• TCV on the Market, the Competition, and Taking Bankers’ Advice with a Grain of Salt

    Screen Shot 2016-08-20 at 4.52.59 PMTechnology Crossover Ventures has become a major investing powerhouse over its 22-year-old history by funding relatively undiscovered but mature companies; buying sizable stakes in later-stage, venture backed companies; and acquiring positions in publicly traded tech companies that TCV sees as undervalued.

    The firm, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, has done so well that it just wrapped up its ninth fund with a cool $2.5 billion. It also now features offices in New York (opened in 2005) and in London (opened in 2011).

    Late last week, over coffee at a San Francisco bistro, I sat down with TCV’s founding general partner, Jay Hoag, and general partner Woody Marshall, to talk about some of the firm’s latest hits, which include recently acquired Dollar Shave Club and LinkedIn, some of whose shares TCV acquired in February when they plummeted more than 40 percent.

    We also talked about why mutual fund companies (with which TCV sometimes competes on deals) don’t make great private company shareholders, and what can be the bad advice of investment bankers, who are largely telling companies to wait until 2017 to go public. Our chat, edited for length, follows.

    TC: You’ve invested roughly $700 million in Europe since opening an office in London, including deals in Spotify and World Remit. That’s a lot of capital.

    JH: In London and Berlin and the Scandinavian countries, there was lots of activity we were seeing, and we thought it better to see it from quasi-local office.

    WM: In Europe, [the investors on the ground are] very much early stage or buyouts or else guys who may call themselves growth equity investors but are really doing growth-buyout deals with a lot of debt. In terms of minority investments that startups can spend on product and sales and tech and marketing, we don’t have a lot of [competition].

    TC: What about other U.S firms? Doesn’t Insight Venture Partners do a lot of deals in Europe?

    WM: Insight does everything globally out of one office in New York. We’re pretty active, so we don’t necessarily like to be a tourist. We like to be part of the local community, so we felt like it was important to plant our flag in the ground and hire local people.

    TC: One of your more recent investments was in Believe Digital, a Paris-based next-generation music label. What does that deal tell us about your style?

    WM: It’s a growing, profitable business that’s already achieved significant scale with hundreds of employees. Our co-investors are two little French funds, and we were the largest and only investor in the financing we did, which is pretty typical. Also, the company has been around long enough that some of the funds will be thinking about selling some of their stock going forward. Most of our deals are a mix of primary and secondary stakes.

    TC: Five of your portfolio companies have been sold this year, including the data marketing firm Merkle, which just sold a majority stake to Dentsu. You also invested in LinkedIn, which turned out nicely for you. 

    JH: We didn’t see that [Microsoft acquisition] coming; it was a nice surprise. But if you’re going to deploy a dollar, why wouldn’t you look at a public company as well as private companies and assess, “Well, this appears fully valued, but this other one is discounted by 70 percent,” as long as you have the right insight. And the public markets tend to overreact on a quarterly basis.

    TC: Why aren’t more venture funds investing in discounted publicly traded companies, especially given that so many of them got socked earlier this year? My understanding is that most firms aren’t restricted from doing these deals here and there.

    JH: Generally, it’s  because the [universities and endowments and other] sources of capital for all of us want to think of us as being in discrete [buckets]. Either it’s, “I’m in investing in a private manager” or “I’m investing in a public manager.” So it’s not an easy sell.

    WM: It’s also hard. A lot of times you don’t have access to perfect information. It’s a different process. But your private activity informs your public activity and vice versa. Even when we aren’t looking to deploy money in the public market, we probably spend more time listening to quarterly conference calls than most private investors, because when you’re thinking about diligence, that’s some of the best information out there. You can spend a gazillion dollars for [repackaged intelligence] or just go online and look at whatever calls you want. All that great trend and customer data is there.

     

    TC: You mentioned that you buy a mix of primary and secondary stakes. Can you talk about some of the discounts you’re seeing?

    WM: Off of what? It depends on the last round and the structure of the last round. A lot of people have said, “Stay away from unicorns.” But there are a lot of great companies out there that are looking to raise money. Maybe [their last round was] lavish [so the price is now] maybe a little bit up or down, but in the meantime, the business has materially executed since that last round. So even though the [valuation is] similar, your multiple is half because the business has doubled. You have to look at these opportunities on a relative basis.

