WHAT IS SIDEDOORS

Nearly half of America’s billion-dollar startups were founded by people born outside the US. We’re documenting them one by one, and we intend to get to all of them.

Our product is our research. We interview key people who were in the room, which means founders, early employees, board members and investors who wrote the first checks. We watch every recorded interview the founder has ever given and we study the documents everybody overlooks: early decks, regulatory filings, 2014 instagram photos, court orders, and the local TV interview from fifteen years ago that nobody ever subtitled.

Sidedoors is written bi-weekly, for people who are building a company, or are about to.

WHO WE ARE

I’m Anastasia. I meet about a thousand people a year who want to start a company. My job is to work out which of them is going to build something enormous and to write their first $250k check, usually before there is anything at all to look at: no product, no team, often no idea. That’s what I do at The Bridge, the San Francisco residency for non-US founders. I started Sidedoors to understand what greatness looks like before there is a company to point at.

I’m Aish, a 19-year-old writer and content producer from India. I currently run content at The Bridge. I’ve been studying and making founder-led content since I was 17, and it has opened a surprising number of side doors for me (I swear the pun was unintended). HackerRank’s CEO (Series D, $115M+) found me through my writing and brought me onto the content team to lead X, where I generated 5M+ impressions in my first three months. I got into The Bridge by cold-texting Anastasia on her number. Now, I’m building Sidedoors with her, which barely feels like work because it lets me do what I love most: study the best founders in the world.