It’s funny in the venture capital business that, every few years, you get to announce “we’re still in business!” So: we’re still in business!
We will now start to invest out of our third fund — thank you, Bloomberg.
We started day one — in 2013 — with a $75 million fund. Our second fund was the same, another $75 million fund. Our third fund is… wait for it… $75 million. Same same same. Same.
Truth is, a lot of what our third fund does will feel… familiar.
> our focus on the future of work — and machine intelligence in particular (thanks to Shivon Zilis’s early prodding)
> our fund size (∴ check size, ownership, all that)
> our stage (earliest! or, as they now say, “pre-seed and seed”)
> our team (hi Karin Klein, James Cham, Angela Martin, Minn Kim, Harley Sugarman, Lisa Wehden, et. al.!)
All published and open sourced here at bloombergbeta.com…
We’re feeling a galaxy of gratitude for the founders who invited us to back them. They are the suns; we’re just planets, orbiting one more fund-time.
Our reason for backing founders also remains the same.
There are problems that need fixing. Work is the thing we do with more of our waking hours than anyone else, and it must be better.
Our religion remains the same: Founders are our customers. We serve them by doing what they tell us needs doing, full stop.
To founders, we offer our perspective: bridging tech to the world beyond. For example:
> Organizing founders on trips to public schools teaching entrepreneurship and even prison
> Inviting VCs to visit smaller cities around the country, finding customers and second office spots
> Hosting everyone from novelists to members of Congress to CEOs of global conglomerates to activists to academics — leaders outside tech who play influential roles in our modern lives
(Connecting worlds, that’s us taking another page from the Bloomberg book.)
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OK, you get it. Our 2019 fund is the same as 2016 and 2013. Anything new at all??
We’ve begun a new experiment, Beacon, invented by Minn Kim, to back founders even earlier — playing the Limbo with backing people as soon as we can possibly justify it. Ultra fast, ultra small, ultra soon.
I’ve also taken the Founders Pledge, committing to donate 5% of my carry in this new fund to organizations in need. I’ll match it with another half a percent for every founder in our portfolio who pledges.
(Oh and since two founders already took the pledge — I just upped to 6%.)
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In a sideways time in the world, this is a moment where I’m standing tall with thanks. Thanks for our purpose, using the tool of serving startups to make business work better. Thanks for our partnership as a team, bringing out my best (and muzzling my worst!)… Karin Klein, James Cham, Angela Martin, Minn Kim, Harley Sugarman, and our newest, Lisa Wehden.
To my family, who deal with my blast radius more often than they should.
And to our customers, the founders who have invited us to serve them these past years.
