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Before joining Stand Together Ventures Lab (STVL), I spent time in the accelerator world, at Techstars and programs like it. The model is intensive by design. For three to six months, you are deeply embedded with founders. You help their leadership team sharpen their pitch, pressure-test their assumptions, and build their network. Then the end of programming comes, and demo day arrives. Gradually, inevitably, the touchpoints thin out. The support dwindles, the relationship diminishes, and not because anyone intended that, but because the model was never built for the long run.
I loved the pace and the density of founders you get to meet, but I was craving something deeper. A longer relationship. One where we are genuinely in it with founders beyond the check. STVL opened that door.
What is Platform, and why does it matter?
Platform is the capability within a venture firm focused on helping founders navigate and remove friction as they scale. Some firms officially name the function; others are just venture partners working hard to show up for their investments. At STVL, it is a dedicated team that works alongside our investors with a specific belief: support should be tailored to fit each companies' unique needs.
That belief is backed by data. The VC Platform Global Community's 2023 "Power of Platform" report analyzed 850 venture capital firms across two decades and found that funds with significant platform teams outperformed those without, by 1,100 basis points in Net Internal Rate of Return (Net IRR, a measure of annualized investment performance) and 0.5x in Total Value to Paid-In Capital (TVPI, a measure of total value returned to investors relative to what was invested). The correlation held in up and down markets alike. Platform is a performance driver. ¹
What it looks like in practice
The founders we back are subject matter experts. Many of them have lived the problems they are solving, which is often exactly why they are the right people to solve them. And yet no one is born knowing how to run a company. We work with founders at wildly different stages, from pre-seed through Series C. Some come in with a highly equipped team. Others are navigating certain parts of growth for the first time. This is where Platform can make a difference.
STVL accesses deep experience across investing, operations, and ecosystem-building, which means founders do not have to learn everything from the ground up on their own time. They tap into a bench of people who have seen these challenges before and move quickly alongside them.
That support takes many forms. Sometimes it is a single introduction that unlocks a partnership. Sometimes it is a hiring framework, a legal referral, or a thought partner for a board conversation. Sometimes it is access to mentors and domain experts within the Stand Together community who have direct context on the problem a founder is solving. And sometimes it is something more intensive: a sprint.
Sprints are structured, intensive working sessions where we embed alongside a founder to tackle a specific bottleneck fast. We pull in resources from across the Stand Together community, point them at a real constraint with a real deadline, and do the work together. It is not consulting. We are not handing founders a deliverable and walking away. With Aura Health, for example, we ran a week-long Foundation and Design Sprint to help sharpen the product hypothesis for a new personalization feature. The sprint surfaced user research that directly informed how Aura approached their product launch and who they prioritized as their primary customer, the kind of clarity that changes the trajectory of a decision, not just the speed of it. We do not know of many other platform teams that operate this way, and we think it is one of the things that most distinguishes how STVL shows up.
None of this would be possible without the Stand Together ecosystem sitting behind everything we do. Our ecosystem spans policy, philanthropy, tech, and the arts. It includes operators, builders, and policy thinkers who are already working on the problems our founders are trying to solve, not as passive contacts but as active collaborators. The doors we can open, the network we can activate, the expertise we can bring in, none of it works unless a founder is willing to ask and lean into what we can offer.
Mutual benefit is the model
At STVL, we look for founders already working on problems that matter deeply to them and to the future of the country. The best partnerships happen when there is strong alignment between what a founder is building and the broader expertise, networks, and capabilities we can bring alongside them.
That alignment creates leverage on both sides. Founders gain access to people and resources that can help them move faster through key inflection points. In return, we get to support companies advancing ideas and systems we believe can create meaningful long-term change.
When Unmudl shifts how employers think about who is qualified to do meaningful work, it moves a systemic needle. When PadSplit proves that the housing crisis can be addressed through market design rather than top-down policy, it validates something far bigger than one company's growth. When Pathfinder makes it easier for families to access and spend education funds, it advances a vision the Stand Together community has been building toward for years.
These outcomes are not separate from the investment thesis. They are the investment thesis.
