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FN Fund
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About FN Fund

A venture fund that grew out of a founder community.

FN Fund is a pre-seed venture fund affiliated with Founders Network (FN), an invite-only community of tech startup founders and serial entrepreneurs.

Our thesis

Concentrated pre-seed, in founders the community knows

Founders Network has spent fifteen years doing one thing: helping tech founders help each other. That work builds deep, long-term relationships, through raises, pivots, exits and the quiet stretches in between. FN Fund exists because capital turned out to be one more way to support the founders in it.

Not every founder wants what we offer, and that is the point. The founders we back are the ones who value peer mentorship and actually use it. They are also the reason we get room on a cap table: not because we bid highest or carry the best-known name, but because they know what our support is worth.

Time served is not the signal. Roughly as many of our investments went into founders within months of joining as into founders we had known for years. The community reads a founder quickly, and it keeps reading them for a decade.

Our thesis is concentrated. We believe great founders stand out and that picking is possible, so we would rather take a real position in a company we understand deeply than spread thin across companies we don't.

Fund I taught us how to size that conviction. Across 26 companies, six of them took half the capital we deployed, and most of those began as small checks that grew as we learned what we were looking at. The lesson was simple: when the conviction is already there, the first check should say so.

We don't have a sector thesis or a target geography. FN members build across every category and in dozens of cities, and we invest wherever the community is. Today that means pre-seed, with checks of $50K–$500K.

Founders Network is the invite-only peer mentorship community for tech founders that Kevin Holmes started in 2011. Learn about Founders Network →

General Partner

Who you’ll be working with

Kevin Holmes

Kevin Holmes

General Partner

LinkedIn ↗

Kevin Holmes is the General Partner of FN Fund, which invests at pre-seed in founders from the Founders Network community.

He founded Founders Network in 2011 so that founders would have what he'd wanted in his own startup years: peers to lean on. He has led it as Chief Executive Officer since, and more than 3,000 founders have been members. Among them are the founders of the unicorns Docker, Productboard and Paystand, and of Braze, now public.

Being a founder is a career rather than a single company, in his view: do one startup and you want to do the next, which is why Founders Network is a lifelong network and not a program. As the community matured and its members began to exit, FN Fund was the natural evolution, the founders who had already built and sold companies backing the next generation.

Previously, he led the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University, where he taught entrepreneurship and helped raise the Bronco Venture Fund. He began his career as Chief Operating Officer of AllDorm, joining after the dot-com bubble burst and operating through the years that followed, an education in how many ways a company can go wrong.

He holds a BA in History and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Santa Clara University. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 and today lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.

Why it works

Fifteen years of community is our edge

  1. 01 · Source

    We see founders first, and for years

    Members have nominated 8,900+ founders since 2013, and 2,900 asked to join in the last year alone, across 29 chapters in 19 countries. We don't meet a company when it starts raising. We read their applications, make their introductions, and stay close through raises, pivots, exits and the quieter years in between. Conviction gets built from the way someone works rather than the way they pitch, and founders tell us what is actually happening, in confidence, well before they raise.

  2. 02 · Pick

    Peers vet them before we do

    About 1 in 18 people who asked to join last year became members. By the time a founder raises, we've watched how they operate in peer groups, intros and events, and the references come from the peers who worked alongside them.

  3. 03 · Win

    Trust that's already there

    Founders already know us and trust us. One decision-maker means a fast answer. It's the community's fund, not a stranger's term sheet: the capital behind it comes from successful founders in the community.

  4. 04 · Support

    A whole team behind every check

    500+ member-to-member introductions a year, 200+ events a year, 41 Lead Mentors, 80+ volunteer chapter and sector leaders, and the FN staff team. Founders get the same community after the check that introduced them to us.

See the portfolioFor founders