Read more about how we’re thinking and where we’re investing here.

Every website needs a light refresh, if not a complete overhaul, every once in a while. And we’re no different. The last time we updated our website was back in 2018…a lot has changed since then!

At Version One, we typically focus on early-stage investments, though we occasionally make exceptions for standout opportunities—like Clio’s Series C and Coinbase’s Series D. These unique investments delivered exceptional returns for V1 and our investors.

As you’ve come to expect on our blog, here’s a quick rundown of the highlights from the past few months. Q3 has been one of the quieter quarters in terms of public announcements. That doesn’t mean everyone took the summer off but rather have been heads down building. Look for some exciting news soon!

We’re excited to announce our investment in Optimotive, having led the company’s $2m seed round with participation from Garage and NewLab. Optimotive is building a fleet of advanced autonomous robots for some of the toughest, extreme environments… picture the rocky, dusty, muddy and unpredictable conditions common in industries like construction, mining, and oil & gas.

A month ago, we published a post outlining our latest thesis update, “We back mission-driven founders who are early in new areas.” In it, we expanded on the types of founders and opportunities we’re looking for: “We’re interested in those rare opportunities where a founder is creating a brand new category. These opportunities are fringy and emerging (some might call them crazy, weird, whacky or wild). There’s nothing obvious or inevitable about it. They’re building something the market hasn’t yet imagined and doesn’t fit neatly into an existing market category. But if they’re right, then the fringe picks up momentum and ultimately becomes a wave.”

If you’ve been reading our blog recently, you may have noticed that we updated our investment thesis and shared that deep tech is on our radar. We followed that post up with what deep tech means to us but since it is a broad category, we’ll be writing more on specific areas within deep tech over time.

We’ve officially hit the halfway point of 2024, and all we can say is… wow, this year is flying by. The entire V1 family has been pushing, hustling and going all-out, so we’d like to recognize some of the milestones and accomplishments from this quarter. As we say in every recap, this represents the tip of the iceberg; there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that we can’t talk about publicly (yet).

As you may have read in our thesis update last week, we have been spending more and more time in the deep/hard tech space, making our first six investments since 2021. Today, we’re excited to share that we co-led the $9 million seed round of Bedrock Materials, a Chicago-based startup that manufactures the active materials for sodium-ion batteries. We co-led the round with our good friends at Trucks Venture Capital and Refactor Capital.

It’s hard to believe we are halfway through another year…and the past three months have certainly been a bit of a rollercoaster. The thing about mission-driven founders, though, is they continue to build even during market uncertainty. When you’ve got a clear point of focus, you keep moving forward despite the surrounding turbulence. As Version One turned 10 last month, we reflected about how lucky we are to work with incredible mission-driven founders – and challenging times like this bolster our gratitude.

Today, we’re excited to share that we led the $2M seed round of Antimatter, whose mission is to build the world’s most valuable peer-to-peer learning network, centered around memes. Spacecadet and Ordinary Holdings joined us as new investors in this round, alongside existing investors Haystack and Compound.

I just returned from a weeklong trip to India, having spent a few days each in Delhi and Bangalore to meet with local entrepreneurs and investors. Noah Smith recently wrote about why everyone should get excited about India’s prospects. I shared his optimism going into this trip and came back even more bullish about the potential of India’s tech ecosystem.

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome 2022! Although 2021 was a tough year in many regards, it was also an incredible one. Start-up funding hit an all-time high. We’re seeing more interest from people to follow their passion and become founders. And in many ways, it feels we’re entering a golden decade for technology.

Today our portfolio company Coinbase went public via a direct listing.

Despite the obvious challenges, we ended 2020 on a strong note and, so far, our portfolio family has been riding a huge momentum wave. 2021 is proving to be an incredible year across our portfolio – from big funding announcements to significant product developments. We’re so proud of what everyone has been able to accomplish and are looking forward to spring – and more widespread vaccine availability so that we can all be together again soon!

We’re excited to announce our investment in SuperRare, the leading marketplace for blockchain-based digital art known as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

A well-timed funding announcement is your introduction to the world. It’s a way to increase your visibility with prospective investors, talent and customers. It’s also a signal that your company is gaining traction and momentum – you’re putting a stake in the ground for competitors.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve been increasingly focused on investing in climate and energy startups.

