The risks of scaling too fast, too soon
While preparing for some recent LP presentations, we took a close look at all of the companies that we exited in Fund I. There were ten exits out of a total of 20 investments. These were all “early exits” with mostly unsatisfactory outcomes for everybody involved, especially the dedicated and talented founders who had poured […]
Q1 2018 in Review: Portfolio News and Activities
Happy Tuesday! Hope you had a great Easter! It’s hard to believe that a whole quarter has flown by. In just the first few weeks of the new year, we saw a lot of M&A activity in our portfolio: @Mattermark (by @FullContact), @MemoAIHQ (by @coinbase), and @GoPike13 (by $CSU.ca). But there have been other big things happening across […]
Women in Tech: Improving balance in the workplace with more creative hiring
With March being International Women’s Month, I had the honour of moderating an event, “Women Shaping the Valley: A Celebration of Female Technologists” at the Computer History Museum (where I sit as a member of their NextGen board). We had an incredible panel of female technologists: Julia Grace (Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering, Slack) Amber Feng […]
Announcing our investment in CryptoKitties – the wildly popular, blockchain-based pet
We are very pleased to announce our investment in Axiom Zen, the maker of CryptoKitties. We participated in the $12M Series A alongside our friends at USV and a16z. And, we are excited to be working with the CryptoKitties team to create the leading crypto collectible platform. If you’ve missed the CryptoKitty mania, it’s a […]
Announcing our investment in Drover, a new way to get a car
We’re pleased to formally announce our prior seed investment in the London-based car subscription company, Drover. And we’re even happier to announce that Drover has just raised a £5.5 million Series A round. We co-led the £2 million seed investment with Forward Partners, and today Drover is announcing they’ve closed a Series A round, which […]