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🤝Building a home for the High Growth Tech Founder Community - Joe Speiser, Co-Founder of Hampton

Who are the leading VC Fund/Syndicate GP’s and how do they think about allocating capital via Funds, SPV’s and the like?

Today, we are excited to present an awesome interview with someone who has started over 5 companies and is currently building one of the fastest growing tech founder communities. He also spent time on the investor side as both an angel investor and a syndicate lead. We'll hear about some of his entrepreneurial journey, early wins, big implosions and more!

The objective of this interview is to showcase many of the leading VC fund and syndicate GPs and provide them with an opportunity to delve deeper into their identities and investment philosophies.

Let’s share more about this week's guest…

GP Profile:

Our GP Spotlight this week is Joe Speiser, a 6x entrepreneur and co-founder of Hampton, a private network for High Growth Founders.

Joe co-founded Epic Advertising, a performance based ad network that did $200MM/yr (Sold to Private Equity for over $100m), then Founded PetFlow, which scaled to $65MM in <2 years. PetFlow is an online auto-delivery pet food service, which Joe ended up selling to Nuts.com. As a side project, PetFlow spun out a blog called LittleThings, a viral website that scaled to $65MM in <3 years, and was one of the most shared websites on the web (100m+ users a month). Before co-founding Hampton with Sam Parr, Joe was buying and selling Saas co’s (like Brax.io, Mailtag.io and Winback).

For context, we have done multiple deals with Joe (& his partner, Sam) via their syndicate, Hampton VC. Not only do they have great deal flow but they are some of the most desired syndicates by founders I’ve come across in my experience.

Check out our interview with Joe below:

1. How did you get into entrepreneurship?

Was lucky to see my father build a company from scratch and always just assumed that was the way.

2. What was the highest high of your career as an entrepreneur?

Selling my ad-tech company (Epic Advertising) to a PE firm @ 24 yrs old for nine-figures (Last Money In: yes, that’s $100m+).

3. Any other notable wins worth sharing?

Raising a $20m Series A from Jeremy Liew (on Midas list multiple times) @ Lightspeed for my subscription ecom startup (back in 2010 before they were all the rage).

4. What has been the biggest failure in your entrepreneurial journey?

Watching all our revenue (and company) disappear overnight after Facebook cut off our reach... (Last Money In: this was LittleThings).

5. How did you and Sam get into the syndicate world?

We were both seeing crazy strong deal flow, and wanted to share it with our close friends.

6. How did you and Sam meet originally?

Sam used his cold email tactics to get a meeting with me and then convinced me to angel invest in the Hustle.

7. How was/is the experience of running SPVs on a deal by deal basis?

I loved it. AngelList made it so damn easy to handle the back office, which meant you get to spend all your time talking to Founders everyday and hearing their story and vision?

8. Is there any company in your Hampton syndicate or angel investing portfolio that you're most excited about? How did you initially meet them and what excites you about it?

Ha, asking me to pick favorites. That’s like asking which of your children you like better. =) I am currently loving Deep Sentinel, they offer 24/7 active surveillance of my home cameras (think proactive vs reactive monitoring), it’s a huge level up from the standard nest/ring offering.

9. As an angel investor/syndicate lead, what types of founders/companies do you look to invest in?

Ones who are humble but have confidence. They have to be able to inspire, and have strong recruiting abilities. I’ve missed too many investments where I thought the market size was too small, so now it’s more about the jockey than the horse.

10. What led you and Sam to start Hampton?

We both have very strong private Founder groups that helped guide us through the ups and downs of our lives. The vision was to be able to offer that same type of network to any tech Founder looking for a little extra help and support.

11. Hampton is about 1 year in, what excites you most about the opportunity ahead or what has taken place in the past year?

Significantly increasing our investment in in-person events. Getting our members out from behind their screens, and experiencing adventures, retreats and meetups together.

12. Any cool Hampton-related stories you want to share?

This is the first time I’ve purposely throttled the growth of my startup. Normally, with all my previous companies, you scale up as fast as you can and ride that growth train. Hampton is different. Since it’s people, not software, the worst thing you can do is grow too fast. There is a fine line between running a community and a network. Intimacy between members is earned, and delicate. You grow too fast, that balance gets violated and then decay of the community sets in. This is the single most important thing Sam and I stress about on a daily basis. How to protect this incredible community at all costs.

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Sydecar is a frictionless deal execution platform for emerging venture investors. We make it easy for anyone to launch SPVs and funds in minutes, with automated banking, compliance, contracts, tax, and reporting so that customers can focus on making deals and building relationships.

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✍️ Written by Alex and Zachary