Boris Wertz
@bwertz
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Entrepreneur @abebooks (sold to AMZ) turned investor @versiononevc . Backing mission-driven founders who are early in new areas. Curious + optimistic. 🇨🇦/acc
🇨🇦
Joined January 2008
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Pinned Tweet
*Update on
@VersionOneVC
thesis*
We back mission-driven founders who are early in new areas.
---
We review our investment thesis every few years so that we are 100% aligned on the North Star that guides and keeps us centred amidst all the noise in early-stage VC.
Our current
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“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” - RIP Stephen Hawking
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Career advice I would give my younger self:
- pick a nascent industry w/ huge growth potential over next decades (tech in 2000-20, crypto now)
- figure out your superpower (entrepreneur vs operator vs investor)
- work for yourself, not someone else
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Canada is quickly becoming one of the best destinations for global tech talent:
🇨🇦 Startup Visa (fast-tracking foreign tech entrepreneurs to permanent residency so they can build their co's in Canada)
🇨🇦 Global Skills Strategy (2 weeks processing guarantee for work permits)
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Anyone critical of NFT's should just watch how they have take over the conversation in high schools. For our two older kids (grade 7 & 9) and their friends, NFT's seem to be everywhere these days: creating, experimenting, buying, selling.
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Whenever you listen to successful people talk abt how they got here, they often recount at least one instance in which somebody took a huge bet on them early in their career.
Be that person that takes bets on others - no better way to have a huge impact on somebody else's life!
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So interesting to watch how running a VC fund on the side has become a business model for athletes, influencers, writers, coaches, entrepreneurs...
Wouldn't be surprised if we saw thousands of those "nano funds" soon. The creator economy is also becoming an investor economy.
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State of VC right now:
* Extreme competition btw VC firms for any deal w/ solid traction and/or experienced founders
* Sharp increase of pre-emptive deals
* Increased focus of VC firms on finding companies outside of SV
>> probably the best market to raise capital since '99!
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❤️ that
@UniswapProtocol
story!
"All students who, as part of a class project, participated in listing and swapping a token on Uniswap received 400 UNI. [...] valued at roughly 12,000 liras, which accounts for nearly half the yearly education fee [...]."
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What are the best examples of someone having a successful "second act" in their career? (as in: world class in first career and then replicated that in a completely different field)
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The government of Canada has unfortunately completely lost their plot on innovation & entrepreneurship:
- trying to pick winners (eg superclusters)
- proposing very rigid AI regulation
- dramatic increase of # of public sector employees
- increasing capital gain rate
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Biggest lessons learned that I constantly hear from 1st-time founders:
- should have invested more aggressively in building out recruiting function
- should have hired more senior/experienced people earlier
Building the best possible team is the most important task for founders.
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VC's have always relied on the strength of their networks for dealflow.
As an increasing number of founders come from more diverse backgrounds, VC's will have to change to stay relevant.
More diverse partnerships, more openness towards cold emails, less pattern matching.
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Best summary of the opportunity for well-positioned start-ups in a downturn
(from the Sequoia "Adapt to Endure" deck)
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$100m in additional capital for mission-driven founders in SaaS, marketplaces, crypto, climate/energy & healthcare - very excited to announce
@versiononevc
fund IV & Opportunities Fund II.
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Early signs of start-up success:
- founders being 100% focused on talking to customers & finding PMF
- rate of product releases
- founders obsessing about quality of first 10 team members
- how quickly founders fire 1st underperforming employee
- consistency of investor updates
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Seed = finding product-market fit
Series A = figuring out distribution
Series B = building the organization
Our most recent
@VersionOneVC
blog post on what founders should focus on at each stage of their startup’s journey.
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One of the most frequently asked questions from marketplaces founders is what side of the marketplace to focus on.
The answer is BOTH but at different times.
[thread] 👇
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Any government in the world should be laser focused on this chart and try to change it in their favour (and incredible to see how much of a net importer of talent the US is)
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Incredibly excited to announce the launch of the
@VersionOneVC
Startup Handbook, bringing together all the best practices we have observed over the past 10 yrs in 3 areas:
👥Building your team
📈Building your organization
💰Building your investor base
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Version One launches $70M Fund IV and $30M Opportunities Fund II
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One of the kindest things you can do for somebody is to "put them in business" and believe in them when nobody else does:
- Hire someone into their first job
- Be the first one to buy someone's new product/service
- Write the first cheque for a new start-up
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It is sometimes useful to simply look at the tech industry as a series of pendulum swings:
bundling 🔁 unbundling
centralized 🔁 decentralized
growth focus 🔁 profitability focus
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India observations
A few quick observations from my trip to India last week:
- 25% of all AI-related Github commits come from India, 12% of active blockchain devs are based in India - developer talent is incredibly deep and getting even deeper
- AI is huge threat + opportunity
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It is so interesting to watch how more experienced people often see someone's talent much earlier than they themselves can see it.
