexity is headquartered in San Diego and we just opened our first office in San Francisco. Together with offices in South Africa and New York (through our partnership with our friends at Gust), we are fortunate to meet talented entrepreneurs and co-investors in key startup ecosystems.
Confucius once said, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” We are very excited about the years ahead and to helping the next generation of founders to reduce the complexities of building their startups into winning organizations and investments.
Please note our new website is www.simplexity.co