    TC: Mutual funds have gotten into your business in recent years. I still see them popping up here and there in late-stage deals.

    WM: Sometimes we don’t see anybody. Sometimes, if there’s a more formal process, we do. One deal we looked at earlier this year, we thought the discount was appropriate, and one of the T Rowes or Fidelitys did a flat round. But you’re generally seeing less aggressive behavior from the Baillie Giffords and the BlackRocks. You’re definitely seeing people pulling back and reevaluating the bets they’ve already made. 

    TC: Reevaluating and literally re-valuing — and publicly — which I think has surprised some of the companies these managers have backed.

    JH: If we hear a company is talking with T Rowe and Fidelity and BlackRock, I understand why. The company probably wants a high price and a quick process. But we [know we] should probably spend our time elsewhere. Full stop.

    [Mutual funds] are buying [private stakes] so they can have lower costs at the IPO price, etc. But the moment [their portfolio companies] underperform their competitors, that activity stops. These private investments have to have a return associated with them. If they’re buying high and selling low, that’s not good.

    TC: Could you see action being taken against any of these managers?

    JH: Mutual fund and hedge fund guys have been sued in the past over valuations. Even if it’s just 5 percent of your activity, with [people on Main Street] going in and out of your fund, your [net asset value] is a very important measure. These investors are buying in, assuming the valuations [they are paying at any single moment in time] are correct.

    WM: Some of these guys, they have deep pockets but they get those alligator arms sometimes. And management teams are starting to say, “I got it.”

    Much more here.

    Connie

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  • Bill Maris Parts Ways with GV

    Screen Shot 2016-08-19 at 9.31.12 PMBill Maris, who founded GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) in 2009, is leaving the unit at the end of this week, according to a new report from Recode.

    Maris, a neuroscience student at Middlebury who cofounded an early web hosting company before joining Google, is reportedly being replaced by David Krane.

    Krane is a managing partner at GV; he joined the venture arm in 2010, after spending nearly 10 years as Google’s director of global communications and public affairs.

    This is quite a bombshell, and, as Recode notes, comes on the heels of a string of other recent, high-profile departures within Alphabet, parent company to GV and several other units.

    Android cofounder Rich Miner recently left GV to start an education project within Google.

    Alphabet also recently parted ways with Tony Fadell, the cofounder of Nest Labs (acquired by Google for $3.2 billion in early 2014), and several executives at Google’s self-driving car unit, including CTO Chris Urmson.

    Maris wielded a tremendous amount of power at GV, which, as he told this editor in an on-stage interview in February, currently invests $500 million a year.

    Not everyone realizes that despite GV’s bench of investors, every decision fell to Maris.

    As he explained the process during that sit-down: “[A]ll the investment decisions I make, going into a company or when and how to come out of it, is in collaboration with the partner who brings [the deal] forward. So we talk about all the opportunities as a team and everyone is invited to that discussion – not just the investing partners. And we don’t take a vote. It’s not like a democracy in any way. But everyone knows where people stand and we try and give each other good advice, and at the end of the day, the person who brings it forward and I decide whether to move forward or not.”

    Asked why GV wasn’t run more democratically, he told me, ” I have no idea, because I’ve never worked as a venture capitalist before. I masquerade as one now . .  . But basically it started out with just me. The buck stops with me. So if we succeed, credit all goes to the team. If we fail, the blame should fall all on me; that’s how management should work.”

    Whether that top-down process will change now remains to be seen.

    More here.

    (Pictured:Bill Maris at a StrictlyVC event in February. Photo courtesy of Brittany M. Powell.)

    Connie

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  • VC Kent Goldman on the Changing Dynamics Between Seed-Stage Firms

    kent_goldman2By Semil Shah

    Two years ago, Kent Goldman, a former partner with First Round Capital, took the wraps off his own seed-stage venture firm and the novel idea that it incorporates. Specifically, Goldman said that his new firm, Upside Partnership, would give every founding team that it backs a piece of its own carry, effectively making them Upside’s partners.

    Investors liked the idea, committing $30 million to Goldman’s debut fund, and committing another $44 million to his second fund, which closed earlier this year. We caught up with him recently to talk about the current, seed-stage ecosystem. More from that chat below.

    In the consumer tech landscape today, what are some consumer behaviors you’re tracking that could lead to new products, services or networks?

