Former partner of a16z launched an exclusive fund to support early stage fintech startups – TechCrunch

In the year In 2015, Rex Salisbury was working as a software engineer at the now-defunct mortgage startup Syndeo, where he built a fully automated back-end for mortgage pre-approval.

At the time, Andy Carra, who had served as that company’s CTO since founding Sophie, was working.

It was Salisbury’s first foray into fintech, and he admits he was bitten by the fintech bug in the excitement of having a new product live in a highly regulated industry. At the time, the sector was nowhere near the force it is today, “emerging as a meaningful and large category,” Salisbury recalls.

“That said, there were a lot of other software engineers, product managers and founders doing what I was — bringing new technologies to a painfully outdated industry,” he said. “I wanted to meet these people.”

After several coffee dates and meetings, Salisbury decided something more formal was needed. So in the year In 2016 he started his own Cambrian community. His goal with Cambrian was to develop a community focused on fintech founders and builders.

Shortly after the organization’s birth, Salisbury began hosting quarterly job fairs and monthly events in San Francisco and New York. Speakers such as Credit Karma’s Ken Lin, Del Shuo Wang, Betterment’s John Stein and Plaid’s William Hockey and Zach Perrett, among others. His work attracted the attention of the Andreessen Horowitz Company.

“When they came across it, it turned out to be a really interesting opportunity – a lot of the things I was thinking about scaling with the Cambrian were similar to the work on the 16z,” Salisbury says.

Before becoming a partner in 2019, Salisbury was a founding member of a16z fintech practice alongside general partners Anish Acharya and Angela Strange, so his community building led him to the venture world by chance.

During his two years at the company, Salisbury supported two companies he discovered through the Cambrian community, now Decacorn Dell and Talley. At the age of 16, he started the company’s newsletter, which is still published today.

Meanwhile, Cambrian has grown to 15,000 newsletter subscribers and a Slack community of 1,100+ members just for founders.

In the year By 2021, Salisbury concluded that an overlap in funding would be a natural extension of the growing community. So began the process of raising capital for Cambrian Ventures Company.

“The venture landscape has changed dramatically during my time at a16z and fintech was no exception,” said Salisbury. “Fintech has exploded, which is both scary and exciting for future entrepreneurs. I realized that the networks I built through Cambrian will help the next generation of entrepreneurs navigate this ever-growing ecosystem.”

It has managed to attract a who’s who of fintech LP group that includes founders from companies like NerdWallet, Plaid, Simple, Blend, Modus, Sentinel, Jeeves, Betterment, Blend, Rubable, Trim, LendUp, One, SoFi, Moonpay, LoanPro. , Altruist, Melio and more.

And today, Cambrian’s $20 million seed fund is announcing checks of up to $500,000 at the angel, pre-seed and seed stages to “support the next generation of fintech founders.”

“Our mission is to give our founders access to the best networks in fintech,” Salisbury said. “The fund itself reflects a community ethos with some of the top fintech founders who are both investors in the fund and the resources of the companies we back.”

As a community, Cambrian helps people connect through its co-founder matchmaking and hire through its skills and jobs board. Now, it can also provide investment capital.

As a small fund for writing non-lead checks, Cambria focuses only on the early stages of a company’s formation. Salisbury wants to be the “first check” on startups, and wants to be hands-on and collaborative as an investor, partnering with other founders (especially from the fund’s investor base), seed funds, and multi-stage funds. Invest or lead future rounds.

“The good thing about being a sole venture capitalist is that I can be very flexible, like working with founders who want to raise a very small angel and say, ‘We don’t really want the big institutions involved because we want flexibility and leverage,'” Salisbury told TechCrunch.

With Salisbury serving as the sole GP, Cambria plans to invest up to $500,000 to support 30 companies. So far, the company has made five investments, including in the last few months Save the finances Latest race round. He expects Salisbury to be his capital. Fully distributed over 24 months.

Overall, he plans to target US-based companies in the US-centric market.

“My key goal is, ‘How can I identify and then support the next fintech founders?’ Salisbury said. “And first of all, they’re really investing in people.”

There were no hard feelings against his former colleagues a16z.

“Rex’s influence, reach and ability to identify the next great entrepreneurs in fintech are impressive and make him a valuable asset at 16z,” said Acharya. “We are excited to see how he and Cambrian will support the fintech ecosystem when they launch this fund.”

Sophie’s co-founder Carra remembers meeting the engineer for the first time after completing a coding boot camp.

Although he was still early in his career, Cara described Salisbury as “the guy who asked the ‘tough’ questions in all-hands meetings, to the point where other members of the management team thought Cara was feeding them questions.”

“It’s simply that Rex is smart, understands both finance and technology, has a keen analytical mind and is willing to ask tough questions in good faith,” he said. It was a running conversation among the people we worked with that we were looking forward to investing in his startup – we figured he’d be a founder next time.

Turns out Salisbury’s “startup” was Cambrian, and Cara is now LP in the new fund.

“I really like the community he’s built and refer founders to him when I can,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “I like that he took the time to understand the space as an operator in multiple roles, and I like Cambrian’s model and risk profile.”

Betterment founder John Stein described Salisbury as a “great investor”.

“I invested with him because he is one of the best networkers and community builders I have ever met.” he said in an email.

Salisbury is not the only VC startup in the fintech space. Earlier this year, Nick Milanovich — who also started with newsletters and conferences — launched his own venture fund to support early-stage startups.

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