We’re excited to announce our investment in Arweave, a decentralized platform that enables anyone to store documents and applications forever.

Today, we are thrilled to announce our investment in Preemadonna, a consumer hardware startup that is powering creative expression in beauty. The company’s first product is the Nailbot – a connected, at-home manicure device that instantly prints on nails any photo, emoji, image or self-created design from the user’s camera roll.

We’re excited to announce our investment in Cap Hill Brands, a Seattle startup with the mission to build a next-generation CPG company by acquiring and operating digitally-native consumer brands. Combining the investment capital of a private equity firm and the deep operational experience of a startup accelerator, Cap Hill can lead brands to new levels of growth online.

Happy new year! We hope you’re well rested and recharged from the holidays! While 2020 brought unprecedented challenges, it’s also been a time of great innovation and perseverance. We’ve seen our startup companies find new ways to keep moving forward.

Two weeks ago, Boris recapped our fund and portfolio activity in what has been a year of unprecedented hardship, innovation and human accomplishment. If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at our post, The Version One year in review and looking ahead. We also like to send off each year by sharing some of the most popular blog posts from the past 12 months.

2020…the year of the pandemic. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of human loss and hardship, but it’s also been a year full of hope and innovation.

As we all know, the pandemic has forced companies to become remote organizations virtually overnight. While some CEOs and companies cannot wait until the conditions are safe for everyone to return to the office (e.g. Reid Hastings from Netflix), others have chosen to become “digital by default.” (e.g. Shopify).

In a recent Invest Like The Best podcast, the guest, who goes by the pseudonym Modest Proposal, described a 2×2 matrix for segmenting marketplace types. It’s a simple, yet very effective way to think about the differences in online marketplaces, from the original product marketplaces like eBay to the emerging services marketplaces. One axis represents products or services, and the other axis represents homogenous or heterogenous.

We updated our investment thesis a few months ago…we invest in mission-driven founders at the earliest stages.

Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Jam, a tool that brings Google Docs style collaboration to a live product/website. With Jam, you can comment on, or soon even suggest a change to your live product, from within the product itself, turning your live product into an all-encompassing workbench.

We’re thrilled to announce the third edition of “A Guide to Marketplaces.” We published our first edition five years ago and the second nearly three years ago. So much has changed since then – from the rise of B2B marketplaces to new crypto-native platforms.

We’re thrilled to announce the third edition of “A Guide to Marketplaces.” We published our first edition five years ago and the second nearly three years ago. So much has changed since then – from the rise of B2B marketplaces to new crypto-native platforms.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already October and time to recap another quarter. While we are all focused on staying safe (whether from Covid-19 or an unprecedented fire season), we are also looking ahead – working hard to build great companies and hopeful for 2021!

Few launches have been as timely. Over the past month, those of us on the west coast have been dealing with forest fires… if anyone ever doubted climate change, let us be the first to tell you that the orange, fiery, smokey skies and the ash raining down from it are all very real.

We are very pleased to announce our investment in Uniswap, the leading decentralized crypto exchange. We participated in the $11m Series A raise, alongside our friends at a16z, USV and Paradigm.

Since the early days, crypto has had four core promises:

Technology changes. The startup market evolves, and so do we as VCs. Over the past few months, we’ve reflected on our journey over the past decade, who we are and what we invest in. We’ve quietly made changes to our website. And here’s the official unveiling, with a quick synopsis of our new messaging and the thinking behind it.

Happy Canada Day & Happy (early) Fourth of July!

Today, one of our newest portfolio companies, Cape Privacy, announced their seed fundraise in conjunction with the public launch of their privacy platform. You can read more details about the launch here. We co-led the seed round with our friends at boldstart ventures with participation from Haystack, Radical, and Faktory Ventures.

We are very excited to announce our investment in Opyn, a decentralized options marketplace.

As we’ve been spending time on B2B marketplaces and dev tools/platforms, we’ve come to realize that there’s an interesting sub-category that combines elements of both: the API-as-a-marketplace.

Twenty years ago – in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom – expectations were high for B2B (product) marketplaces. The assumption was that online platforms would completely automate all supplier-customer transactions including retailing, wholesaling, and procurement.