    It’s been a pretty long time since I’ve taken a thematic approach to investing. I try to be proactive about people rather than ideas. Founders are much better at seeing the future than investors, so my focus is really on finding people who’ve been thinking about and working through solutions far longer than I’ve even known a problem exists.

    I have gotten wrapped around the conversational UI axle. Some of Upside’s earliest investments were behind founders building companies around text-based conversational UIs. With the attention now being paid to voice interfaces, it’s been difficult not to revisit the idea of a disappearing UI and the challenges they present to our collective learning around visual interfaces. For example, we’re used to having app icons to remind people about the existence of apps they’ve already downloaded. We’re used to visual design being used as a method to introduce new features. But how do you remind a user of skill they added to their Amazon Echo? What’s the audio equivalent of an app tutorial? How do you train a user to a specific conversational app syntax? What’s the audio corollary of a badge count? It’s been fun to kick around these questions with folks.

    With one fund of Upside Partnership under your belt, what’s been the single-most surprising element of running the fund?

    The biggest surprise is that we’ve been the first institutional investor to commit to funding a founding team in the majority of our investments. Our typical initial investment is very deliberately around $300,000. Because Upside was formed with the intention of playing well with other investors, I thought it was more likely that we would be tucked into a round after a lead was chosen. More often than not, it’s been the opposite. It’s been a gratifying development.

    Another surprise was that four of our first eight investments backed female founders.

    How do you anticipate seed syndicates changing as more investors enter the mix and smaller funds begin to scale? 

    It’s going to get a bit edgy in syndicate land. When I joined First Round, back in “super angel” days of 2008, I saw how much support founders could get when their investor syndicates were working in alignment with one another. But as the seed landscape evolved, becoming the lead investor or hitting arbitrary ownership targets became increasingly important to a number of funds.

    At some point investors decide whether they believe special founders drive outsized returns or concentrated ownership does. I strongly believe it’s the former, so I decided to build a fund that would be focused on overachieving as a syndicate member. This means investing time to help regardless of your check size. And it means there is a bit more freedom to support the founders you want to work with. One way to do this well is to keep fund sizes small.

    As many emerging funds make the decision to grow their size and set a goal to lead rounds, they’re going to discover that it’s much more challenging to directly compete with elite firms like First Round than it is to work alongside them. In doing so, they’re making the decision to put their access to great founders in jeopardy. It’s always been a puzzling strategic choice to me; do they want to scale fund size or do they want to scale returns?

    Many of your seed deals have gone on to raised Series A rounds. How does the nature of your work with companies change after that Series A closes?

    I’m most engaged with founders at the seed stage. The challenges they face are the ones I best understand. As their companies scale beyond into Series B territory, the decisions they face fall outside of my focus. By this point, I hope to have earned enough of their confidence that they will still consider me a trusted counsel – it’s the way I hope to earn the opportunity to make follow-on investments in their businesses. But, as companies age, I anticipate becoming more reactive, rather than proactive.

    In the context of early-stage investing, what’s something that you believe that isn’t necessarily a popularly held point of view?

    Investors stand on the shoulders of founders. And often founders, not investors, give other founders the best operational advice. It’s why we make each founder we back a partner in our fund. Venture firm’s brands are built on the smarts and fortitude of the people they back. It’s wise to recognize this with more than hollow lip service.

    Connie

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  • Quick Chat with Investor Avidan Ross

    Root VenturesA year ago, Avidan Ross, an investor with an engineering background, raised a debut, $31.4 million, fund under the brand Root Ventures. The idea was to back early-stage hardware startups — eight to 10 of them each year. StrictlyVC talked with Ross at the time; we more recently caught up with him to ask how things are going, one year into his newest adventure.

    Imagine a new consumer hardware startup team forming. In an ideal world, what kind of team should it assemble if it aims to become an MVP in the consumer market?

    I hate to say this, but it depends. If the team is building some deeply technical hardware with ongoing material science development, then there better be a material scientist on board. Generically, I’d say that at least one person on the team has to be ready to roll up their sleeves and deal with the business development side of the startup. That means everything from sales and marketing to fundraising and operations. The core tech of the company should never be outsourced, so we love seeing a very strong technical team. No matter the team’s professional background, the most important element is a passion for the problem the business is solving. Building hardware companies is way too hard to just be opportunist. Hardware founders have to be driven by a deep fire that will not let them sleep until the problem is solved.