If you happen to get such feedback, take the opportunity to increase your ambitions, you can probably go much further in life than you thought. 💪
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Sharing (preliminary) results from our fund I - a few take-aways:
* the power law that drives venture returns is alive and well
* early-stage investing takes real patience - losses come quick, winners take 7-10 years to develop
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1st IPO for
@VersionOneVC
w/ many more hopefully to come!
Congrats
@brian_armstrong
&
@FEhrsam
for building an iconic company that has helped tens of million ppl get into crypto.
Don't be fooled, it is still day 1 for both
@coinbase
& crypto in general.
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To everyone affected by the US immigration ban that got announced today - 🇨🇦 still wants you!
Canada is quickly becoming one of the best destinations for global tech talent:
🇨🇦 Startup Visa (fast-tracking foreign tech entrepreneurs to permanent residency so they can build their co's in Canada)
🇨🇦 Global Skills Strategy (2 weeks processing guarantee for work permits)
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Every startup needs to figure out its flywheel - it provides incredible strategic clarity on what levers to focus on. This is a great example from Doordash's S-1 showing how their business has 3 interlocking flywheels built around local network effects, economies of scale & brand
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So incredibly excited to announce Version One's new General Partner, Angela Tran Kingyens (
@ATKingyens
) - looking forward to building
@versiononevc
into a true VC franchise and continuing to back the most ambitious and visionary entrepreneurs!
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1/
@versiononevc
turns 9 years this month - time to share some stats from investing about $100m across 3 early-stage funds into 73 portfolio companies over that period of time.
Thread 👇👇👇
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Mad respect for entrepreneurs that ended up on the wrong side of COVID, had their co's almost destroyed over night & have been working incredibly hard over the past year to get them back on track.
Easy to forget in these bubbly times w/ valuations at ATH for most of the market.
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If I was a late-stage investor and only had one metric to base my investment decision on, it would be Glassdoor reviews of the company. Attracting and retaining talent is the most important leading indicator of start-up success.
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Incredibly excited to announce our first
@VersionOneVC
Opportunity Fund with $25m in commitments.
This new fund will allow us to double down on our most successful portfolio companies - and helps us to partner with our founders even longer!
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The ultimate freedom is being able to choose
- who you work with
- what you work on
- when to work
- from where to work
(to be clear, you will probably never score 100% on all 4 dimensions but also many ways / jobs that can get you very close to "perfection")
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Have backed close to 20 emerging GP's over the past 5 yrs & looking to add 3-4 more to the portfolio this year.
Areas of interest: crypto, climate, deep tech, India (& any truly unique/differentiated strategy)
Must focus on pre-seed/seed, ideally < $20m fund size.
DM's open.
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“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.” Clayton M. Christensen - RIP
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Fascinating how a crisis can accelerate decisions that should have been taken a long time ago but nobody wanted to touch while times were good.
Closing an unprofitable line of business. Giving up office perks nobody needed. Automating manual processes.
What did you accelerate?
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"Amazon is hundreds of small, decentralized, atomized teams sitting on top of standardised common internal systems." -
@BenedictEvans
on the Amazon Machine
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.
@bhorowitz
is quickly becoming one of the most influential thinkers on management and culture - great podcast between him and
@tferriss
that every CEO and founder should listen to
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It is always incredibly tough for a founder to get a "no" from a VC when fundraising.
Remind yourself of 3 things though:
- VC's are more often wrong than right
- A "pass" can sometimes come along w/ great feed-back on how to improve the business
- You only need *1* term sheet!
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Very few people can explain crypto in the historical context of tech innovation and w/ novel analogies to real world concepts like
@cdixon
does in this podcast w/
@patrick_oshag
- highly recommended for anyone interested in crypto, from DeFi to NFT's!
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Very happy to announce
@VersionOneVC
fund III with $57m (USD $45m) in commitments! With fund III, we’re doubling down on all that has worked in our previous funds: investing in seed companies & platforms across North America that leverage network effects
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I've been through the 2000/01 & 2008/09 downturns. This one is clearly happening so much faster than the other 2.
But I am also observing an unprecedented amount of compassion & empathy: individuals & companies are (almost always) doing the right thing. Hoping it stays that way.
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What's your best productivity hack?
