Founder Friendly Forms
What is a founder friendly application?
Let’s start with the problem: for entrepreneurs, between applying to accelerators and future investors, reporting to current investors, and more, everybody wants data from entrepreneurs and it takes a ton of time and effort to answer everyone.
This status quo is very extractive. Entrepreneurs are expected to answer the same questions dozens of times, and in nearly every case they get nothing out of it. In the impact space, for instance, there are constant demands to report on impact metrics as an alumni of different programs, and as a portfolio company of various investors. In each case, the entrepreneur satisfies the needs of their investor, or the accelerator program, but derives no value, only lost time.
Abaca seeks to change that. It’s time to be respectful of entrepreneurs’ time and be founder friendly with the way we ask for and gather data. Abaca seeks to provide value to the entrepreneur for every piece of information they submit while minimizing the burden of submitting that information in the first place.
On Abaca, we help companies grow and scale their business. The more entrepreneurs tell us about their business, the more we help them to plan their next steps, prepare to communicate and connect with investors, and find helpful resources.
So to answer the question, what is a founder friendly application? Our guiding light for designing applications is will this help the entrepreneur or just consume their time? Founder friendly applications maximize the value the entrepreneur gets out of completing it and minimizes the time needed to complete it.
How it works:
A Standardized Question Library
The first way Abaca protects founders is by making sure they don’t have to reenter the same information over and over again. Abaca hosts a carefully curated question library, currently standing at over 100 questions, that covers all the most common and important questions that investors and entrepreneur support organizations ask. It also includes a variety of industry and region specific questions to satisfy a broad spectrum of needs.
All organizations using Abaca for entrepreneur applications are committed to a founder friendly data collection process built on this standardized question library. Believe us, we know the temptation to want to write your own questions! It always feels like there’s some nuance the question is missing, or it’s not quite how you would word it. But, there’s a cost to this perfectionism, and it’s a burden to the entrepreneur. When our wording preferences (and sometimes let’s admit, our egos) get in the way of using shared questions, entrepreneurs are the ones forced to spend time answering the same information again but with a slightly different twist.
By curating a collection of standardized questions Abaca protects entrepreneurs from having to answer negligibly different questions.
For instance, fundamentally, there is no difference between questions:
“Tell us about the problem your company is solving.” and “What challenge or problem is your company working on?”
We need to let go of our need for control and do what’s best for the entrepreneur. Organizations using Abaca for applications commit to using questions from the question library and working with the Abaca team to add new questions to address topics that are not yet covered and can be used by all members.
Company Questions vs. Team Member Questions
Most questions asked on Abaca are about the company. Abaca can now also ask questions where answers are specific to each team member. This includes basic information such as name, title, email, and relevant work experience. It also includes sensitive information such as gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, etc. This information is only utilized in an aggregate way and is not shared with anyone on Abaca. Support organizations turn to Abaca to help monitor the inclusiveness of their pipelines and selection processes. By requesting this information from founders we are able to give Supporters an anonymized and aggregated view of the diversity of each step of their selection process. We will be announcing more on this diversity and inclusion project in the near future.
Question Types
Abaca supports the following question types:
- Free Response
- E.g. “Describe your product or service.”
- Integer
- E.g. “How many full-time team members do you have?”
- Currency
- E.g. “How much revenue have you earned to date?”
- Currency range
- E.g. “How much are you looking to raise?” Answer: Between $500,000 to $750,000
- Single Select
- E.g. “Which of these best describes your business model?” Options: B2C, B2B, B2B2C, B2G
- Multi Select
- E.g. “Which of these are an important part of your product or service?” Options: Software, Hardware/Physical Goods, Services
- Date
- E.g. “When was your company founded?”
At present, Abaca cannot offer other question types like data tables, file uploads, and social media profiles. If you’d like to vote for or suggest a new question type please submit feedback here.
Matching Considerations
All company questions (except free response) are also used to match entrepreneurs with the resources and investors they need to grow. This is a core part of delivering value to entrepreneurs for every question they answer. The matching algorithm achieves this by asking investors and support organizations a mirror question to each asked of entrepreneurs.
Note: Team member specific questions (those questions that are asked of each individual team member) on demographics such as gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are not shared or utilized for matching purposes. In many cases there will be a similar question asked of the company, such as “do any of your founding team identify as women?”. These questions are used for matching, but always have a “prefer not to answer” option.
For instance, if an entrepreneur is asked:
“How much capital have you raised to date?”Answer: Currency e.g. $75,000
Supporters on Abaca are asked:
“How much capital do you want the company to have raised?” Answer: Currency range e.g. $50,000 to $150,000
It’s important to note that for some questions this impacts how we can ask the question. Most importantly, we do not want to inadvertently make discrimination easier. Abaca is here to help expand access to capital and we have a number of investors that are specifically looking for women founders. Subsequently we have a carefully designed question in the library to ascertain gender identity on the founding team. For matching questions we very deliberately do not ask:
How do you identify:
- Woman
- Man
- Non-binary
Because the mirror image of this question would look like:
Which founders are you looking to invest in?
- Women
- Men
- Non-binary
Clearly, this would enable investors to screen for only male founders, which we absolutely do not want to facilitate. As a result we instead ask the following:
Entrepreneur: “Are any of your founders women?” and “Are any of your founders non-binary? Options: Yes, No.
Investors: “Are you specifically looking to invest in women founders?” Options: Yes, No.
Here a negative response does not limit the investor to only male entrepreneurs. Instead it simply does not give special preference to female founders.
The impact in the end is that Abaca collects the same information you would expect, however, we may structure and word the question differently than you’re accustomed to. Rest assured that every question in the library has been carefully crafted to capture useful information while providing the best outcome for founders.
Note: For team member specific questions that are not used for matching and not shared with Supporters, we do ask demographic questions more directly such as:
How would you describe your gender identity?
- Woman
- Man
- Non-binary
- Unsure
- Prefer not to say
The Question Library
Questions in the library are largely categorized around Village Capital’s venture investment level framework. The categories are as follows: general, revenue, team, problem, value proposition, product, market, business model, scale and investor exit.