Uncommon Capital

Uncommon Capital

About Us

  • We're are former operators investing in operators.
  • We invest primarily in software companies from Pre-Seed to Series A. Some areas we like are B2B SaaS (especially in unique verticals), Bottoms-Up SaaS, marketplaces, consumer, developer tools, fintech, and frontier-tech.
  • We are able to help founders at the day-to-day operational level with things like:
    • Product
      • How to know if you have product-market fit
      • When to hire product managers and how to structure a product organization
      • When to build a growth organization and how to manage it
      • How growth and marketing should work together
      • How to think about growth (incremental improvements) versus core product (step-change improvements)
    • Data
      • How to set up early metrics infrastructure that pays dividends later
      • How to get the most out of your data by integrating it with the rest of your organization (marketing and sales specifically)
    • Marketing
      • How to think about what marketing channels make the most sense for your business
      • How to test and develop marketing channels cost-effectively
      • When to think about making your first marketing hire and who to hire (marketing specialists versus generalists, growth marketing versus brand marketing, etc)
      • How to operationalize maximally effective, data-driven marketing
    • People
      • When to think about making your first people hire, and who you should hire (HRBP, People Ops, etc)
      • When to introduce more structure around people operations (recruiting processes, interview panels, leveling, promotions, compensation)
      • How to develop a high-performance culture
    • Engineering
      • How to hire great engineers that can scale
      • How to structure early engineering teams

Who We Are

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Tikhon Bernstam - Managing Partner

LinkedIn | Twitter

Tikhon is the co-founder of Scribd and Parse (acquired by Facebook). He is an engineer and physicist by background, graduating in the top of his class at Dartmouth CS before dropping out of his physics PhD to start Scribd.

Tikhon helps portfolio companies with engineering hiring, engineering culture, fundraising strategy, and more.

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Jamie Quint - General Partner

LinkedIn | Twitter

Jamie has 15 years of experience as one of the foremost/leading product growth practitioners in the valley. He is an engineer by training, and started his career as a startup founder, joining one of the first few Y Combinator classes in 2008. Since then, he has consulted on growth at breakout companies such as Twitch, Everlane, Mercury, and Substack. He has worked as a senior executive at Notion and Reddit, leading both growth and revenue.

Jamie helps portfolio companies with product focused growth, product strategy, product hiring, data infrastructure, performance marketing, lifecycle marketing, and more.

Investments

Select Investments

NameWebsiteInvested AtYear
Antares
Seed
2023
Garden
Seed
2023
Bemlo
Seed
2022
Edia
Seed
2022
Heard
Series A
2022
Aqua
Seed
2022
Explo
Series A
2022
Skipper
Seed
2022
Nira
Seed
2022
Shaped
Seed
2022
Butter
Seed
2021
Cococart
Seed
2021
Patterns
Seed
2021
Basis Board
Seed
2021
Reframe
Seed
2021
Praxis
Seed
2021
Fora
Seed
2021
Rye
Pre-Seed
2021
Ordo
Pre-Seed
2021
Jar
Series A
2021
Surely
Seed
2021
Yendo
Seed
2021
Hotglue
Seed
2021
Motion
Series A
2021
Aviator
Seed
2021
BalkanID
Seed
2021
Endla
Seed
2021
Firstbase
Seed
2021
Kick
Seed
2021
Select Star
Seed
2021
House Numbers
Seed
2021
Mercury
Seed
2017
Function of Beauty
Seed
2016
Snyk
Seed
2016
Razorpay
Seed
2015
Talkdesk
Seed
2014