Come for the tools.
Stay for the founders.
Every tool built for people who back founders reads the same stale internet. f3’s read a record the founder keeps current — because their name is on it, and it travels with them.
Five things everyone needs. We’re not charging for any of them.
Before a builder, a backer and a believer can do anything useful with each other, there’s a floor of tooling all three need. It’s the currency the whole interaction runs on — and it’s the same five features in every product built for this market.
So we stopped treating them as a product. They come with your membership.
A sourcing feed
New companies, ranked by something. Usually recency.
Company profiles
Logo, blurb, headcount, last round, a website link.
A portfolio tracker
Your holdings, in a table you update by hand.
A notes / CRM layer
Where you put what you thought after the call.
Alerts & updates
An email when something public happens.
They’re all the same because the world moved and the tools didn’t.
Three things changed inside about two years. Each one made a category of software cheaper — and made one specific thing far more valuable.
AI made the tooling free.
Anyone can build their own tracker in an afternoon now, which is exactly why we can hand you five of them without blinking. The software was never the scarce part.
Getting a founder to keep anything current is a completely different question — and a tool nobody maintains is a tool nobody can read.
Everything looks alike now.
The cost of shipping collapsed and the technical bar came down with it. Far more products, far fewer that look different from each other.
Andreessen’s own timeline: a safe default used to take twenty years to set, and with AI it can be set in under two. Differentiation stopped being a marketing problem. It’s the whole problem.
The best builders stopped being in one place.
a16z published that 44% of their Apps Fund I & II investments over two years have an international founder — roughly half headquartered in the US, half outside it.
Their own read on why country diasporas beat alumni networks: the diasporas are more powerful, they “just often lacked the sort of organization.” The talent is entangled across countries, cities and affinity groups. Nobody has mapped it.
LinkedIn is a graph of claims. f3 is a graph of events.
A claim is self-reported, unfalsifiable and free to fake. An event has a timestamp, a counterparty and a witness. Every commodity tool above is reading claims — which is why they’re all the same, and why none of them can tell you who is actually moving.
We’re building the other one. Sources the founder connects once, with consent, producing a record they own and a stranger can read. Andreessen calls the thing that actually matters preferential attachment — the rate at which a founder converts attention into resources. It’s the whole game, and nobody measures it.
When the tooling is free, the only thing left worth owning is the truth underneath it. A rate you can measure is a rate you can coach, benchmark and back.
A résumé is a memory. A Proof Score is a live instrument.
f3 doesn’t scrape founders. Founders maintain their own record, daily, because it’s theirs — the card they carry to the next raise, the next hire, the next company. That’s the incentive nothing scraped can reproduce.
A number out of 1,000 that moved because she shipped — not because she updated a profile.
The record travels with her. Inflating it costs her the only asset she carries forward.
You watch a founder compound between ventures, not just between rounds.
Borderless says what a founder isn’t. Braided says what they are.
The word going around is borderless, and it’s pointed at nation-states. We think that’s one strand of three, and the subtractive version of a much better idea — because nobody’s advantage has ever come from the borders they don’t have. It comes from the belongings they do.
Every founder is braided from three strands: what you build, who you are, and where you’ve been. Any one of them on its own is just a category. Where all three cross is a position almost nobody else on earth occupies — and it’s the only place serendipity can actually be engineered.
The problem you’ve chosen and the trade you practise — and everyone else solving the same thing, wherever in the world they happen to be sitting.
The groups you belong to by identity, background, school, faith or story. The least instrumented network in venture, and routinely the fastest one.
Not one address — the whole path. Countries, cities, and the second cities everyone overlooks. Lagos and Greenville are the same problem.
One strand makes you findable. Two make you interesting. Three make you the only person who can do a specific thing.
That crossing is your braid, and finding it is the work. Today it’s done by one or two exceptionally well-connected people, by hand, out of their own calendar and their own memory — until they run out of Tuesdays. f3 does it as infrastructure, across every ecosystem a member belongs to at once.
Which half of that you get depends on which side of the table you’re on.
Same dues, same graph, different first argument. We’d rather be straight with you about that than pretend one page fits both.
Backers get a desk.
This is where our tooling is deepest today, and we’d rather you judge it on that.
- A pool of builders you can actually read. Not a logo and a blurb — a record, with self-reported, f3-verified and third-party-verified marked apart.
