Starfish
Clarity for small, fast-moving teams.
Your business, out of your head.
After three decades in startups and five years running an accelerator, we kept seeing the same thing in every kind of small business: the core knowledge of how it runs lives nowhere you can find it.
Starfish is our answer.
Our experience has given us a deep, up-close understanding of how early-stage companies and small businesses try to get their operational feet under them — and how often they don't. Different industries, different owners, different stages. But one pattern was impossible to miss.
The core operating knowledge of a business — the stuff that defines how it actually runs — almost never lives somewhere you can find it. It lives in exactly three places, and all three are broken.
A folder of PDFs. A thread with the accountant from eighteen months ago. A screenshot in Messages. A downloads folder. Individually these are fine. Collectively they're unsearchable, unshareable, and routinely lost when someone closes a tab.
FragmentedSomeone made a Notion page. Another person started a Google Drive folder called "Company Info". Both were 30% complete the day they were created and have decayed since. Nobody trusts them, so nobody updates them, so nobody trusts them.
NeglectedBy far the most common — and most dangerous. The owner or founder remembers it, so it "exists." Until they're out sick, on a plane, or you bring someone new on and realize there's nothing to hand over.
At riskFragmented, neglected, at-risk — and all three fail exactly when you need them: during diligence, during an incident, during a hire, during a handoff. What starts as a minor annoyance quickly escalates into a deep time sink and a drag on efficiency — exactly the opposite of what small, fast-moving teams need.
The symptom is always the same: a question that should take fifteen seconds turns into an afternoon.
"What's our EIN?" — who has the letter?
"Where's the list of everything I'm supposed to have access to?" — spoiler: there isn't one.
"Who's our contact at the insurance company again?" — dig through email.
"Our domain expires next week — who has the registrar login?"
"We've been paying for that subscription for two years. Does anyone still use it?"
"Which vendor handles payroll tax? Which handles state filings? Are we sure?"
"The walk-in died overnight — who's our refrigeration vendor, and are we still under warranty?"
"Who's the property manager, and what's actually covered by the lease?"
Every one of these is cheap in isolation and ruinous in aggregate. They compound into what an ops person would recognize as a thousand-cut tax on doing anything at all. And that tax falls hardest on exactly the teams least able to absorb it — early-stage companies and small and mid-sized businesses, where every hour and every dollar is already spoken for.
Starfish is a place to capture the tacit and fleeting operational knowledge of an organization — the stuff that normally only lives in one person's head or scattered across a dozen surfaces — and make it a single, shared, current source of truth.
And it's not just a tech problem. A restaurant has a landlord, a maintenance contract, a POS vendor, and a permit about to lapse. A retail shop, a clinic, a studio, a nonprofit — same operational sprawl, different labels. Wherever a business runs on people, vendors, accounts, and renewals, the knowledge scatters the same way — and Starfish is built for all of it.
The things that should be simple become simple:
Starfish is opinionated about structure (you don't configure the modules) and flexible inside it (tags and the people and organizations you work with handle the nuance of your specific business). It's designed for teams small enough that nobody's job title is "ops" — but where someone still has to be the one who knows. And for the teams that do have ops people, it frees them from the busywork to focus on the real, high-value work only they can do.
If you can make operational knowledge easy to capture, easy to share, and cheap to keep current, a lot of the grind of running a small organization just … goes away. Handoffs get shorter. Audits get less scary. Hires get productive sooner. The owner or founder's head gets a little less crowded — and everyone is freed to focus on the work that actually matters.
That's the bet, and that's why we're building Starfish.