    You’ve been at this for a year. What’s been the single-most surprising element of running your fund so far?

    The help from my LPs. Seriously, I’m not just kissing up to the folks who gave me money. My LP base is far more diverse than the average Silicon Valley fund. We took funds from individuals and institutions, but their industrial affiliation is widely varied, from medical to real estate to manufacturing and logistics. When you’re working on hardware, the industries and partners you’re looking for aren’t just spread across industry but also geographically diverse. Most other firms can get away with extremely deep relationships along the 101 freeway. We had to go broader, and a strong LP network has been helpful in generating great strategic relationships in every possible industry.

    With all of the startups going after the smart home market, how did Amazon Echo just cut through the noise? What can founders and investors in the space learn from Echo’s success?

    I think the main reason for Alexa’s success is the intuitive natural user-interface. Alexa works because she is listening when your hands are full or you’re deeply sitting in the couch. Also, Alexa launched with a very basic first set of functions, making the interaction simple and intuitive. When people interface with software, a counterintuitive experience such as Snapchat actually becomes a feature. In the world of physical objects, the design should be first and foremost intuitive and delightful. I think that founders of hardware startups often think this is just about industrial design, but Echo showed us that it’s more about an intuitive user experience, and interaction is the core.

    You recently opened up a new SF office, or should we say, workshop. Tell us about how you designed and built it. How can people check it out?

    I like building things. My home garage is a mini maker space, filled with CNC routers, laser cutters, and 3D printers. As our team grew, it became clear that we needed a little bit of space to call our own. Just like the garage, it seemed only natural to make it an inspiring workshop. Our friends at Dodocase were kind enough to share some of their factory in the [the San Francisco neighborhood] Dogpatch with us, and we’ve been working there ever since. Instead of creating an office with a lobby, reception, and conference rooms, it’s an open access space for entrepreneurs to collaborate and ideate on designs. We have a café inside the space to keep everyone properly caffeinated, beer taps for meetups, and have access to the larger equipment within Dodocase when someone wants to go big. If anyone wants to come hang, tweet at @rootvc or @avidanross, and we’ll get you some machine time.

    In the context of early-stage investing, what’s something that you believe that isn’t necessarily a popularly held point of view?

    I think that most hardware companies should never take venture money. If you walk down the aisles of a Best Buy or a Target, nearly all those products were never venture backed. Do not feel pressured to measure your success as your ability to raise venture capital. If your product has the ability to be a Trojan horse for a much larger recurring revenue or network-effect-driven business, it might be worth pursuing venture investment.

    I like to think of entrepreneurs as fire starters. You can build a fire with brush, then twigs, then branches, and while it might take a while, the flame is sustainable. Meanwhile, venture capital is like gasoline. If your fire is not built to consume the fuel, it can [destroy your business].

    Connie

  • Chatting with Jenny Lefcourt of Freestyle Capital

    17215968806_422ba16077_zBy Semil Shah

    A little more than two years ago, Jenny Lefcourt, who cofounded the wedding registry startup WeddingChannel.com and a short-lived e-commerce company called Marrkit, made the leap into venture capital.

    Specifically, the Stanford MBA joined Freestyle Capital founders Josh Felser and Dave Samuel at their small but growing seed-stage fund, and she’s been helping build the firm’s brand and the rest of its business since.

    We caught up with her recently to talk about her newest gig.

    You’re the newest GP at Freestyle, a seed-stage fund. What’s been the most surprising part of the transition? 

    I’m still an entrepreneur at heart and felt that being a seed-stage VC would enable me to add the most value to my portfolio companies while also being the most exciting and fulfilling for me as an investor. Compared to being an entrepreneur, I expected the highs to not be as high but the lows not as low, but I’ve been surprised by how high the highs are. [Watching] my entrepreneurs and their companies develop from tiny to thriving has been more of a thrill than I had imagined. I’ve also been surprised and delighted by the depth of relationships I’ve developed with my entrepreneurs. Being in the trenches with them creates quite a bond.

    As some micro funds grow and add partners, what would be your advice as to how they integrate new faces?