- Dig all the way in. Data rooms, not teasers, when the founder opens one to you. Every share is on the record, both directions.
- Bring your portfolio over. Your existing companies get live records that update themselves — and tell you when something slips.
- Watch someone compound before the round. Three portable pillars mean you’re tracking a founder, not a cap table entry.
You’ll spend less time deciding who’s real, and more on whether you like the business.
Believers get the room.
We’re not going to sell you a mentor dashboard. Nobody has ever wanted one.
- The right founder in front of you, not the loudest one. Matched on proof, so the hour you give lands on someone who’ll use it.
- Read them before you commit the Tuesday. The same record a backer sees, so you know what’s actually stuck before the call.
- Your own record, finally. You’ve been vouching and making intros off the books for years. Here it’s scored — TRUST and SIGNAL are yours, not the company’s.
- Rooms you can’t buy into. Office Hours, The Loop, Demo Day. Every one adds to your record and to theirs.
The tools are thinner on this side today. We’re building them with you — that’s part of what the seat is for.
The new tools of the trade. Indistinguishable from your membership.
A complete suite, built for the three things you actually do — find them, decide on them, hold them — plus the record you earn by doing it well. None of it sits in a separate app you have to remember to open. The tools embed themselves into the work you are already doing.
The dark cards are where f3 does the work alongside you rather than handing you software.
Proof feed
Builders surfaced by what they shipped, not what they posted or who introduced them.
Prospect search
Filter on proof, stage, geography and pillar strength — not on keywords in a bio.
Watchlists
Follow a founder long before there’s a round. Told when the score moves, not when the press release drops.
Two-sided deal memo
One memo, a Builder view and a Backer view. They see what you’re weighing; you see what they answered.
Data rooms
Financials, cap table, contracts — diligence-ready before you ask, when the founder opens one to you.
Group diligence
Run it with your syndicate in one place. Questions, answers and who asked, on the record.
Portfolio import
Bring your companies with you. Their records update themselves — no more quarterly-email archaeology.
Early warning
PULSE decays before revenue does. You hear about the slipped promise and the quiet month while it still matters.
Diligence exports
Take the record into your IC memo or LP update without retyping a word of it.
Your Proof Score
Backers and Believers carry their own four pillars — track record, portfolio health, how you actually behave in the room.
Vouches
Put your name on someone. It counts on their record and on yours, and it’s countersigned.
Your Proof Page
One link a founder can read before they take your money or your meeting. It leaves with you.
Connector agent
Intros made with context, so nobody starts cold and nobody spends a favor.
Ecosystems
Every builder in a city, a program or an affinity network, on one view. Be an insider without moving.
Events & media
Office Hours, The Loop, Demo Day — and the coverage that makes a portfolio company’s SIGNAL compound.
Pro agents
Deeper tools, longer leash. The week of work you keep postponing, done in an afternoon.
Special Apps & Skills
Partner-built apps and focused skills for the work your seat needs next.
Consigliere
Limited white-glove service for those who need more — a senior operator to call before the hard decision, not after.
A guild, with a talent agency inside it.
f3 is organized as a guild. The agency lives inside it — and an agency is only worth anything if the talent can get through the door in the first place. So there is always a free tier. Not a trial, not a teaser: a permanent open door, so we can find, identify and welcome the best people wherever they happened to be born or happen to live.
That’s what open access has to mean if you actually believe proof beats pedigree. Paid membership is what keeps that door open — and what turns f3 from a directory into a room. You’re not buying software. You’re paying dues, and the tools come with the seat.
Any builder, anywhere, at any stage. There will always be a free tier — that’s the open door, and it isn’t going anywhere.
Advisors, mentors, exited founders, connectors, program leads, corporate champions.
Angels, syndicates, solo GPs, funds, family offices, CVC, grantmakers.
Access.
The record, the room, and every tool on this page. This is where new tools land — we keep adding whatever members tell us is missing, and it stays here.
Capacity.
Not more features — more of us. Agents with a longer leash, and software built to how you actually work.
People.
Limited white-glove service, for the members who need more. Priced per engagement and taken when you want it, rather than carried in a tier all year.
You already do this work. f3 is built to plug into it.
Backers and believers reading this are already running dinners, office hours, cohorts, demo days and community channels. We’re not asking anyone to stop, move or migrate any of it — f3 is building the capabilities to sit alongside what you run, so the work you’re already doing produces a record instead of evaporating.