If you spend a lot of time in crypto (like we do here at V1), it can be easy to lose sight of how non-crypto investors and entrepreneurs think about the space. The huge ICO run-up in 2017 brought a lot of attention to the vertical. Since then, many have stopped following the progress or have become downright negative about the space.

It’s been over five years since my friend Jonathan Libov and I wrote a blog series on digital healthcare. I revisit these posts every so often – most recently, when I wrote the 2020 edition of our areas of interest in healthcare. Each time I go back, I’m reminded that despite so much development in digital healthcare technology and infrastructure, we have yet to see mainstream scale.

This has been the longest quarter ever. Early January seems like an eternity ago. Countries, communities and households have been turned upside down.

With many companies moving to work from home (WFH) over the past few weeks, our portfolio company Kobalt (which provides security as a service for small-and mid-sized companies) has been getting a lot of calls from organizations that have had suffered incidents related to remote work.

In these unprecedented times, we know that controlling the spread of novel coronavirus requires social distancing and testing. While all of us are doing our parts to stay at home, there’s a lot of confusion, chaos and frustration surrounding coronavirus testing in the US.

It has been almost 10 years since Union Square Ventures launched the first Opportunity Fund, creating a strategy that has since been copied by many other VC’s. An opportunity fund is basically a separate pool of capital that allows a VC to continue to invest in its most promising portfolio companies once the core funds have exhausted their follow-on reserves. This puts the VC firm and its investors in a position to continue to exercise their pro-rata rights in later-stage rounds instead of giving them up.

Almost six years ago Marc Andreessen spelled out the playbook for creating the next Silicon Valley: Don’t copy the Valley but “figure out what domain is (or could be) specific to a specific region—and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain”.

Last week, I outlined our current areas of interest in healthcare: patient networks, digital therapeutics, patient care management, new diagnostics, and disrupting health insurance.

Over the past two weeks, Boris and Max have shared their investment themes and interests. Boris wrote about the latest opportunities in enterprise SaaS, while Max outlined some of his current investment themes, from the Open Internet to climate change. I’m going to continue the trend by highlighting some of the key areas in healthcare that I’m most excited about right now.

Enterprise SaaS has seen tremendous growth over the past decade and created many, many large stand-alone companies. Given the current public struggle of tech-enabled services, marketplaces, hardware and DTC companies, enterprise SaaS also feels like VC’s most favourite investment category right now.

In August 2018, we set out to add a third member to our team. A year and a half later, we are thrilled to welcome Max Webster as Version One’s new associate.

Last month, we released our startup guide. We appreciate all the feedback and we’ll be adding to the handbook over time so that it can be a more comprehensive source. So, please keep sending us your thoughts and suggestions.

Happy New Year! Here at Version One, we are very excited for 2020, but before we kick off a new year, we want to recap some of the highlights from last quarter. Q4 2019 was a busy quarter for us, and here’s some select news on the Version One family. Let’s ride the momentum into 2020!

Another year, another 50 blog posts. We’ve now reached four straight years of publishing at least once a week.

I’ve been thinking about productivity a lot lately. As an investor, time is always the scarcest resource. I can’t add more hours to the day, so the question is what can I be doing differently to make the best use of my time.

Over the past ten years, we have invested in and worked with close to 100 startups. Along the way, we have seen teams, ideas, and practices work spectacularly well. And, we’ve seen others that didn’t work out as expected.

Over the past ten years, we have invested in and worked with close to 100 startups. Along the way, we have seen teams, ideas, and practices work spectacularly well. And, we’ve seen others that didn’t work out as expected.

The consumer subscription business model is certainly not a new concept. And as we’ve been investing in more B2C companies recently, we’re reminded just how popular this strategy to monetization continues to be.

Last week, I shared that I am looking for opportunities in femtech.

I recently froze my eggs. I was actually surprised by how much energy, effort and time was involved. It’s not as straightforward as taking a “fertility test” today and then deciding to freeze your eggs tomorrow. The entire process demands months of preparation – from getting your body to optimal health to coordinating with care providers, pharmacies, etc. I’d like to do an AMA on Twitter sometime on what the whole process was like for anyone who is curious.

