Arts & Crafts

Arts & Crafts is a Sustainable Impact Startup Studio co-building companies that are actually helpful

Closing Your Eyes Doesn't Make It Go Away

Imagine on your way to work tomorrow, you see an unattended child drowning. Most people would stop what they were doing and prioritize saving the child's life. What about the things you don't see?

1. Every 6 seconds a parent watches their child under 5 die from a preventable cause (source).
2. Over 20% of U.S. high school students seriously considered suicide and over 9% actually attempted suicide (source).
3. 1 out 6 people don't have a middle school equivalent education (source).
4. 1 out of 7 people live in slum conditions, who face hunger, sleep on a floor and have no access to electricity or clean water (source).
5. Over 73% of our wildlife has declined and every year we have an even worse carbon footprint (source, source).

United Nation's Blueprint For Global Peace & Prosperity

In 2015 the United Nations created the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a shared blueprint for how we can achieve global peace and prosperity for all people and the planet, now and into the future.

There are 17 Goals and 169 Measurable Targets that end deprivations such as poverty, hunger and inequalities while improving health, education and economic growth at the same of addressing all our planet's environmental challenges.

In 2025, the. U.N. announced we are severely off track to achieve our goals. In order to achieve our goals, we either need to increase global spending on these initiatives by $17 trillion or transform all existing interventions deployed to these problems to be 31% more efficient (source).

Startups Innovating For Public Benefit Solves Our UN SDG Gap

We believe humankind has a much better chance of achieving the UN SDG's by focusing on making everything 31% more efficient over focusing on increasing total spend by $17 trillion.

When we think about what environments have traditionally attracted our world's brightest talent to invent new transformative solutions, we think about our startup ecosystem.

We know this is possible because some founders have already built impact startups innovating in service of our public benefit that have blown past the minimal 31% cost efficiency target.

Case Studies:

1. Aurolab invented a new solution that dropped the average cost for cataract surgery from $100 to $3 per patient, a 3,300% efficiency gain from previous interventions (source).
2. Evidence Action invented a new solution that provided clean water access to millions of people in rural African countries that was 5,000% more efficient than previous interventions (source).
3. Opower used behavioral science and personalized energy reports, helping U.S. households cut energy use by an average of 3.5% while delivering more than 300% efficiency return for every dollar invested (source).

Most Founders & Investors Are Not Helping

Unfortunately we have found that a high majority of founders and investors are not focused on building startups in service of our public benefit to bridge the gap for global peace and prosperity.

Founders:

1. 4,905 U.S. startups received early stage funding in 2024 (source).
2. Only 2.7% (132) of those startups had Impact Business Models (source).

Investors:

1. There is a total of $128 trillion of assets managed by investors (source).
2. Only 1.2% of those assets are invested in companies focused on impact (source).
3. Only 0.02% of those assets are invested in early stage impact startups (source).

And Most Startups Fail

Another reason why we are not seeing enough startups innovating in service of our public benefit is because 90% of startups fail (source). And when they don't fail, it typically takes over 6 years and $52.7M of capital to become self-sustainable and profitable (source).

When digging into sources for why most startups fail, you mostly come across reasons like this. We don't believe in any of these reasons because they are all either proximate causes or a consequence of failure itself.

We find this interesting because we believe this is crack into one of the largest causal systemic reasons for why most startups are so capital intensive and typically fail:

Our Important Truth That Most People Don't Agree With

We believe the real root issues why most startups fail can be identified, significantly mitigated and proactively managed to build startups with much higher average success rates and with a lot less capital.

Some examples include:

1. The unspoken perverse, yet aligned incentives, between founders & startup investors
2. Not learning the customers true behaviors, resulting in creating solutions looking for a problem
3. Expanding the market or creating new products before winning your first segment
4. Cultivating performance cultures instead of experimental learning cultures

Arts & Crafts is run by founders who have previously built multi-billion dollar startups who have learned some of these by luck and some of these the hard way.

We have spent decades reflecting on these deep truths and have built the entire Arts & Crafts playbook to natively integrate all these lessons. We expand on that below.

Arts & Crafts is a Startup Studio

Arts & Crafts is a Startup Studio that exclusively co-builds Sustainable Impact Startups (SIS):

1. We are a team of founders who have previously created multi-billion dollar companies, now looking to co-build with the next generation
2. We hands-on partner with only a few founders at a time, starting from the earliest stages of ideation through product market fit, until the startup is fully self-sustainable
3. We invest $500k on day 1 to every Startup and then offer the additional capital required in order for the startup to become financially profitable and self-sustaining
4. We legally guarantee and protect the integrity of every startup by incorporating as mission locked, Public Benefit Corporations, that is controlled by the founders

Sustainable Impact Startups

A Sustainable Impact Startup (SIS) is an early-stage company whose legal primary purpose is to generate both profit and a measurable public benefit aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

It derives the majority of its revenue directly from mission-driven products, ensuring that impact is inseparable from its core business model.