Here’s what we run on our own side, and what we’d plug into yours. If you run something we should be connected to, come talk to us.
Weekly Office Hours
Live feedback, warm intros, and a push on whatever is stuck. Bring an hour, leave with a name.
The Loop
Builders, Backers and Believers in one room. Engineered serendipity — the co-investor, the first hire, the pilot.
Demo Day
Founders who logged the work get the room, and the checks. The invitation comes from the record, not the rolodex.
Media & Triangulate
The stories we publish and the podcast we run. Your portfolio company’s SIGNAL compounds instead of evaporating.
Membership isn’t a subscription. It’s a seat with obligations.
A guild works because entry costs something other than money. Paid members are asked. Free members are active — that’s the trade, and it’s the whole reason the record is worth reading.
If you’re a Builder
Your seat is free. It stays free while you’re building — the only condition, and the one that makes everything else here mean something.
- 01Connect one source. GitHub, your calendar, wherever the work actually happens. One is enough to start.
- 02Log what you shipped. Not a report — a line, when something happens. The Accountability Agent asks so you don’t have to remember.
- 03Keep a promise where we can see it. The kept ones become TRUST. That’s the pillar no deck can fake.
If it goes quiet for a while, someone here checks in — not to chase you, but because a quiet stretch is usually exactly when somebody in this room could help.
If you’re a Backer
You’ve paid your dues, so none of this is a requirement. We kindly ask that you:
- 01Read the proof before you take the intro. It’s there so nobody’s first meeting is a bio recital.
- 02Give one hour a quarter to the room. Office Hours or The Loop. Camera on.
- 03Say no clearly, and say why. A specific no is worth more to a founder than a maybe — and it’s worth something to your record too.
Three asks a quarter. The members who do them get the most out of this by a distance.
If you’re a Believer
You’ve paid your dues, so none of this is a requirement. We kindly ask that you:
- 01Make one vouch you’d stand behind. Your name goes on it. That’s what makes TRUST mean anything.
- 02Show up for one room a quarter. The founders come because you do.
- 03Take one intro you didn’t have to take. This is the whole mechanism, and it only works running both ways.
Three asks a quarter. The members who do them get the most out of this by a distance.
The five things you’re about to ask.
Open the ones that matter to you.
Question 01Founders write their own proof. Why would I trust it?
Every line on a Proof Page is labelled with how it was verified — self-reported, f3-verified, or confirmed by a named third party. You always know which one you’re reading.
The score shows evidence strength rather than raw points, so there is no number to optimise toward.
And the real deterrent isn’t technical. A founder who inflates this is inflating the one asset they carry to their next company, in front of the exact people they’ll need there.
Question 02Is f3 a fund? Are you taking a cut?
No. At this time f3 doesn’t invest, doesn’t broker, and takes no carry, fee or success payment on anything that happens here.
We’ll also be straight with you: f3 is a startup as well. We’re actively evaluating different business models and different approaches to the market, all with the same intent — getting more founders the resources they need, whether that’s connections, capital or customers. We’ll keep finding ways to do that. We’re not opposed to launching a fund alongside f3 one day, but it isn’t a priority today.
Question 03Are you replacing the stack I already pay for?
Only if you want us to. Bring your portfolio in and keep everything else — most members run f3 alongside their CRM for a quarter and then quietly stop renewing one or two things. We’d rather that be your call than our pitch.
Worth knowing: our agents, and the premium ones especially, do overlap with a fair number of tools you’re probably paying for. The easiest way in is to let our agents talk to the ones you already run, then taper whatever stops earning its keep. No migration, no rip-and-replace weekend.
Question 04I’m both a backer and a believer. Which am I?
Both, on one membership, at the Backer rate. If you can write the check you’re a Backer; everything you bring beyond the check is you being a Believer.
This was built that way on purpose. Most people here will hold more than one role, and plenty will hold all three — the operator who angel-invests, the founder who mentors, the exited builder who starts again. We think of this as a lifelong membership, and you should expect to move between roles across your career. The record moves with you.
Question 05Believer invites are free. So what’s the $25?
The invite is free and always will be — it’s how you get through the door. Dues start when you activate the seat.
Go ahead and claim your invite. Tell us how you’d like to be helpful to founders, and we’ll reach out to you proactively when there’s someone worth your time.
Come for the tools.
Guild member for life.
The tools take five minutes to try. The room takes one Thursday.