Mine has been the rule to touch every email only once (read and then immediately either reply, forward, delete, file or flag as "follow-up")
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"The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking"
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We’re looking for our 3rd partner at Version One
At
@VersionOneVC
, we are strong believers that early-stage investing is best done by small teams that are aligned around a differentiated investment thesis and are investing with high conviction. The partnership is currently
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1/ Spent time at
@AWSreInvent
today - incredibly to see into what juggernaut
@awscloud
has grown in only 12 yrs:
- $27b annual rev
- 46% yoy growth
- 50%+ market share
- 25K+ employees
Competitors should be very scared by the size of the ambition & speed of execution of AWS.
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The
@VersionOneVC
anti-portfolio, an incredible group of companies we should not have passed on:
@honey
@shopify
@hootsuite
@instacart
@cartainc
@casper
@SonderStays
Take-away for founders: A “pass” means nothing abt the future success of your company!
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I have now heard of dozens of engineers that have moved to Toronto or Vancouver after their H1B visa got declined. Welcome to 🇨🇦, excited to have you! (And please reach out if you are looking for a job and I will personally connect you to
@versiononevc
portfolio co's!)
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Chief Operating Officers often play very different roles at different companies but the position is usually most useful if CEO & COO are yin and yang (e.g. extravert <-> introvert; product focus <-> sales & marketing focus; customer/external focus <-> operations/internal focus).
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Venture capital is so tough b/c most success is driven by principles that appear counterintuitive:
- focus on asymmetric upside, not what you could lose
- let winners run, don't take money off the table too soon
- getting a huge wave right often more important than picking skills
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Very comprehensive overview of the third-party API economy - largest 3 API-first co's (Twillio, Stripe, Okta) now have a combined market cap of over $100b
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Very, very good news from our portfolio co'
@scanwellhealth
which will soon distribute the 1st fully at-home test for COVID-19:
- Results within 15m
- Test was widely used in China
- Rapid serology test detecting IgM & IgG antibodies (= exposure to virus)
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Today marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At the time, I was a 16yr old living in West Germany & I still remember the magic of Nov 9, 1989 - ppl from East & West celebrating together in the streets.
Let's hope we see more of such magic moments of peace!
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When it comes to start-ups, there might not be a better feeling than having a co-founder that you can go to war with.
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People still underestimate how quickly venture capital is going global
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At the idea stage a founder needs to ignore advice - if you listened to the naysayers, you would never become an entrepreneur.
But as you scale your company, listening and learning become crucial capabilities.
Finding the right balance at every stage is the really tough part.
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The internet only knows two types of winners: horizontal platforms w/ winners takes all dynamics and highly-specialized vertical players. Not much value will be created in between these two extremes.
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"It is rare in the crypto sector to find a team that has successfully launched a blockchain, a wallet, and a number of popular applications."
@fredwilson
on
@dapperlabs
- I think most people have yet to realize what
@rohamg
&
@dete73
pulled off.
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@UTMBWorldSeries
disappointing behaviour by
@UTMBWorldSeries
&
@VailResorts
- we had an amazing Whistler trail race w/ WAM, run by people who deeply care about the local community. If you asked any of the 1000's of WAM participants, don't think a single one would say that this is a better option.
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Excited about our new fund and excited about doubling down on Seattle
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Great reminder while you are thinking about New Year's resolutions
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OH from LP: "We are now looking for GP's that can create 10x funds"
The rule for VC has always been that you need to deliver 3x funds but looks like return expectations from LP's are starting to increase significantly (reflecting the massive opportunity in tech in next decade).
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When your new Startup Handbook hits the front page of Hacker News and you get 20K+ visitors in 24h....
(HN is still such an incredible traffic machine, no other channel even comes close)
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@zachweinberg
Will probably not convince you otherwise but you're missing the big picture when it comes to crypto imo: creating an open financial system (and a scalable economic layer for any information market in general) will be hugely impactful for society. And yes, still a long way to go.
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The list of US tech co's that couldn't succeed in China is getting longer: eBay, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, & now Uber. Jury's out on Amazon.
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Incredibly busy & exciting quarter for the
@VersionOneVC
portfolio family:
💰$700m+ raised in follow-on capital (
@dapperlabs
,
@GetJobber
,
@shippo
,
@SuperRare
,
@opyn_
,
@usepatch
,
@TopHat
,
@trylolli
)
🚀Coinbase S-1 filing
👋 new investments:
@ArweaveTeam
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It is amazing to see how many start-ups are able to improve their unit economics / efficiencies if they are forced to by external factors (like a failed fundraise or a general tightening of capital markets).
Good reminder that bad news can often create much stronger businesses.
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Great analysis by CBRE on how tech talent markets have developed between 2015-2020:
- SF still highest concentration (except for Ottawa >
@shopify
effect!)
