A message from LAUNCH founder, Jason Calacanis
Welcome founders, investors & curious others!
Our mission at LAUNCH is to support founders and inspire innovation.
We do this through a series of free events, podcasts, books, research products, and by investing millions of dollars a year into promising, early-stage startups.
To date, we’ve invested in over 150 startups, six of which have gone on to achieve valuations over a billion dollars: Uber, Thumbtack, Datastax, Wealthfront, Robinhood & Desktop Metal. We invest in 40 startups per year through a series of private funds, the LAUNCH Accelerator and our public angel syndicate. Our check sizes range from $25,000 to $1.5m.
All of our events are free to founders.
Our flagship event is the LAUNCH Festival, which is occurring in Sydney in 2019, and will return to the US in 2020. Startups including Fitbit, Yammer, Dropbox, Mint, Abra, CafeX, and Clicker all launched at our events. 15,000 people attend LAUNCH Festival in the United States, and 1,500 overseas will be attending our second LAUNCH Festival Sydney in June 2019.
LAUNCH Scale is a two day event in San Francisco designed to help founders scale their businesses. The next edition will take place in October 2019.
Founder University is an intimate, two day event for 60 founders who are in our “goldilocks zone” for investing. Our goldilocks zone is defined as startups that have launched their products and have some traction (just right!), but that are past the idea phase (too cold!) and before having closed their Series A investment (too hot!).
In the summer, we welcome fifty angel investors to Napa for our annual Angel Summit.
We produce a 2x weekly tech podcast, This Week in Startups, which has been running for 9 years with over 150,000 downloads per episode.
We produce a twice a day research product, LAUNCH Ticker, which concisely summarizes the days tech news for over 30,000 industry leaders. Our sister company, Inside.com, produces similar email newsletters for over 25 topics.
Our founder, Jason Calacanis, is author of the book ANGEL and a frequent contributor to CNBC.
We partner with organizations that share our passion for supporting founders including WSGR, Samsung, Sequoia Capital, Social Capital Partners, SeedInvest, IBM, Fenwick & West, Walker Corporate Law, WordPress, LinkedIn, NetSuite, and Squarespace.
You can follow us on twitter at @launch, @twistartups and @jason.
All the best,
Jason & the LAUNCH Team