Yes! Plug In South LA definitely invests in companies. We pride ourselves on providing flexible capital. We understand that in today’s world early-stage companies capitalize themselves on different schedules with a variety of mechanisms and we adapt on a company-by-company basis. PISLA invests along the entire early-stage spectrum from company formation to Series A. We primarily lead or co-lead pre-Seed and Seed rounds with checks ranging anywhere from 750k to 2.5M+.
No. The earlier we can speak, the better. We’re looking to partner with the best founders long-term.
No. Plug In South LA only invests in companies that we can work with directly. We believe that our structured approach to education, coaching, and strategic involvement significantly increase the value of our member companies and we don’t believe in partnering any other way than being all-in.
I’m not a founder, should I apply?
No. While we appreciate your interest, the decision to take on new investments and join Plug In South LA rests with founders. Only founders can attend regular office hours, founder dinners, and partner sessions. If you’d like to get involved with the community, you should instead subscribe to event updates and the newsletter.
We don’t have funding to date, should we apply?
Yes. Our primary concern is that our members have visibility into some initial product/market fit and are ready to start thinking about how to scale their business. This might include having built a strong early dev community, a popular and related open source project, or having landed a handful of PoC/Design Partners/Customers.
Our product hasn’t launched to general availability, should we apply?
Yes. It’s never too early to begin discussions. We’ve worked with a number of pre-product teams, but we do look for teams with a product vision and some experience in their product category or with their target audience. We love working with teams to help them connect the dots towards commercial scaling.
Our product is open-source, should we apply?
Yes. If you run an open-source project and you either have a path to commercialization, or you’ve already found a way to monetize it as a business, we want to talk to you. In the past, we’ve worked with Netlify, Apollo, LightStep, Serverless, CitusData, and others.
We’ve already raised our Series A, should we apply?
Yes. About a third of our member companies join at or after their Series A.
I’m not in SF, should we apply?
Yes. Plug In South LA has worked remotely with founders in Tel Aviv, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Taipei, New York, LA, Minneapolis and we’ve worked with completely distributed teams. We do suggest that you visit SF occasionally to network with customers and investors, but we recommend that even if you aren’t joining Plug In South LA. Developer-first software is a global phenomenon, but the density of potential customers, partners, and investors in the Bay Area isn’t available anywhere else. We schedule regular bi-weekly check-in calls and progress updates, weekly online events, and we can offer you office hours via video calls.
After we’ve introduced you to the entire Partnership and team, we’ll announce your membership to the entire community. You can expect to participate in 1-2 activities per week during the duration of the program.
Personalized Plan & Partner Office Hours: During your first month, we’ll meet with you to determine our joint priorities, help build these priorities, and determine an initial plan of action until you’ve found some repeatability in your funnel. After that you’ll meet with Partners every two weeks for both progress updates and operational advice. These sessions are meant to ensure you’re executing against the plan and adapting it as necessary. Your progress is benchmarked against alumni and other companies we track in the space.
Advisor Office Hours: We continually design 1:1 office hours and advisory sessions based on your needs as identified by Plug In South LA partners and staff. Advisor office hours happen weekly. Example areas of focus include early hiring, sales compensation, sales strategy and operations, lead generation, pricing, onboarding, and enterprise product development. Remember – these hours are a chance for you to work directly with a domain expert to ensure you’re executing well.
Speaker Series: These monthly presentations are streamed online live and offer founders a chance to hear from experts in sales, marketing and product design. A complete catalogue of Speaker Series videos lives in our library. While you can watch these videos after the event, founders are encouraged to attend live to ask questions in real-time. Speakers are often invited back for 1:1 advisor office sessions in which founders can receive more in-depth and tailored advice.
Founder Group Sessions: These calls feature an advisor presentation and Q&A alongside 3 other Plug In South LA founders. These sessions give you a chance to candidly share your progress and compare notes with other founders at a similar stage. Example discussion topics include product marketing, retention strategies, engineering management, PR and analyst relations, open source strategy and content marketing.
Alumni Hours: These intimate 3-4-person calls are a chance for founders to hear stories, ideas, and learnings from celebrated alumni. We curate these events to ensure that active founders are able to build relationships
Community Happy Hours: These events help community members connect and unwind at the end of the week. While these are casual social events, we often find founders meet new community members that can introduce them to potential customers, hires, and new go-to-market tactics.
DevGuild: DevGuild is a community and twice-yearly conference featuring the CEOs, founders, and top execs at leading developer, infrastructure, enterprise, and B2B SaaS companies defining the future of software development. In the past we’ve held conferences specifically on evangelism, product marketing, pricing, enterprise-readiness, content, demand gen and developer product. Attendance is capped at 200 people and the outcome of these conferences beyond immediate learnings, have included new hires, customers, and users for our member cos.
Broader Community: Because Plug In South LA’s team, advisors, investors and founders have deep domain expertise in developer and enterprise go-to-market, our broader community represents an amazing place to learn and a great network to help you scale. Through our Slack sub-communities in marketing, sales and product, our DevCoJobs job listing site, and through direct introductions and connections made at events — founders have met some of their best allies, customers, employees, and friends.
Even though we accept members on a rolling basis, we limit the number of members in-program to around 8 at any given time in order to ensure every company has a curated experience with as much support as you need. While factory-style accelerators can work in search of initial product/market fit and funding, we believe that go-to-market fit and scaling your company into hyper-growth requires dedicated, detail-oriented attention. Since the program is batch-less, we still connect you with later-stage alumni as many of them can also offer support and advice around some of your core challenges.
Plug In South LA alumni remain an active and incredibly important part of our community. We’ll continue to check-in periodically and work with you on your strategy and fundraising through your Series B and beyond if you need it. Many of our late-stage founders and graduates become mentors to newer Plug In South LA members and continue to attend founder events.
Plug In South LA invests along the entire early-stage spectrum from company formation to Series A. We primarily lead or co-lead pre-Seed and Seed rounds with checks ranging anywhere from 750k to 2.5M+.
Yes, for the right company we will.
Not concurrently. We won’t accept multiple competitive companies at roughly the same stage as this creates conflicts of interest and prevents us from being fully aligned with any one set of founders. As our alumni network grows; however, it’s inevitable that there may be some overlap with a prior member company that has long since scaled into their Series A, B, and beyond. In these cases, while we’ll need to understand what new approach or market enables you to compete with said incumbent, we definitely want to talk and are happy to work with you if it’s compelling.
