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

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.