PEO’s

As a fund manager, sales people from PEO’s hit us up all the time.  It’s a time suck from our end.  In the main, we let the companies we invest in decide who they are going to use.  If they want to chat with us about it, we talk to them.  The final decision is the CEOs and we stand by it.  It’s just not that big a deal to us.  We have plenty of other things to worry about.

If you don’t know, a PEO is a Professional Employer Organization and they allow smaller companies to outsource their human resources needs like health insurance and other benefits.  They are at a lot of the startup events.

Honestly, I don’t know the difference between one PEO and another.  Even for our fund, each of us has our own insurance.  We don’t have an specialized HR program for our two employees.  One of the reasons is we had it going in and one of the others is our needs are pretty different.  One partner has small kids and the other has grown kids who are on their own and out of the house.  When it comes to this sort of thing, one size fits all policies don’t work.

Almost all our companies use one of the big three cloud providers, Amazon, Azure or Google.  We don’t care who they use as long as it’s secure and works for them.  When they get further along in the process, they can do the cost/benefit analysis to see if it would make sense to move out of the cloud and into something else.  It’s not our decision.

As a fund, we already have several service providers we lean on for banking and insurance.  Insurance can be a biggie.  Some deals need key man insurance, some others don’t.  Banks specialize in different needs.  Some banks are better fits for certain kinds of businesses than other banks.   We use Carta to do a lot of cap table management and encourage companies we invest in to use it as well.  Since we are a very small fund, we can’t afford a high cost fund manager, so we hired a person that came highly recommended to us.  BDO does our audit.  If a company needs new space, we refer them to Truss.  Why? Because I am invested as an angel and I always try to support my book when I can.