I know many people that are dyslexic: entrepreneurs, close friends, family members. And almost all of them have suffered from the general perception that dyslexia is a learning disability. Most of them had a terrible time with a school system that generally doesn’t recognize that dyslexic individuals learn differently – which usually results in them struggling with reading and writing, and losing a lot of self-confidence in the process.

Nearly two years ago, I published a post exploring four key opportunities in crypto.

Boom is one of the most ambitious start-ups I know – their mission is to develop supersonic planes and make the world more accessible. As you can imagine, you need incredibly talented people to achieve this goal. So when Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and CEO, recently shared insights into the company’s hiring playbook in an investor update, I asked him for permission to publish his email on our blog – “the Boom Way of hiring” is a great blue print for start-ups to take their recruiting processes to the next level. Enjoy!

We are very excited to announce our participation in Nexus, an Ethereum-based insurance mutual.

The WeWork drama of the past weeks is a great reminder of how perceptions of a start-up opportunity can change very dramatically in a short period of time. What was one of the highest flying start-ups with a private market valuation of $47B was brought down to Earth when trying to IPO. (Important to note that building a $10B – $15B start-up, the rumored valuation if the company went public today, is still an incredible achievement – even if it’s only about a third of the market cap a few months ago).

Before we head into the last quarter of the year, let’s take a few minutes to highlight some notable announcements made over the summer in the V1 portfolio.

A few weeks ago I shared my reflections on my first year as a GP. Along with all the well wishes (thank you!!), many asked what Version One is investing in these days. Our portfolio companies aren’t as quick to publicize fundraising rounds like they used to and as such, we’re not making as many public announcements about our activity.

Our portfolio company Dapper Labs, the creators of CryptoKitties and the Dapper Wallet, today announced Flow, a new blockchain for entertainment applications.

The first week of September is my VC anniversary. This milestone is always a great forcing function to reflect on the past year, my contributions to the startup community, as well as my overall goals.

The venture capital market has become very noisy over the past few years, especially on the early-stage side. Not a day goes by that a new fund isn’t being announced. Entrepreneurs have an increasing amount of financing options – that’s good news, but it also makes it harder to choose the right partners for your journey.

Inspired by Bill Campbell’s influence and having seen firsthand how our founders and CEOs have grown as a result of having an executive coach, I recently put out a call on Twitter for recommendations for coaches.

It was 20 years ago next month that we started JustBooks, creating a marketplace that connected buyers and sellers of used, rare, and out-of-print books. We initially launched in Germany before expanding into the UK and France, and then sold the company to our North American competitor AbeBooks in 2001.

Last week I blogged about the return multiples for our Fund I and how they perfectly illustrate just how much the power law drives VC return.

We raised our first fund in summer 2012. It was a $15m early-stage fund that we invested in 20 portfolio companies over the course of two and a half years. We’re now seven years in and the portfolio is maturing.

A year ago, we set out to add to our team. You may recall that we opened a search for an associate last summer.

A question I have been pondering for some time now, especially since a lot of our portfolio companies are now distributed organizations…

Last week was a rough week. I can be a pretty open book when it comes to my personal and professional life (though I’m not going to delve into the details here). As I shared what I went through, the kindness and encouragement from family, friends, and colleagues helped tremendously.

Happy Canada Day to our friends and colleagues north of the border, and Happy Fourth of July to those of you south of the border. We hope everyone is having a great start to summer.

A few years ago, I explored the idea of a healthcare marketplace model. At the time, I imagined it would be pretty difficult to build a true marketplace for several reasons: low frequency and high unpredictability of use (because thankfully, we’re not always sick), the monogamy issue (people prefer to stick to the same doctor once they find one), and most transactions are handled offline and won’t be captured by the platform.

This year we have seen privacy become top of mind for the general public, the media and “big tech.” The business model of Google and Facebook (collect as much data as possible about users for highly targeted advertising) is under attack. Europe’s legislators were addressing some of these privacy concerns when they put into effect GDPR in 2016, the primary law regulating how companies protect EU citizens’ personal data.

Good to Great is one of those iconic business books that every founder, CEO and business leader should read at some point. In the book Jim Collins identifies eight common traits that “good to great” companies share.

Imagine a future, maybe 20-25 years from now, when there’s a smart toilet in every home. Picture it: the smart toilet, a device that collects our fecal matter and provides information about our health via our microbiome.

