Investing

We are entrepreneurs, investors (GPs), and limited partners (LPs). This allows us to help startups across a wide swath of market segments, knowing the best relationship with your startup might be to enthusiastically introduce you to one of our VC partners, help through a advisor or consulting relationship, or invest.

Three principles guide our direct investments:

  1. Quality over quantity

  2. Invest in founders we’d want to work for

  3. Our expertise and experience are more valuable than our money

Our involvement with startups can be characterized as early and active. We focus on Pre-Seed and Seed investments. We rarely invest "naked" money into a startup; our investments come with the commitment and desire to actively engage with you. You select KVP because of our experience and expertise; our battle scars. Hopefully we can impart some of our wisdom and experience, so you don’t make the same mistakes we made as entrepreneurs. When you make mistakes, they should be novel and game changing :)

Advising

Klein Venture Partners advises a small group of startups beyond those we invest in. Startups often ask us to advise them before they have institutional capital or when they are beyond our investment phase or round economics. We only advise on:

  • Raising Capital

    • We uniquely understand how to position startups to VCs, having been successful entrepreneurs, invested in over eighty startups ourselves, and reviewing more than five hundred startup pitches each year. We’ve seen the best and worst pitches and helped many of our portfolio companies go from Pre-Seed through multiple rounds of funding to successful exits.

  • Product Management

    • We have deep experience and expertise in the Product Management lifecycle from ideation through determining Market Requirements (MRD), Product Requirements (PRD), and being the voice of the customer throughout the development cycle. The knowledge comes with templates, real world examples, and the experience of building some of Silicon Valley’s most iconic products.

  • Engineering

    • We started as engineers who became engineering leaders and then entrepreneurs. We still prototype and build products at our workbenches. The lab in the background of our Zoom calls is not a canned photo :) We help startups build and scale engineering teams, especially those involving hardware.

We've navigated our own startups through this process, shipped world class consumer products through Fortune 500 companies, and helped our portfolio startups do the same thing. Our commitment as adviser is one we take seriously, and the time commitment we make means we only do this for a very limited set of startups.

Consulting

Every once and awhile we fall deeply in love with a product, a team, or a vision where investing or advising might not be possible or can’t provide enough bandwidth to help that startup be as successful as we both know it can be. If the startup feels the same way, we’ll find a way to work together through consulting. When we do this, we’re doing it at the expense of our own ideation and prototyping work, so we’re conscience of the commitment we are making.