A venture-scale company…

Progresses along a trajectory of traction — e.g., idea stage, MVP, pre-product, pre-revenue, pre-funding, seed stage, profitability, Series A, B, C, growth stage, acquisition/IPO. 

Not every venture-scale startup will pass through every stage, but Startup Haven requires that member companies have achieved some recognizable traction along a growth trajectory before joining. 

Idea stage startups are too early for Startup Haven membership. The baseline for consideration for membership in Startup Haven is that the company has built a functioning (although perhaps still primitive) product. 

So, pre-product companies are usually too early as well, unless some other meaningful milestones have been achieved.

Does not deliver it’s principal customer value by their own human employees performing work for another person or company — in general, services performed by humans do not readily scale.

Has as it’s intended trajectory one of significant scale — e.g., aiming for national or global reach and/or aiming to provide a product or service to a significant market (typically valued in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.) There are some exceptions, but they are rare.

Founder is interested in building a company for which their financial incentives are not the money they make while they are building or running the company (i.e., their income or the company’s profits) but, rather, the financial upside that comes from building a company of great value that produces an out-sized outcome in the future (typically through a liquidity event such as a merger, acquisition or IPO, but also sometimes through immensely scaling revenue.)

Need never raise venture capital, however the company is of a kind that investors would recognize as, in principle, ‘investable.’ Investors may range from angles to VC and terms may range from convertible debt instruments, to priced rounds to revenue redemption models. As a rule of thumb, venture-scale investors are principally interested in investments that can return many times their investment (typically 3x to 10x+) over a relatively short period of time (typically 4 years to 10 years.) This means companies that can scale to millions in monthly revenue, grow to tens of millions in annual revenue and/or produce liquidity events in the range of tens of millions, hundreds of millions… and possibly even one billion or more.