A letter to founders,

89 Christopher is a $2M fund backed by Sequoia and Bloomberg Beta built to support entrepreneurs like ourselves.

We (Varun Anand, Nitin Gupta) have been best friends since our freshman year at Penn. Our fund is named after the address of our 300 sq. ft, 6th floor walkup, shoebox apartment we shared in the West Village. It was in this apartment where we began our journeys working in the startup ecosystem. Every night was a brain dump of what we saw, what we learned, and what we were going to do next. We want to build similar relationships between us and a small number of founders, operating on a first text basis on the few areas we know best.

We can uniquely solve a handful of important problems all companies face:

• Compensation: Nitin built the benchmarking product at Pave and is the first call for dozens of founders when it comes to employee + executive compensation. We expect you’ll save multiples more in dilution from the advice Nitin shares than our own investment.
• GTM: Clay operates at the edge of all things GTM and Varun is a few steps ahead of the founders we invest in, having built all the business functions at Clay from scratch. He helps founders with tactical advice on hiring, marketing, sales, team structure, planning, etc.

We participate in Pre-Seed and Seed investments with a $100K check. We aspire to be your first text or call on the above topics and anything you need on the company building journey — from website designer recommendations to how we set goals.

Our Investments

“We weren’t even fundraising but felt we had to make room for 89 Christopher. From introductions to thought partnership on hires to closing candidates, they are hands on and make their impact felt” -Jasper Story, CEO of Yarn

“We proactively chose to work with Varun and Nitin over other investors. They are proactive in helping us think through questions on compensation and strategy (especially related to building data products, where they both have built great companies). We’re glad that we fought to make room for them in our round” - Founder (Not Yet Announced)

"Varun and Nitin are my first text on sales, compensation, team, and the misc. 100 other things that come up when building. Its a feature that they're both actively building companies. Their information is relevant and they have empathy for what I'm going through. They were the first check I committed to for both the pre-Seed and my Seed." -Josh Ip, CEO of Ranger