Deal Abstract

Invest in Iris
Republic is a startup investing platform where you can invest as little as $10 in impactful startups

Mint.com for various financial brokerages that compiles a social network of all your friends public trades. Slick product, but can they build a solid business?

Financials (VRB)

Question Notes
1. Fundraising Target? $500000
2. Fundraised So Far? $46075
3. Pre-Money Valuation? $20000000
4. Previous Year's Annual Revenue $0
5. Previous Year's Annual Net Income (+ Profitable, - Burning Cash) ~$-23900
Source

The 6 Calacanis Characteristics ("Sow Passion, Not easy mediocrity", or S2 P6 N18)

Criteria Yes/No
1. A startup that is based in SV? False: Santa Monica, CA
2. Has at least 2 founders? True: Two
3. Has product in the market? False: No revenue
4. 6 months of continuous user growth or 6 months of revenue? False: No revenue growth
5. Notable investors? False: No one I recognize
6. Post-funding, will have 18 months of runway? True: Only needs $36k, but the company is not doing much interesting yet

The 7 Thiel Questions (Every Time Man Profits, Don't Dismiss Serendipity)

Question Score Notes
1. Engineering? 4 Slick app that integrates well with all traders
2. Timing? 2 Lots of traders nowadays
3. Monopoly? 3 Solid user base in less than a year
4. People? 3 Strong team, even with the background in financial services
5. Distribution? 3 God to good number of users
6. Durability? 4 Strong network effects
7. Secret? 2 Building proprietary technology for watching trades will build the ideal case for traders to congregate

What has to go right for the startup to return money on investment:

1. Monetize using one of the financial routes chosen; 2. Grow increasingly fast; 3. Integrate well into existing social networks in addition to building exclusive content

What the Risks Are

1. Business model risk, what happened to the Quantopians of the world? (Yikes, shut down last November: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantopian); 2. Relying on proprietary information from other sites is always a compete/collaborate pressure; 3. While I don't see Fidelity building any type of innovation on this, I could see RH or WeBull or Public taking this market better with more capital and direct business model via the brokerage model.

Bonus Muhan's Notes

Super cool, honestly liked the company more than I expected.

Updates

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So, did I invest?

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Other thoughts, questions, comments, or concerns? Write me at mail@muhanzhang.com and let me know.