TenNine Pro, Advisory as a service.

Quick links.

• TenNine Pro
• TenNine VC

Welcome!

I will write this part in the style of tennine.pro.

TenNine Pro is a dynamic community of Big Tech managers and executives, Fortune 500 strategists and operators, legislators and regulators, entrepreneurs and investors, mentors and board members. We are advisors, coaches and fractional managers in venture.

We deliver value in two models:

1. Advisory as a Service, where we advise startups on a flat rate, with no equity exchanged.
2. Tailored projects, where we engage our network’s intelligence on bespoke inquiries.

We work with:

• Founders and C-level teams in startups and scaleups.
• Family offices, Venture Capital and Private Equity funds, corporate venturing teams.
• Public and private institutions supporting the venture industry.

For more information, please keep reading, visit our website and write to us on [email protected].

Thank you for your reserved attention, it really is your most valuable asset as of late. Actually, it probably always was, right?

TenNine Pro. Why?

I’ll tell you a founder story. It starts with The Demand.

The Demand.

Being an entrepreneur, who grew into the investors’ pants directly from the founder's shorts, I feel intrinsically empathic to founders, (to a certain level of course). I usually reserve five to 10 minutes of a scheduled 45 minute pitch meeting for giving (khm, useful) feedback. I feel it's fair to offer value to the founders at that specific meeting, besides the usual back and forth dating with prospective investors. I know that a founder is grinding to improve any and every aspect of their business at each moment in time, simply because that is the name of the game which they play. Fundraising is, more often than not, additionally exhausting.

I also know how valuable it is to ponder around meaningful questions and receive feedback from people who I trust. And then, when I'm on the advice-giving side and I do offer feedback, I'll often get so immensely rewarded when I see that our chat might have helped them uncover something important, right then and there. They are building their whole lives into that venture, how great is it to help that team if we can? And that is why I say: You can’t have a more grateful customer than a founder. Many of my dear co-investors and advisors who I met share this opinion.

So I hypothesised: there is a sizeable need for streamlined advisory services in the startup world of all scales, which can be effectively monetised.?

Advisors already operate in the startup world, and usually take 0.1 to 1% of startup’s equity. But I'd like to propose another model. No responsible business gives up equity easily.

Alright, on the base of above, I assumed that we have The Demand.

But, do we have The Supply?

The Supply.

Back in summer 2022, when we were starting TenNine VC, we had many more hypotheses to validate. A few of them are (in their integral version):

• Our Stanford community connects global executives, spread across industries, markets, and jurisdictions, centred around the fascination of Silicon Valley. When engaged optimally, this presents an enormous potential in aggregating and directing expertise, for the sake of venture.
• Executive business graduates are in transformational phases of their professional lives. They are curious about new concepts.
• We can source critical knowledge and contacts across industries, markets and jurisdictions within our investment thesis, because we dip in the community of Stanford GSB graduates. This gives us a strong leverage in early stage investing.
• We invest in the EU, North America and Israel, and our community is spread globally. We can benefit from market arbitrage.
• Our community represents Big Tech, large industry, public institutions, financial centres, all major consultancies, regulating and legislative bodies, and the world’s largest network active in venture. Founders will want to attract their attention.

I know, this was about TenNine.VC and we are on the TenNine.Pro page now, but validating the former drove us to another hypothesis.?

In December 2022 we ran a survey within our investing community at Stanford. 94% of respondents answered with a Yes to our question “Would you consider advising, or otherwise engaging with startups and scaleups, and help advance the missions which are meaningful to you?”. We saw a similar hand raise around sharing knowledge in areas of one’s specialty, joining panels or publishing expert opinions and analyses curated by our community, or helping TenNine VC diligence and forward the companies we invest in.

So this hypothesis hit us unplanned. Our community is searching for opportunities to engage their skill, not only capital, beyond the stellar enterprises they bring vast experiences from.

We spoke to many in our community about the idea of connecting societal startup concepts with our invaluable network as active advisors, and streamlining the value exchange between. We got a "Yes" across the board, with additional input as smart as we hoped it to be.

And you already feel where I'm going with this.

There it was: The Supply.

In our case, the community of industry leading advisors across the world, looking for The Demand.

Reality check: I didn’t say anything new, right? BUUUT: advisors won’t work for free, and startups can’t afford them.

So, we designed The Plan.

We will continue on this in our next article.

To keep our posts readable ??.

Midjourney prompt for the banner.

Nope, we took this one from Notion and slightly edited it. Thank you Notion ?. Don't sue us.

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