These companies deliberately build in a sustainable, stakeholder-oriented manner that prioritizes customers, workers, the environment, community, and shareholders instead of traditionally only being liable for shareholder financial gain.

They focus on becoming default-alive by reaching self-sustaining profitability before scaling, intentionally lowering the capital required to succeed and increasing the odds of long-term transformative impact.

Our Process

Phase 1 - Apply to Arts & Crafts

1. Online Application - Founders who are interested in co-building a Sustainable Impact Startup that want to learn more and potentially apply start here
2. Live Pitch - Applications that met our Startup criteria selection process will be invited to live pitch the Arts & Crafts team

Phase 2 - Mutual Vibe Check

1. 30-Day Company Validation - Founders that had strong live pitches will be formally invited to accept the Arts & Crafts Standard Deal Terms and to start a mutual and collaborative 30-day company validation process
2. Go or No Go - At the end of the 30-day process, the Founders and Arts & Crafts team will both each decide if it makes sense to officially co-build together or not
3. Legal Incorporation - If both sides agree, a 14-day legal process kicks off to officially incorporate the company and for all stakeholders to execute the long form documents outlined in the Arts & Crafts Standard Deal

Phase 3 - 12 Weeks At The Ranch

1. Investment & On-Site Residency - Arts & Crafts invests $500k into the Startup on day 1 and the Founding Team relocates to Arts & Crafts Ranch in San Diego for its 12-week on-site residency program
2. 2 Years In 12 Weeks - An intensive 12-week program where the Startup launches a private beta at the end of its 1st week and then launches a new version of its private beta every week for 12-weeks in a row
3. Public Launch - At the end of the 12-week residency program, the Startup will publicly launch and the Founding Team returns home

Phase 4 - The Path of Sustainability

1. One ICP & One Product Until Profitability - All operational efforts focused on optimizing one Ideal Customer Profile and one Product until it can deliver the promised impact while achieving self-sustaining financial profitability
2. Securing Additional Funding Required - Arts & Crafts offers additional remaining funding required to the Startup and/or helps the Startup secure external funding required to get to self-sustaining financial profitability
3. Maturing Sustainability - After the Startup is financially self-sustaining, the company matures its operations in order to maintain its self-sustaining financial sovereignty while optimizing its long term sustainable impact to all stakeholders (customers, environment, community, workers and shareholders)

Our Building Philosophies

Below are eight core building philosophies that drive most of the behavior of how we co-build Sustainable Impact Startups:

1. Consciously Define Success Then Align All Stakeholder Incentives
2. Prioritize Default Alive Profitability & Impact Delivered, Then Scale
3. Properly Diagnose If There Really Is An Impact Problem
4. Make Decisions Primarily From High Quality Customer Feedback
5. Entire Company Focuses On One Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) & One Product
6. Cultivate Learning Cultures, not Performance Cultures
7. Protect The Spaciousness Required To Actually Gain 10x Leverage
8. Every Single Employee Must Ship Daily & Run Weekly Experiments

Our Theory of Change

If we can co-create a small handful of high quality Sustainable Impact Startups (SIS) every year with the next generation of founders co-building in the trenches with founders who have already built multi-billion dollar startups and provide the capital required;

Assuming enough future follow-on investors seeking blended impact returns and founders accepting the Art's & Crafts Standard Deal terms;

Then we can expect Arts & Crafts to have a portfolio of capital efficient and profitable Sustainable Impact Startups that drives outsized positive social and environmental change in a highly desirable and repeatable unit economical model for other founders and investors to adopt and scale;

Which will contribute to systemic change that increases the (1) total Assets Under Management allocated for early stage Sustainable Impact Companies, (2) the total amount of Sustainable Impact Startups that receive early stage funding and (3) the probability of success for Sustainable Impact Startups achieving profitability to secure delivering long term transformative impact;

Ultimately becoming one of the most effective and efficient causal strategies towards achieving global peace and prosperity in our lifetimes as defined by the United Nation's Sustainable Development Agenda.

Co-Build With Us

A lot of founders start off with ambitious visions to change world but get pushed into chasing vanity metrics, burning capital, and ultimately building companies they are not proud to call their legacy.

It does not have to be that way. Let's co-build a Sustainable Impact Startup that invents long lasting transformative solutions to our world’s most important problems.

Together we can break the chain and build something we are both proud of. Let's lead by example and raise the standards that redefines success for the entire startup ecosystem.

Come join us.