Ep. 309 How I Raised It with Mark Phillips of 11 Tribes Venture Capital
episode
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
38 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What inspired Mark Phillips to start 11 Tribes after his failed startup?
Hi guys, welcome to the How I Raise It Podcast, the show where you get an inside look at how real entrepreneurs and VCs raise capital for their businesses. I'm your host, Nathan Beckard, and today's episode is with Mark Phillips of 11 Tribes. 11 Tribes is an early stage venture fund that invests in the care and resilience of its founders. Pretty interesting hook. In this episode, we discuss Mark's journey getting into VC and how his failed startup shaped his vision, why selling the vision and passion worked well for fund one, how his narrative changed for fund two, and much more. If you're tuning into this podcast to learn how to raise capital for your business, be sure to check out foundersuite.com if you're a startup, or fundingstack.com if you're a VC or advisor.
Both platforms will give you access to an awesome. collection of tools for raising capital, including a massive investor database, a new get intro tool to get warm intros to those investors, a CRM to manage your raise, a virtual data room to run due diligence, plus pitch deck hosting, investor updates, email tools, and more. Last but not least, if you enjoy this conversation and think someone else would too, please share it with them and hit that subscribe button to get all our latest episodes. Thank you, and sit back and enjoy this chat with Mark.
Welcome to How I Race It! The podcast that goes behind the scenes with entrepreneurs who've raised capital. We uncover the tips, tricks, and techniques they use to get investors to write a check. Strap in and turn it off.
Hi, welcome to another episode of How I Raised It, produced by Foundersweet dot com and Fundingstack dot com. Today I have Mark Phillips of Eleven Tribes Venture Fund out of Chicago. How's your day going?
Uh it's going better now being with you, Nathan. Glad to be here.
You're so so nice. Thank you though. Um well great to be here. Great to have you here. I appreciate it. Let's just go right to it. What is eleven tribes all about?
Yeah, we're an early stage venture fund, as you said, based out of Chicago. I started Eleven Tribes. It's been about four years now. Coming out of my own failure as an entrepreneur, Nathan, I was um at business school at the University of Chicago and I built a company called DiaSense. It was a hardware device designed to help type one diabetics better, more passively measure blood sugar. It was really the predecessor to what's now the continuous glucose monitor. That's a whole other conversation for another day. We ended up building it for about three years only to get leapfrogged by a better piece of technology. Couldn't raise the capital we needed to keep the business going. I two things happened in that moment.
Number one, my love for capital efficient businesses was born. Uh but number two, I I really went through what can only be described as in the crisis of identity. Um, entrepreneurship is a crazy thing. Taking anything from zero to one requires so much of your your personhood, your soul, if I can use that word. And it's it took a lot out of me. And to really experience that failure when I've given so much of myself to the business really i it sent me into a spiral. Um it was a depressive state for me and and it required a lot of work, coaching, some therapy, some really important stuff that I had to go through. To realize that my identity, my sense of self worth is not tied to the performance of my company.
It's not tied to how much venture capital funding we can bring in. But really what came out of that and what I'm so grateful for, and it's it's a funny thing to call your failure something that you're grateful for, but it it really is that in my life. I'm grateful for the perspective that it's brought to eleven tribes, which is to say How can we support founders not only in the development of their business, which we want all of our founders to be very successful? We want them to pick a lot of money. But how can we actually help them grow as leaders? How can we help them grow as people? And begging the question, Nathan, that
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Mark Phillips to start 11 Tribes after his failed startup?
0:00–7:44
2
How did Mark’s personal crisis shape the fund’s focus on founder resilience?
7:44–14:30
3
Why did selling the vision and passion work better than a pure financial model for Fund I?
14:30–22:02
4
What tactics helped Mark secure the first commitment after 200 Zoom pitches?
22:02–29:29
5
How did the fundraising strategy evolve for Fund II and what role did family offices play?
29:29–32:49
6
What is the 2 % GP‑stake model and how does it create value for LPs and founders?
32:49–36:32
7
How does 11 Tribes invest in founder development (coaching, therapy, leadership) and why?
36:32–37:58
8
What does Mark define as resilience and how can founders build it outside of work?
37:58–37:59
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
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