We've spent years telling founders the same thing.
Talk to your customers. Real discovery is uncomfortable, because you're hunting for the reasons your idea is wrong while it's still cheap to be wrong. Most founders go looking for a yes.
Between the two of us, we've mentored hundreds of founders and taught customer discovery for years, in classrooms, accelerators, workshops and across a table. A founder is in love with an idea, and we help them find out whether anyone else is.
We can only be in so many rooms. So we built Inno, a tool founders use to run their own customer discovery and see where the evidence holds up. It's what we wished we could hand every founder we've worked with.
There Squared is where both halves live: Inno, and the two of us, still coaching pre-seed and seed-stage founders through customer discovery before they bet years on an idea. We also work with innovation teams inside larger companies. They have plenty of ideas and need real customer depth to decide which ones to fund.
Angie started out as an Air Force aviator and has spent 15 years in startup operations, brand strategy, and executive roles. She was Executive Director of the Alliance of Angels, the largest angel group in the Pacific Northwest, connecting founders with capital and mentors. She co-founded KIKO, which builds peer support for veterans, and Canopie, a research tool for students that grew out of a UW class project. Since 2018 she has also run a brand strategy practice. She has been Chief of Staff at multiple startups and did community and operations work at Context VC, a veteran-founded VC firm. She is a Venture Partner at Founder First Fund and an Entrepreneur in Residence at VertueLab, teaches idea validation at Venture Mechanics, and guest lectures at the University of Washington.
Catherine has built her career as an operating partner to founders: the one who takes the vision and turns it into something that runs. At Tiny Earth Toys, a toy rental subscription company, she moved from Director of Product to Co-Founder and COO. She has since been Interim CMO, America at Decathlon and Director of AI Training Operations at Invisible, and she works as a fractional operator for startups. Earlier she was a product manager and competitive intelligence analyst at Wayfair. At NC IDEA she evaluated pre-seed startups for non-dilutive grants, interviewing founders, customers, and advisors to make the go or no-go call. She co-teaches customer discovery at Venture Mechanics. Duke MBA and former Duke lecturer in innovation and entrepreneurship.