Why Did We Launch Studios?

Founders who are looking for more than just a VC fund have come to the right place. At Golden Section, we’re not only interested in offering funding and leaving you to navigate the turbulent waters of the B2B SaaS world. We’re interested in becoming growth partners on your journey toward building a successful startup and achieving a meaningful exit.   

Toward that end, we launched Golden Section Studios, an investment strategy we are deploying in which we partner with founders who understand and align with our unique point of view to support them on their journey. 

As your growth partners, we offer: 

• Expert support: We have been working with B2B SaaS startups for more than a decade, and our experience has yielded a proven methodology and playbooks that we share with our portfolio companies. The goal is to guide intentional building, share knowledge, and encourage balance within founders and their startups. 
• Guided growth: Our years of experience in both founding companies and investing have yielded many successes and mistakes. While we’re certainly proud of our successes, we haven’t shied away from our mistakes either. In fact, we’ve used them to create playbooks, which include timelines and milestones for startups to guide them toward timely and successful exits. 
• SaaS development: We believe it’s crucial to build products right the first time and have a global team of experts to help startups do so in a capital efficient way. Leveraging our product development resources, leading to less time spent hiring and building a development team yourself. This means you, the founder, are able to spend more time on strategy, marketing, and sales. 
• Seed funding: We offer as much as $750K+ to help founders launch their products and potentially start to generate revenue in less than a year. Our strategy focuses on marketing and sales optimization. 

Who we are and what we stand for 

Golden Section Studios is part of our larger approach to investing in B2B SaaS startups, which is vastly different from most other VC firms out there. 

Our approach to VC funding is based on 7 pillars: 

• Less capital: The average company takes $8M of equity to produce $5M in ARR, while on average our portfolio companies take $1M equity and turn it into $5M in ARR. 
• Meaningful exit: We can help your company achieve a meaningulf exit, which we define at the average of which SaaS companies tend to sell at between $5-15M in ARR for $30-100M valuations. 
• Sell earlier: We don’t believe in scaling forever. We help companies scale to $5M ARR in about three years so they can sell earlier. 
• Series B should not be necessary: We can provide all the capital you need to get to an exit. We do this by investing in pre-seed to Series A, and by offering our portfolio companies access to venture debt through our lending arm. 
• Build value by avoiding mistakes: We’ve seen many mistakes and have documented them in a list and in our playbooks — so we know what not to do and are happy to share it with you. 
• Build right the first time: 80% of the companies we see in our due diligence process have intractable tech problems, which is why we invest early in building products correctly the first time. 
• Value creation vs. valuation chasing: We believe that value is created through revenue growth, not through chasing a high valuation. 

Growth Through Partnership 

Our approach to VC funding can only work when there is a full and transparent partnership between our team and the founders we work with. We recognize that every founder has their own unique vision, and we appreciate and defer to their expertise in their fields.  

Whereas other VCs prefer to take over the entire endeavor, we understand that the best way to build products in an efficient, scalable manner is to work together with founders. So we keep the doors between us wide open, creating a foundation of mutual trust and reciprocity.  

At the same time, we expect the same of founders when it comes to our expertise in building products in an efficient and scalable way. We expect the doors of communication to always remain open between us, as we are both working toward the same goal: your success!  

Of course, building a B2B SaaS company from the ground up is not a task for the faint of heart. In most cases, it’s shocking if everything goes entirely according to plan! But that’s where the experience, grit, and empathy of a seasoned VC team come in.  

With our experience, we’re not rattled by the unexpected. 

With our grit, we’re able to create and implement solutions.  

With our empathy, we can guide founders through the hurdles so they can come out sane and with a great product. 

The journey may be rough, but founders who are backed by Golden Section have their eyes on the prize at all times: a meaningful exit and a balanced journey.