Earnest Capital

We believe that there is another way to build companies besides the venture capital rollercoaster. Earnest Capital began as "funding for bootstrappers" which we now call capital + community + mentorship for entrepreneurs building calm companies. 

Team has invested in 40+ profit-focused software startups across two funds since 2019.
167% total portfolio value increase since launching Fund I in 2019.
Created novel, innovative, founder-aligned SEAL (shared earnings agreement) investment structure.
Several portfolio co's sharing profits already + 2 exits (Makerpad to Zapier; EnjoyHQ to UserZoom).
Launching $10M Subscription Fund III in July; on track to outperform original fund expectations.
Created Trailhead initiative to make access to funding more equitable for founders.
Opportunity to get a slice of carried interest from current and future funds managed by Earnest Capital.

Our goal is to generate returns that are competitive with top tier early stage venture firms with two notable differences:

• Less concentration of returns and thus less overall risk. Diversification is the only free lunch in investing and our strategy is to hit a wide variety of “single, doubles, and triples” with the types of companies we back versus having all our returns concentrated in “mostly strike-outs and one home run” (apologies to the non-US crowd for the baseball analogies).
• Faster timeline to liquidity. Early stage venture investing usually means locking up your capital for nearly a decade until a multi-billion-dollar exit or IPO. We target a much faster time to seeing realized returns in our portfolio. Our initial, somewhat conservative, model expected the bulk of returns to be in years 4-7 of a fund, but from our earlier funds we are seeing an even faster timeline with Shared Earnings and exits within 2 years.

Tyler Tringas, General Partner and Founder
Creator of Shared Earnings Agreement (SEAL). Former B2B SaaS founder. Head of Energy Economics, Bloomberg LP.

Najva Sol, Head of Product & Marketing
Former Head of Community at Quartz Media, VP of Marketing at Spankchain, and Digital Director at A Practical Wedding. Creator of "Branding for Bootstrappers" workshop + Mastermind Sprint.

Sibi Murugesan, Chief of Staff & Head of Platform
Worked with 100s of founders through Earnest Capital, Product Hunt, Startup Weekend by TechStars, gener8tor, Co-Lab, and Junior Achievement. Cofounder of @AppleBananaUX.