View from Seed

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Revisiting the Craft Beer Metaphor for the VC Industry

View from Seed

When we started NextView back in 2012, we often used the metaphor of the beer industry to describe the evolution of the VC business. In a nutshell, the argument was that all industries go from being a cottage industry to one that is industrialized. A few big players emerge that compete on scale and scope, much like AB Inbev in the beer industry and the megafunds in venture.

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Hackers or Heroes?

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As we are in the early phases of a Cambrian explosion of generative AI applications, I’ve been thinking about how to make sense of the madness. There is a huge volume of companies being started, with many more to come, and it is very difficult to separate the signal from the noise and to assess the various teams that are building in this space. The most common rubric that I’ve heard from investors is to invest in what I’ll call “heroes”.

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Where We Are Investing in 2024

View from Seed

Products, Problems, and People What’s always made us unusual as a firm is that we don’t have the typical answer to the question of “focus”. 90%+ of VC’s will tell you that their focus is either a technology or a space. For example: Technologies: AI, IOT, Cloud, Blockchain Areas: Vertical SaaS, Crypto, Security, Consumer, Deep Tech There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it has never been native for us.

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Hammer or Hands?

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One of my goals in 2024 is to start blogging again. Admittedly, I stopped blogging a few years ago because of the proliferation of content around VC and startups. Also, blogs felt like an antiquated way to engage with founders vs. threads on Twitter/X. But I feel like these platforms are way to ephemeral, so I’m going to try to post at least semi-regularly and see where things go.

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NextView’s Investment in Sincera: Simplifying Digital Advertising with Metadata

View from Seed

Deep Domain Expertise at the Helm Sincera Founders Mike O’Sullivan and Ian Meyers bring to the table a rich expertise and domain knowledge in the ad tech space. Their extensive experience, spanning tenures at LiveRamp, Index Exchange, Roku, Criteo, Microsoft, and AppNexus, provides both technical and strategic depth to the company. But it was the glowing endorsement from industry peers of Mike and Ian as a “can’t miss duo” and “the absolute best ad tech product people” which resounded du

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Second order effects of a bank run on fintech startups

View from Seed

The post Second order effects of a bank run on fintech startups appeared first on NextView Ventures.

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New Year, New & Improved NextView Accelerator

View from Seed

TLDR. With three accelerator cohorts under our belts and 17 graduated teams to turn to for feedback, we’re more confident than ever that our white-glove approach has lent itself well to the kind of program our industry was lacking. We’re running our high conviction, hands-on accelerator program back, we’re maintaining our clear financial terms (hey $400k), but this time around, we’re making a few meaningful changes to directly address the state of the world we’re living in, namely our updated