A platform to create communities of companies you trust from Perk Management to Vendor Organization.
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Joined October 2020
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Kevin Hoffberg, Venture Partner at ULU Ventures, talks about his experience using GetProven.com to help manage vendor relationships for his portfolio companies in his #venturecapital firm. youtube.com/watch?v=h_-FbZT3…
Equal access is not a nice to have, it is the whole point. A fund can negotiate the best vendor deals in the market, but they barely matter if only a few founders ever hear about them.
#VentureCapital #EqualAccess #FounderFirst
One fund fixed vendor access for every company overnight. No new negotiations, no rollout plan. They just made deals already secured visible to the whole portfolio at once.
#PortfolioSupport #VendorManagement #VentureCapital
I found out too late that not every founder gets the same deal. Same fund, same negotiated terms, different access depending on who you knew. That gap is exactly why I built Proven.
#FounderLessons #VentureCapital #EqualAccess
The gap between well connected founders and everyone else is larger than most funds admit. It is not favoritism, it is visibility. Deals stuck in an inbox only reach the founders who happen to ask.
#VentureCapital #EqualAccess #VendorManagement
"Give founders more perks" misses the point. Most portfolios already have plenty. The real problem is half the founders never find out they exist. Fix visibility before you add more perks.
#VentureCapital #VendorManagement #FounderFirst
A platform team replaced three tools, a spreadsheet, a stale Notion page, a buried Slack thread, with one link. Nobody missed the old way. Sometimes the win isn't a bigger discount, it's making it easy to find.
#PortfolioSupport #VendorManagement #StartupTools
A founder once asked why some companies get better deals than others. The answer wasn't skill, it was proximity. That's not a founder problem, that's a distribution problem, and it's why I built Proven.
#FounderLessons #VentureCapital #EqualAccess
Some funds saved more from organizing deals than from negotiating them. A great discount buried in a spreadsheet isn't a discount, it's a rumor. Visibility is where the real savings live.
#VentureCapital #VendorManagement #StartupSavings
Most vendor advice assumes every founder already knows the right people. That works if you have a network. It's useless if you don't. The real problem isn't negotiating skill. It's who you know.
#VentureCapital #StartupEquity #FounderFirst
One Slack thread cost a company a discount they never knew existed. A partner mentioned it once, then it scrolled away. The founder signed at full price, never getting a fair shot at the deal.
#StartupSavings #VentureCapital #FounderSupport
The worst vendor deal I ever signed taught me the most. I trusted a friend's recommendation and never checked if a discount existed. It did. I just wasn't in the room when it got negotiated.
#FounderLessons #StartupMistakes #VendorManagement
A handful of Tier 1 VC firms quietly rebuilt how their portfolios buy. No press release. They just got tired of founders paying full price for deals their fund already negotiated. Boring work. Real savings.
#VentureCapital #VendorManagement #StartupTools
Every fund talks about the deals they negotiated. Almost nobody talks about who actually gets them. Usually it's the same founders every time, the ones already close to the platform team. Proximity isn't a fair way to decide who saves money.
#StartupFounders #PortfolioSupport
A platform team spotted an opportunity and secured a better vendor deal before the founder ever had to ask. No request, no follow up email. That's the gap between reacting and being built to catch things early.
#VentureCapital #PortfolioSupport #StartupFounders
Proven retweeted
30 days of data from Proven : The perks & discounts marketplace platform we run for tier-one banks, top VCs, government innovation agencies and global accelerators.
The biggest signals from this series:
• @AnthropicAI flipped OpenAI in Q1 2026
• @meetgranola is the breakout of the year (60x)
• AI = 24% of all startup tech spend
• Avg startup leaves $200k+ in perks unredeemed
• $1.3B value redeemed in 12 mo
New quarter, new reports.
I used to assume vendor contracts were fair by default. Then I saw one nearly lock a founder into terms that only worked if they never grew. Fair isn't the default, it's the exception. Founders shouldn't have to negotiate their way to it.
#StartupFounders #FounderStories
Every fund says they add value to their portfolio. Few can put a number on it. Centralize vendor deals and that number stops being a guess, it becomes a metric funds can actually point to. That's not luck. That's infrastructure.
#VentureCapital #FounderSupport #PortfolioValue
"AI will fix vendor management." AI reads contracts faster, sure. But that was never the hard part. The hard part is making sure every founder knows the deal exists and actually gets access to it. Speed isn't the same as access.
#VentureCapital #AI #PortfolioSupport
A founder asked in Slack if anyone had a better vendor deal. No fire drill, no weeks of back and forth. Within a day they were swapped onto a better one. Fast answers happen when the deal already exists and someone knows where to find it.
#PlatformTeams #StartupFounders
A founder in our portfolio almost signed a contract that would've eaten three months of runway. Not a scam, just standard terms nobody had time to check. The fix isn't asking founders to be careful. It's vetting the deal before they ever see it.
#StartupFounders #VentureCapital
