Marc Wesselink is a serial entrepreneur, who started 12 companies and failed 4 times. He’s the Founding Partner of Startupbootcamp and responsible for the alumni portfolio. Based on the learnings from his journey, he’s building a new way to fund global startups and scaleups. Learn about venturerock, his digital venture capital platform, and find out what type of ventures they invest in.

1. Hi Marc, thank you for agreeing to do the interview. It’s been a while since our last chat. What have you been up to these past couple of years?

During my years at Startupbootcamp, I saw a lot of flaws in the fundraising ecosystem; founders losing 70% of their time on fundraising, 90% failure rate after five years of tech companies, bad terms from many VCs like liquidation preferences and anti-dilution with a full ratchet, etc. So I decided to develop an entirely new way of investing and building impact ventures with one goal in mind: alignment of the entire supply chain of a startup to increase the success rate of companies, especially those who can create a huge impact.

2. You’re the Co-Founder of venturerock, a digital venture capital platform and ecosystem of founders, backers, and venture builders. Could you tell us more about your mission?

With venturerock, we want to show another way of investing in companies, from pre-seed to series A in an almost automated way. The ventures are going through a 72-step Venture Operating System and they receive funding in four phases:

Phase A: Customer Discovery €50.000
Phase B: Customer Validation €150.000
Phase C: Customer Growth €500.000
Phase D: Company Scale €1.500.000 often combined with capital from strategic investors

3. What type of ventures do you invest in? What kind of technology is interesting for venturerock?

We have a tech focus on AI, Blockchain, and IoT but we run different vertical programs like WEB3 in FinTech, HealthTech, and SportsTech. We hope to launch a SolarPunk in Singapore next year (SolarPunk is the convergence between Tech & Nature).

4. How do you empower startups to design a new investment protocol that enables them to focus on execution?

We have developed an online 72-step program to help founders focus on what matters most. It’s based on many existing theories like Customer Development, Lean Startup, Scaling Lean, Scrum & Agile, predictable revenue, and rockefeller habits. Since they can focus on execution, it gives them a lot of headspace, to build a solution after the validation of the problem by its first potential customers.

5. What’s the future of building next-generation global tech companies?

We believe the future holds more community-based ventures, solving real problems instead of executing a nice idea. This approach will make investing in startups a much lower risk.

Thank you for sharing what venturerock is about. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

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