Short answer: Yes.
For most of VC history, investors had a hard rule: no investment unless you were full-time. When we started our incubator, we had that same point of view. But the bar for what you can build part-time has changed. The rules should too.
Longer answer: Now more than ever, you can raise funding without being full-time because of what you can do on nights and weekends. A great engineer can keep their salary while doing customer and product discovery — building real conviction in what they're making before they quit, and long before they ask an investor to believe in it.
We've funded numerous entrepreneurs while they're still in their full-time roles because we can see high execution velocity while part-time. When we first invested in Rebulk, they weren't full-time. But they were shipping product constantly and acquiring customers. They went on to join YC after our investment. Today, they’re crushing it. Seeing what founders can do part-time is one of the best indicators of what they'll do when it's their only focus.
Someone part-time may have a family, multiple kids, or a mortgage — there are real reasons you can't just quit tomorrow. That's understood. But the scrappy founder finds a way anyway. Maybe they fund it with early revenue. Maybe they're just really good at articulating what they're building. If you can do that clearly, you can raise before going full-time, and you might not even need a lead to do it.
If you're a non-technical cofounder going part-time and you don't have much proof of concept, it's going to be hard to raise. Needing money just to hire your technical co-founder is a tough sell. Investors aren't funding your vision of what the team could look like — we're funding what the team has already shown.
If you want to raise without being full-time, you need two things:
Execution velocity.
Ability to articulate the problems you’re solving.
If you're building something worth funding, pitch us today.
