Founder Stories: Bolster, an On-Demand Executive Talent Network

Bolster Co-Founder and CEO Matt Blumberg shares his experience partnering with High Alpha to start the business.


Transcript
Bolster is a marketplace that connects executives with startups and scale ups. The problem we're solving for them is helping them very quickly and very efficiently and very inexpensively find great executive talent. And finally, there's an element to Bolster, which is serving VCs and serving investors, where we help them across their whole portfolio think about talent coaches, mentors, board members in service of all of their CEOs.

The foundation story or formation story of Bolster is an unusual one. I got together with Scott Dorsey at High Alpha and he told me about an idea that was coming out of the High Alpha Studio with Silicon Valley Bank as a corporate partner. That idea and our ideas fit very well together, and we had Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Costanova Venture Capital excited about backing our team. So we essentially did a pre-arranged, one-two punch. We got started with an unusually large financing and formation capital round, multiple business ideas that fit together and a very large founding team of eight.

I would describe High Alpha Studio services as a mix of back office and killer design and product work. The Product team was absolutely tremendous in giving us a world class identity, logo, marketing website and the application. All the setup of finance, accounting, benefits and payroll was turnkey. We didn't have to put a minute's thought into it, and that just allowed our team to focus on building a business. All of those things put together just let our team go a lot farther, a lot faster right out of the gate.

Venture firms add value in their own ways, but they very rarely add value by doing the hard work, the roll up your sleeves, nuts and bolts work that a Studio will do with a very early stage company. In terms of High Alpha versus other Studios, if you're in the B2B world in particularly the B2B SaaS world, there's just no one better.

I would say High Alpha is the secret weapon to getting your company launched very quickly and very well.