Miriam Rivera and Clint Korver co-founded both Ulu Ventures and Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs (SA&E). As of June 1 2014, Ulu has been referring entrepreneurs looking for potential Investments to Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs (SA&E).

Ulu is an early stage angel fund focused on investing in ventures that make information useful, internet-enabled consumer and business services, digital media, mobile, and online advertising. Typically Ulu partners with other angels or VCs to cumulatively invest from $500k and $1M.

Here are some ways in which Ulu helps its portfolio companies:

1. General Startup Advice
Miriam has experienced all phases of startup life. She co-founded a venture-backed company with Clint, helped grow Google from $80 million in revenue to over $10 billion, and even had the painful experience of shrinking Ariba during the dot com bust.

Clint is a serial entrepreneur with a solid track record of going from nothing to something. He raised $10 million in angel and venture money, sold millions of dollars of startup products and services to Fortune 500 companies, managed through 90 person months of not being able to pay salaries and only lost one person. He knows the pressures of startup life and can offer experienced counsel.

2. Business Model Development
Miriam has seen a wide variety of internet related business models. She knows which sound good but do not deliver, what large customers will accept, and how to tweak a business model to maximize revenue velocity.

Clint knows how to assess and model uncertainties. His strategic financial models identify a business model’s key drivers of value and risk, helping companies weigh tradeoffs and make an informed business model decision.

3. Strategy Development
Clint co-developed and pioneered a process called the Decision Compression Session (DCS) which allows teams to radically compress the time it takes to create strategies and make important decisions. A DCS focuses a team’s conversation on what matters most in a structured process that drives to a decision.

4. Revenue Velocity
Google won in the marketplace in part because its revenue generating engine operated so quickly. Through contract simplification, legal alignment with business goals, process streamlining, and taking smart legal risks, Miriam built Google’s legal department into a competitive advantage where 80% of the revenue deals were signed within 3 days of entering the legal department. By comparison, most businesses take weeks or even months to close large revenue deals.

5. Negotiation Strategy
Miriam has negotiated hundreds of deals for Google and others. She knows where to find negotiating leverage, when to push, when to walk, and how to close the deal.

Clint’s Ph.D. thesis at Stanford was entitled “The Value of Information in Negotiation.” He has created strategic negotiation models for large technology, banking, and pharmaceutical companies. These models enable companies to make intelligent tradeoffs and respond quickly to the give and take of a negotiation.

6. Decision product advice
Clint has built multiple online decision analytic products, he holds multiple patents in web-based decision analytics, and he can help companies avoid decision architecture dead ends when building product that help individuals or organisations make better decisions.

Notable investments by Ulu include: Bridge U.S. (immigration software), NovoEd (Stanford University entrepreneurship MOOCs platform), Palantir ( data visualisation and analytics software), SoFi (community-based lending programs for students in US universities) and Viridis (online middle-skill job training platform).