I have been on cloud nine since Saturday night. As a long-time Toronto Raptors fan, my hometeam is headed to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history.

Over the past few months, we have been running a series of posts where we profile one of the many incredible operators in our network. These operators are generous enough to share their expertise and wisdom, and we are lucky to do deep dives into unique topics. We’ve already learned about marketplaces from Bala Subramaniam, Head of Fulfillment at Instacart. And Sin-Mei Tsai, VP of Engineering at Shippo, discussed code quality.

We are excited to announce our investment in Dolly, where we participated in a $7.5M funding round alongside Unlock Venture Partners and Maveron.

Bill Campbell has long had a legendary reputation as one of the best coaches of all time, but until now, only the people he worked with got to understand and experience the power of his approach.

We are very excited to announce our investment in Kobalt, a new security as a service company.

We are extremely excited to announce our investment in Guesser, the easiest way to engage with Augur prediction markets.

It has been no secret that we have been actively researching and pursuing blockchain companies, particularly those in the Ethereum ecosystem. A few months ago, I wrote that 2017 could finally be the year when cryptocurrencies start delivering on the huge potential that many have been predicting for a long time.

A few weeks ago, Forbes released their annual Midas List of Top Tech Investors, recognizing those investors who have backed unicorns and seen strong returns for their funds. For these investors, their success is partly due to the fact that they are good pickers and can see opportunities like Uber and Airbnb. But there’s more to it than that. Great investors are at the right place at the right time by being thought leaders and generally solid and helpful individuals.

One innovation we have seen in Blockchain has been the rise of app coins as a way to monetize protocols and open source projects. Most launches were through Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), basically crowdfunded app coin sales. And boy, has it taken off!

Sometimes there’s a disconnect between investor sentiment and the product’s value. The same thing happens in the market: good companies can have a lower stock price due to public sentiment and market factors outside of their control.

Back in October, we hosted our first marketplace-themed meetup on the topic of The Holy Grail of the Marketplace: The Virtuous Cycle. More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended and made it a great evening.

Last week, I shared some lessons learned from a Domino Data Science Pop-up that I attended a month ago. There were some very important discussions surrounding the world of data science today. One thread explored the differences between data science and data engineering.

Three weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Domino Data Science Pop-up, which was one of the best days of talks on data science that I have attended. You can check out recordings of the talks as well as copies of the presentations on SlideShare.I won’t dive into all the nitty-gritty discussions on math and statistics, but I do want to share some insightful discussions surrounding the definition and role of data scientists in today’s startups.

When founders, investors, and the whole team are aligned around a common vision, it’s one of the most powerful things that can happen to a start-up. Everybody works toward the same goals. It’s much easier to attract investors, teammates and partners to join your efforts. And, decisions are made much more efficiently since no one is arguing about the general direction.

I remember a time when we used to say “he’s a good sales person” or “she’s a great marketing leader.” However, it’s no longer so simple. Technological advances over the past decade have transformed sales, marketing, and HR organizations. Entirely new titles and functions have sprung up in the process. Founders need to understand what they are looking for in order to find the right person (or people).

I remember a time when we used to say “he’s a good sales person” or “she’s a great marketing leader.” However, it’s no longer so simple. Technological advances over the past decade have transformed sales, marketing, and HR organizations. Entirely new titles and functions have sprung up in the process. Founders need to understand what they are looking for in order to find the right person (or people).

Two months ago, we published our second eBook, Understanding Social Platforms. In it, we discuss the dynamics of each social platform type: messaging, private networks, public networks, enterprise networks, and communities. We also cover important topics for social platform businesses like metrics, exits, valuations, and our outlook for future opportunities in social.

Our portfolio company Top Hat just closed a $22.5M (USD) Series C round. Union Square Ventures – one of our favorite co-investors – added to Top Hat’s existing investors and USV’s Albert Wenger joined their Board of Directors.

On the heels of being named principal last week, I am humbled by Boris’s announcement and thrilled to begin leading deals for Version One. While many of you have already worked with me directly or read my thoughts on this blog over the years, I want to take the opportunity to share my goals: what I’m working on, where I can be the most helpful, and where I’d like to go from here.