Dear Founders,

I am excited to share that we’ve closed on a $75M Gutter Capital Fund III, and as of today applications are open for Elbow Grease!

Elbow Grease is a small batch, founder-led accelerator that brings together the community we’ve created over the past 15-years into a life-changing experience for a select group of founders in the heart of New York City. While the program only lasts 10-weeks, we hope you’ll stick around. As long as you’re devoting your career to building your company, we want to be a part of it.

We started Gutter Capital out of a deep love for founders and a reverence for the important work you do. Building a company from scratch is as hard as it gets. We know because we’ve done it before. We are a different kind of venture firm; one that shows up early, stays late, and builds alongside founders. We get our hands dirty in ways that most investors would never dream of.

Over the past 5-years we’ve worked hard to earn our seat at the table. We’ve recruited over 100 people into the 24 company portfolio. We’ve introduced countless customers and almost every dollar of follow-on capital. We’ve crossed the Atlantic for user research, deployed code to production, and designed more marketing sites and fundraising decks than we’d care to admit.  We’ve walked founders through their first layoff, managed co-founder disputes, and navigated many different forms of near-death-experience. As long as you’re in the fight, we’re in it too.

At Gutter, our founders are our partners in word and deed. Because we share fund ownership back to founders we invest in, we are all on the same team. That means that when you work with Gutter, the founders of Opus, Bikky, Faraday, Forerunner, Treehouse, Rebuild, Recharged and countless others are in your corner too. Because we don’t invest in competitive companies, you’ll never wonder where our loyalties lie.

Our community is not theoretical, it’s as real as the building at the corner of Canal and Baxter streets, home to Gutter and 15 of our portfolio companies. Stop by any time of day, any day of the week and you’ll see why we say there’s something special happening on Canal Street.

Does this all sound good to you? Are you doing your life’s work? Well what are you waiting for? We need to know about it. We look forward to receiving your application, and hope to see you in Chinatown in September.

With Love and Elbow Grease, 

Dan Teran and James Gettinger