    My advice to a micro fund looking to add a partner would be to add someone who has a different lens on the world and that you trust and respect.  Groupthink can be deadly to a partnership, so you need to ensure that you not only have differing points of view but that you have a relationship between the partners that welcomes debate.  Josh, Dave and I have hearty debates, we each have unique skill sets that help Freestyle’s portfolio companies. Also, and important to me, we laugh a lot. Laughter is really underrated as the glue that holds people and teams together.

    You have deep experience in retail, both as a founder and an investor. What are your views on how consumer retail transforms over the next decade? Is there any chance to find a category that Amazon won’t gobble up?

    I believe there is going to be a big pendulum swing back to curation and service. The internet delivered access to so much inventory online, which was thrilling to online shoppers for a while.  Now, consumers find it hard to sift through the options and are ready for fewer, more personalized offerings.  This will require retailers to use the data they have on their consumers and provide more service to make a sale. Retailers will also need to truly become omnichannel —  the most overused and not-delivered-upon concept in retail — to provide the unique experiences that will keep them competitive in the Amazon-versus-everyone else world that we live in.

    As Freestyle grows, how have you and partners evolved your thinking around follow-on funding for your seed companies?

    We’ve reserved a greater percentage of our recent funds for follow-on financings than we used to. We’re usually participating in our pro-rata for Series A and sometimes Series B, and we’ll “back up the truck” for some of our best performing companies. Our usual initial check size is between $500,000 to $1 million, and our entrepreneurs are typically raising between $2 million to $3 million.  We lead rounds and write big checks for our fund size because our model is to work very hard and closely with the teams that we back.

    In the context of early-stage investing, what’s something that you believe that isn’t necessarily a popularly held point of view?

    I don’t seek out high-profile entrepreneurs who I know many VCs are attracted to. I find that high-profile entrepreneurs can be distracted by the many invites they get to networking events, speaking engagements, parties, advising, etc.  The entrepreneurs I have backed have all been heads-down and hard-working people who surgically apply networking. Between Josh, Dave and I — and others with whom we coinvest — we can get our teams in front of just about anyone they desire to meet.  So, while the entrepreneurs who attend events like Summit at Sea are smart, hard-working and fabulous, they’re not typically the entrepreneurs I choose to invest in.

    Photo: Christopher Michel.

    Connie

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  • Ludlow Ventures’s Jonathon Triest on the Importance of Being Nice

    Screen Shot 2016-07-21 at 8.54.12 PMBy Semil Shah

    By now, you may well have heard of Ludlow Ventures, a young, early-stage venture firm in Detroit that seems to punch above its weight. Indeed, the firm’s first fund closed with just $15.5 million in late 2014, yet its investing team — partners Jonathon Triest and Brett Brett deMarrais — have managed to make an array of interesting bets, in Detroit, New York, L.A., and elsewhere. Among them: the organic meal delivery service Sprig, the product discovery service Product Hunt, the wireless power startup uBeam, and the heads-up display maker Navdy.

    We caught up with Triest recently to talk about Ludlow’s approach.

    You’re based in Detroit. What’s the advantage of living outside of the Bay Area? What’s the disadvantage, and how do you address it?

    My job depends on getting to know the most talented entrepreneurs; first. Most of the founders we work with live thousands of miles from Detroit, which makes my job interesting. It forces me to be creative, find unique ways to get founders’ attention, and stay on top of who’s building what/where. In our early days at Ludlow, offense was our only access to deal flow. While we’re now fortunate to have substantial inbound deals, though we’re [still] at our best when on the hunt.

    You and your team have built a reputation for finding interesting founders and deals in the consumer space well before investors who are physically closer to those young teams. Without revealing state secrets . . . actually, please reveal them!

    Super simple. Be a really good friend to the people you invest in. I’m shocked at how many VCs cannot, for the life of them, personally connect with the founders they invest in. C’mon VC dudes and dudettes; get your S%^$ together. The best deals are referrals from people you’re working with or have worked with in the past.

    It also doesn’t hurt to scour Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook, etc., for people expressing unhappiness at their current job [and shoot them a note]. “You’re awesome. Here’s my phone number when you decide to start your own company!”

    What’s a particular space within consumer tech or networks that excites you?

    I scour the Steam store every day to see what new VR games/software were released. I download nearly all of them and take them for a ride. As a consumer, I’m having a blast losing myself in poorly rendered environments. We have a small office, so I’ve nearly broken my arm dozens of times while trying to bash zombies’ heads in.

