Archimedes Labs is a Palo Alto based incubator

We exist to enable ideas to be born, and prosper. Since our founding in 2005 and the formation of TechCrunch the same year, to our most recent initiatives, we have strived to provide...
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From a practical point of view we do 3 things.



Incubate

We incubate ideas developed in-house. In this case we begin owning 100% of the equity, pay all the bills, and as we build a team we allocate equity to the team. Once outside investors are invited to participate we and the team are diluted. TechCrunch, edgeio, just.me 2014’s chat.center and Chance apps and ContextPlane are all examples of incubation.

Accelerate

We accelerate companies from pre-seed and seed stage to be fundable. Acceleration is our core. Today Downtown; Sunshine; Loop Survey; XTV; Kwicr and Tapfame are all accelerated companies we have worked with. M.dot (sold to GoDaddy) is another. Our model here includes investing cash, but beyond that our goal is to work very closely with the founding team to achieve milestones we set together. These may be product goals, operational goals or funding goals. In all cases our goal is to own at least 10% of the stock if the goals are achieved, and our work is to help achieve those goals. In other words our equity is greater than the amount our cash alone would buy.

From a practical point of view, when we invest cash at this stage it converts into the agreed ownership should the goals be achieved. Our cash alone is not enough for us to own the shares. We think this is a great tool for alignment of interests between archimedes and entrepreneurs. A typical acceleration partnership lasts several years and in that sense is quite different than the current 3 month “demo day” model.

Invest

We do investments at pre-seed and seed stage. We have done this with Quixey; Incident Technologies and Broomstick Productions. In this case our equity is equal to the price we pay as a % of the value of the company.

How to reach out to us.

We have no formal application procedure. You should be either referred by somebody we know or just send an executive summary of your idea to [email protected]. We will reach out to you if there is an interest.