Bluem Ventures protects democracy by finding and proving out projects that (a) have traction, (b) can scale, and (c) can produce votes much less expensively than existing methods.

What we do - For founders

We’re a seed donor/investor and accelerator for great political projects.

You’re doing something that’s working. It’s new, amazing, and could make a huge political impact - if only it could grow.

But you’re missing a critical ingredient. To bloom, you need some combination of people (advice, skills, connections, support, etc.) and money.

That’s where we come in.

WE PARTNER WITH YOU EARLY.

In all of our projects, we were the first, or among the first, significant donors.

We polish diamonds.

Great opportunities rarely come in a neat package. In most of our projects, our most important investment was time. We’re often invited to serve on boards, frequently as the first non-founder member.

Apart from funding, we’ve helped in a variety of ways, including by providing or finding partners for the following services:

• Access to data

• Strategic planning

• Fundraising advice and support

• Introductions to potential partners and users

• Contracting with service partners

• Legal, compliance, and finance support

• Email and web site setup

…and sometimes it’s just helpful to have a safe space to bounce around ideas or vent.

We help you get to the next stage.

Our goal is to help you reach a point where you can raise money from other donors. As a prominent venture firm puts it, “This usually means: get you to the point where you’ve built something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale.” In our experience, this usually requires the following:

• A clear story about what you’re doing

• The quantitative and/or qualitative case for how you create value and impact

• Evidence of traction and/or efficacy

• Just enough legal and governance structure

We Bridge the Practitioner and Donor Worlds.

You’re making an impact and need funding. Donors want to maximize the impact of their donations.

But there are structural obstacles between these two communities. These obstacles create inefficiencies where capital and support fail to reach promising projects.

We build bridges between the two communities by helping you explain what you’re doing in a way that appeals to funders, and by making introductions.

We split our time about evenly between the two communities, so that you can focus on what you do best.

What we do - For funders

We create opportunities for you.

You want to fund the most cost-effective ways to make political impact.

The problem is, not all of them exist yet. You’re aware of projects that could become great, but they’re too undeveloped to meet your funding threshold.

That’s where we come in.

We bring the lean startup model to politics.

We find awesome people that have ideas or early-stage projects, and then gradually scale in money and time with evidence of traction.

We work intensively to hone the project into something that we find exciting; something that could scale and have a material impact.

Then we bring it to you, and hope that you find it exciting as well.

Our success is when you view our projects as worthy of funding, compared across your universe of existing options.

We look for projects that beat existing alternatives.

There’s a wide array of funding options for political impact. To make innovation worthwhile, it needs to have a clear path towards producing something that either (a) fills an unmet need or (b) is superior to existing alternatives. In practice, this means we pursue projects in the following three categories:

1. Quantifiable: Produce votes

• Description: Spending for which one can estimate a cost per vote (CPV).

• Goal: Create opportunities to a produce material number of votes, materially below the cost of existing low-risk alternatives.

2. Quantifiable: Produce money (via fundraising)

• Description: Spending that aims to return more than the money invested in fundraising (positive ROI).

• Goal: Create an attractive risk-adjusted return on money flowing to important places.

3. Non-Quantifiable: Infrastructure

• Description: Spending for which one can’t estimate a CPV or ROI. Examples include think tanks and election security.

• Goal: Help promising projects obtain further funding by providing operational support and early-stage funding to produce/expand evidence of traction.

Who

Bluem Ventures is a project of David Slifka.