    As an investor, I’m scared out of my mind at how slow I believe the consumer uptake will be.

    In the context of early-stage investing, what’s something that you believe that isn’t necessarily a popularly held point of view?

    Two things, actually. That social intuition and empathy are the strongest qualities of early-stage founders. And that a founder’s ability to hire his/her first employees is the best predictor of success. If you have enough smarts and passion for what you’re building, you’ll likely be able to attract and retain others. If you can’t effectively communicate why you’re doing what you’re doing, others won’t be able to either. You might as well go spend your time f’ing up zombies in VR.

    Connie

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  • Quick Chat with USV’s Andy Weissman

    Screen Shot 2016-07-19 at 9.43.48 PMBy Semil Shah

    Roughly five years ago, Andy Weissman was recruited from the startup studio that he’d cofounded — Betaworks — to join the influential, New York-based venture firm Union Square Ventures as a partner. Just last month, Weissman was officially named one of its key men, too.

    We caught up with him last week to ask whether and how that changes USV going forward.

    Your firm, USV, recently pulled off a “changing of the guard” in terms of leadership, with you and Albert Wenger now leading. Has any part of the transition changed your point of view or style in investing and, if so, how so?

    Because USV is thesis driven, the transition has resulted in only a few changes at the firm, and those are management wise, not investing-wise. [We have the] same five investing partners, the same emphasis on creating a peer network out of the people and companies in the portfolio, and, to answer your question directly, the same point of view and investing styles [as before].

    When I think of contrarian concepts in VC, Bitcoin and blockchain come to mind. After the first few years of fervor die down, how does the USV team and network maintain conviction and a long-term view, particularly given the 24-hour nature of VC today?

    The way we really maintain conviction is by creating and constantly working on a framework for investing. That framework has a few components. One is a focus on stage. Another is [maintaining the same-size] funds and one office location. A third is our style of making decisions, which is conversational/consensus driven. And the last is by publishing and constantly refining our thesis.

    USV is known to invest regardless of location, especially in Europe. Besides Berlin and Sweden, what other emerging pockets of entrepreneurship do you see bubbling up in Europe? Will USV ever invest in Asia?

    The last couple of years, we’ve invested in companies founded in Helsinki, Tallin/Estonia and Paris. We’d probably have a harder time investing in Asia given the relatively small nature of USV.

    What’s more important over the next 10 years, technology or networks and why?

    Come on dude, this is USV, you know the answer. All joking aside, we continue to focus on the applications layer of the internet — the layer that sits on top of the relatively open and robust infrastructure of the internet, the infrastructure that allows for permissionless connectivity. And we continue to believe there are numerous additional opportunities to create new kinds of networks.

    In the context of early-stage investing, what’s something that you believe that isn’t necessarily a widely embraced point of view?

    That in the context of growing your business, who you choose as an investor is a lot less important that otherwise might be popularly held.

    Connie

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  • Tesla’s Former VP of Production Just Became a VC

    Screen Shot 2016-07-19 at 6.34.59 PMGreg Reichow, who in May left his post as Tesla’s vice president of production (and reportedly as one of its highest-paid executives), has joined Eclipse Ventures as an investor.

    If the Eclipse brand isn’t entirely familiar, it may be soon, given its growing star power. Venture geeks might recall that Eclipse was originally part of Formation 8, a firm that has since disbanded but that, before doing so, raised a $125 million fund that was designed to invest exclusively in early-stage hardware companies. (Its original name was F8 Hardware Fund. Among its limited partners is Flex, the publicly traded contract design and manufacturing company formerly known as Flextronics.)

    Former F8 partner Lior Susan now manages Eclipse, with a team that includes not only Reichow but longtime Sequoia Capital partner Pierre Lamond, who’d been an F8 advisor and joined Eclipse as a full-time partner last year.

    It’s been active, too. The firm has already invested in 27 companies, including making an early bet on the computational photography startup Light, which last week announced $30 million in fresh funding led by GV.

    According to a new SEC filing, Eclipse is also raising a new, $125 million fund.

    More here.

