“Investing early in marketplaces that build new economies.”
Yonder is a pre-seed marketplace fund focused on being the first institutional and most helpful check a marketplace founder ever receives.
<aside> 👷🏽♂️ Submit Your Company
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<aside> 👷🏽♂️ Become an LP
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<aside> 💸 Join Our Syndicate
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“Investing early in marketplaces that build new economies.”
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Yonder is looking to invest in the next generation of marketplaces that are combining marketplaces and software to change the way we buy and sell.
This is a unique model that we call the Marketplace+ model which has been proven to build outlier companies.
Stage: Pre-seed or earlier
Geography: Great companies anywhere that are a Delaware C Corp (rare exceptions).
Industry: Agnostic but prefer markets with underutilized goods or services.
Founder: Exceptional people that won’t quit.
Market: Opportunity exists in a blindspot with sneaky large TAM to create or capture.
Product: People are willing to pay for it or are transacting on it.
Other: Riding a cultural tailwind or zeitgeist.
Welcome to Yonder Ventures, built and managed by me, Colin Gardiner. I am an economist at heart but also a hopeless marketplace and startup geek who thinks about everything through an economics lens.
Yonder seeks to be the best-in-class early-traction marketplace venture fund. With 16+ years of operating and advising experience with marketplaces, Yonder is uniquely positioned to continue identifying breakout startups early and supporting them through their critical years of growth.
As a startup veteran, advisor, marketplace content creator, and 4x marketplace/platform operator (plus an insurtech), I am uniquely suited to do this. I have helped to build multiple $1B+ gross revenue marketplaces from the ground up, with the biggest, Outdoorsy, doing +$3B in gross revenue and platforms like Ancestry.com doing more than $1B. I have extensive fundraising experience, helping raise $200M+ across multiple companies and being an EIR at Techstars, a scout for Headline, and a syndicate lead for eight companies.
After building a unicorn at Outdoorsy, I devoted my time and energy to advising, consulting, and investing in marketplaces. I have worked with 30+ marketplaces and talked with hundreds. It was clear to me that there needed to be more great operator-produced content around building marketplaces and to plug that gap, I started posting daily on the topic. I created a newsletter, Take Rate, with 2K+ founders/investors as subscribers.
I am building Yonder Fund I to help founders with precisely the reason they hired me—my proven track record of efficiently growing and building marketplaces and fundraising for them. By investing early, I can dedicate significant time and effort to help the business grow while being able to help them fundraise more effectively by having skin in the game.
Experience:
Socials:
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Don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected]
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