- 🇨🇦 on fire (Toronto & Vancouver 2 fastest growing markets)
- Seattle fastest growing US market (& 3rd overall)
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"Entrepreneurs operate on RAM, not hard drive space"
(paraphrasing Sam Bankman-Fried -
@SBF_FTX
- talking about an entrepreneur's need to stay on top of many different priorities in a dynamic environment vs. having a detailed knowledge of everything that happened in the past)
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7+ years of crypto investing at
@VersionOneVC
:
2017:
@Celo
,
@coinbase
,
@Stacks
2018:
@dapperlabs
,
@trylolli
2019:
@NexusMutual
,
@opyn_
2020:
@Uniswap
,
@SuperRare
2021:
@ArweaveEco
,
@definedfi
,
@TenderlyApp
2022:
@DinariGlobal
2023:
@ether_fi
anti-portfolio:
@Sorare
,
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"It is the slope that matters, not the y-intercept."
Most important rule to evaluate talent.
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"It’s perfectly healthy to have an idea tomorrow contradicting your idea today" Jeff Bezos
http://t.co/jnqF9a19Cl
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I just spent $3.94 to send $100 worth of Bitcoin - the times that BTC was an affordable way of sending money are clearly over.
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Our best investments at
@VersionOneVC
have almost always been the result of having had strong conviction in founders and opportunities at a moment when nobody else believed in them. So if the mainstream market doesn't believe in you, look for an investor with conviction
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Happy Canada Day! 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
I arrived in Canada exactly 18 years ago - incredibly thankful for all of the opportunities this country has given me and I hope I can give back some of it over the years!
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Really good
@benedictevans
' deck covering the big questions emerging from the AI platform shift
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Loved this line from a monthly update from one of our co's:
"Culturally, we are learning to hold our macro optimism while having micro pessimism—challenging every detail that could bite us and rooting out unrealistic optimism."
Execution magic happens when you get this right.
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April was the busiest month ever for
@VersionOneVC
w/ 4 new deals (vs 8/yr usual pace):
📈 B2B marketplace, online collab' SaaS, API platform, crypto
💰 2 pre-seed, 1 seed, 1 "early" A
🌐 Lead for 3
If you're a product-focused founder w/ a slow burn, this should be your time!
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"If given a choice between a flashy operator or a grinder, I will take a grinder every time."
Great reminder by
@fredwilson
how grinding it out is much more successful over the long-term than looking for that silver bullet or that magic move.
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If you are a startup looking for salary & equity data, consider checking out - very good (and free!) survey data that you can slice by roles (from programming to marketing), location (all major startup ecosystems) and market (e.g. enterprise vs consumer)
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A few of our founders open every single board meeting reminding everyone of the mission of the company and why it matters.
Such a powerful way to set the tone for the rest of the meeting.
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Building start-ups is never a straight line.
Yapta was one of my first angel deals 10+ yrs ago & today got sold to COUP.
Co' went through 3 CEOs, a pivot, a major shareholder lawsuit & ran almost out of $ multiple times.
But persistence ultimately wins, thank you team Yapta!
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Fundraising advice for emerging GP's
A few weeks ago, I put out this tweet - which kind of blew up and led to 200+ inbound leads. …
Having looked at hundreds of decks & spoken to dozens of GPs in the past 2 weeks, here's some fundraising advice for
Have backed close to 20 emerging GP's over the past 5 yrs & looking to add 3-4 more to the portfolio this year.
Areas of interest: crypto, climate, deep tech, India (& any truly unique/differentiated strategy)
Must focus on pre-seed/seed, ideally < $20m fund size.
DM's open.
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It is crazy to observe how quickly tastes change among 12-13 year old boys: while Fortnite was all the rage a few months ago, they now declare it dead. But PokemonGo is back. Which was apparently dead over 2 years ago. Confused.
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Most important investment trends over the next decade:
- Digitization of everything
- Decentralized platforms
- Carbon-neutral economy
- Rise of the rest
What else?
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1/ When I started
@VersionOneVC
8+ yrs ago, the idea of a single GP was still very strange to many LP's ("what if you get hit by a bus?; how do you scale a fund as an individual?; what about the quality of investment decisions?") - today, most new early-stage funds are single GP.
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Investors w/ conviction don't ask "who else is in". Investors w/ conviction don't ask for detailed financial projections for a seed round. Investors w/ conviction don't need to see more traction. Investors w/ conviction buy into your vision & are excited to help you realize it!
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Looking back at the past 2 yrs, the thing I miss the most is spending in person time with our entrepreneurs.
You can invest over Zoom & you can have board meetings over Zoom but there is no good replacement for sharing a meal w/ a founder scheming on how to take over the world.
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I have no special talents.
I am only passionately curious.
- Albert Einstein
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