    Connie

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  • (Some) LPs Speak Up

    IMG_1919 (1)Venture capital used to be such an insular, under-the-radar industry that entrepreneur-investor Marc Andreessen has said that he’d never heard the term before arriving in the Bay Area in 1994. He’s hardly alone. It wasn’t until the mid- to late-1990s, during the dot.com boom, that the world became acquainted with what venture capitalists do. And it wasn’t until after venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Brad Feld began publishing insights about their work roughly 12 years ago that the art of VC blogging began to border on competitive sport.

    The exercise has paid off for many investors. Among those to actively raise their profiles (and presumably, increase their deal flow) through blogging are Jason Lemkin, whose new venture fund we covered here; Hunter Walk of Homebrew; and Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures. (CB Insights has a longer rundown of VC bloggers here.)

    Institutional investors, the money behind the VCs’ money, have not followed suit, though there’s reason to think the industry is thinking more about outreach at long last. Indeed, though these limited partners (LPs) have largely remained mum, not sharing much about their selection process, not blogging, and not talking publicly with reporters, a few signals suggest a change may be afoot, including recent feedback from one investor from a mid-size university endowment, who recently shared on background that he’s been asked to raise his profile.

    The reason, simply: competition. As you may have noticed, a smaller group of so-called top-tier venture funds now manages more of the money flowing into venture capital than ever before. Still, these firms can only responsibly manage so much, which puts pressure on LPs who want stakes in those venture funds.

    Perhaps because of uncertainty about the market, LPs are also less interested in brand-new funds right now than in the second or third funds of micro-venture firms that are starting to prove themselves. Forerunner Ventures, which has tripled the amount of money it is managing in the last four years, is just the latest example. These managers, too, can only make room for so many LPs.

    Then there’s foreign money. More specifically, there’s more of it than ever to compete with. Take Peakview,  which is the investment advisory arm of Shengjing Group and the largest global fund of funds in China. Its U.S.-based managing partner told this reporter in March that Peakview has millions of dollars to invest in U.S. venture firms. To curry favor with them, it’s promising to help their portfolio companies bridge networking gaps between the U.S. and China.

    More here.

    Connie

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  • Silicon Valley’s Favorite Fixer: Bradley Tusk

    If the producers of the next “World’s Most Interesting Man in the World” commercial were looking for a Silicon Valley type, a prime candidate might be Bradley Tusk, a 42-year-old New Yorker who advises companies such as FanDuel and Tesla that are disrupting highly regulated industries.

    Tusk made his bones in Silicon Valley through advising Uber, which paid him in equity for his services while still a Series A company, dramatically boosting Tusk’s net worth (he says he hasn’t sold any), and in the process, creating a model for his newest firm, Tusk Ventures.

    Right now, Tusk Ventures, founded less than a year ago, has a dozen clients. Most of the 30 staffers who work at the company come out of politics at “high levels,” says Tusk, and each helps two clients navigate their respective regulatory waters, such as keeping them up to date with a curated email that they receive by 7 a.m. every morning.

    His services come at a steep price: clients pay Tusk Ventures in equity and agree to sell him up to 10 percent of their company. (Tusk is raising a venture fund to ramp up his investing activities, though he declined to speak about any specifics at a dinner with reporters earlier this week. )

    Startups make room for Tusk in their cap table because of his connections. Tusk was formerly Michael Bloomberg’s campaign manager, helping him to get elected to an unprecedented third term as the mayor of New York City after convincing the New York City Council to extend the role’s term limits. (Tusk also worked with Bloomberg to explore a bid for the current U.S. presidential campaign. Although he claims he found a way for Bloomberg to win, Bloomberg apparently thought the solution was too complicated.)

    Another complementary business, seven-year- old Tusk Strategies, develops and runs political-style media campaigns for a host of Fortune 500 companies, including Google, Walmart, AT&T; media companies like AMC, NBC News, The Weather Channel; and institutions like Stanford.

    Somewhat astoundingly, Tusk oversees three other outfits, too: a casino management company called Ivory Gaming Group (it owns one casino in Fresno); Kronos Archives, a custom archives business for companies and individuals; and a family foundation focused on reducing hunger in the U.S.

    Did we mention he’s also trying to unseat current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in next year’s Democratic primary?

    Oisin Hanrahan, CEO of Handy — an online platform for booking household services, and a client of Tusk Ventures — jokes that the more clients Tusk takes on, the “earlier my morning emails seem to arrive.”

    More here.

    Connie

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