View from Seed

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The Dawn of Generative AI

View from Seed

It’s become a cliche in our technology startup world: disruptive technologies start as toys and are dismissed as such. The criticism gets louder as the realization starts setting in… the realization of just how much the tech will truly change the status quo.

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Accelerator Spotlight: Balletic Foods

View from Seed

Company: Balletic Foods. Founders: Anita Broellochs & Alex Shirazi. “Balletic’s fermentation technology offers the promise of the best of both worlds: all of the benefits of consuming true animal protein without the environmental and ethical challenges of eating meat.”

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Announcing NextView IV

View from Seed

We are pleased to announce that we have closed on NextView IV. This is a fresh $100M fund with the same high-conviction, hands-on seed strategy that we’ve been pursuing since the start of NextView over 10 years ago.

LP 411
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Sizing the Ask

View from Seed

One important tactical decision when fundraising is determining the size of “the ask”. Sizing the ask incorrectly is one of the things I see founders get wrong most often, and it ends up having a meaningful impact to the fundraising process overall.

Valuation 418
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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in their own ecosystem. He'll also go over metrics we can use to measure the health of our ecosystems as we build more resources for innovators.

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Why LP’s Passed on Seed Funds 10 Years Ago (And What’s Happened Since)

View from Seed

This year will mark the 10 th year anniversary of NextView. I’ll be writing a number of posts looking back over the first decade of the life of this firm. In some ways, this feels like an eternity.

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Airbnb S-1 (Part 1): So How Profitable Is This Thing Really?

View from Seed

Airbnb’s public S-1 dropped Monday afternoon. One of the most highly anticipated startup IPOs of recent years, we now get a peek inside Airbnb’s business.

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Be Like Water – A Guiding Principle for Consumer Product

View from Seed

“Be formless, shapeless, like water.” – Bruce Lee. I was on a pitch video call the other day when the founder asked me what the guiding principle for product was at Blue Apron when I was leading the team there, and my response was that consumer product experience should be like water.

Product 411
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State of VC 2.0

View from Seed

This post is inspired by some of the earliest conversations I have had with the team here at NextView and since the beginning of my VC journey. Back in 2018, my colleague Rob wrote a blog post about how the VC asset class is doing.

Valuation 319
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Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Crusaders

View from Seed

I’ve had the privilege to work with many great entrepreneurs, both in my operating days at the start of my career and over the last decade plus on the VC investing side. In my experience founders usually fall into one of three types: mercenaries, missionaries, and crusaders.

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Welcoming Jack Abramowitz to Our Investment Team

View from Seed

I’m excited to announce that Jack Abramowitz has joined our investment team at NextView. He will be based in our office in New York and looking to invest in companies across the US.

New York 317
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How Venture Capital Decision Making Has Changed During the Pandemic

View from Seed

The sudden arrival of the global pandemic has shifted the playbook for founders and venture capitalists. Despite the beginnings of a vaccine rollout, it’s likely that the conditions created by Covid-19 will continue to persist for some time.

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What’s new with NextView? The story behind our NextView.vc website refresh

View from Seed

As someone relatively new to the VC space, I was particularly struck by the partners’ collective reflections regarding what has changed and what has remained the same.

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State of VC 2.0

View from Seed

This post is inspired by some of the earliest conversations I have had with the team here at NextView and since the beginning of my VC journey. Back in 2018, my colleague Rob wrote a blog post about how the VC asset class is doing.

Valuation 295
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Come Join Our Investment Team in NYC!

View from Seed

With the news of our most recent $100M fund , NextView is looking to add a new member of our investment team based in New York. If you or someone that you know might be a great fit for this role, please apply here.

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The Shift from FOMO to FOLD in Early Stage Investing

View from Seed

For the last several years, the early stage investing market was driven largely by the F ear O f M issing O ut, AKA FOMO.

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New Year, New & Improved NextView Accelerator

View from Seed

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.

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Four Tricky VC Questions and How To Handle Them

View from Seed

During the course of a fundraise, founders are likely to encounter a few questions from VC’s that seem awkward or even a bit unfair.

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Announcing Our Investment in YAA

View from Seed

I’m very excited to announce our investment in YAA. You can read the update from the company’s CEO Zach here , and we are excited to be partnering with our friends at Flybridge and Long Journey on this investment. .

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Why NextView Invested in Poly

View from Seed

We believe that this technology will eventually affect all aspects of our economy, just as the power of the internet’s connected communication, in due course, pervaded our collective lives over the course of the past three decades.

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Updating Your Seed Investors – Board Deck & Update Email Templates

View from Seed

Today I’m excited to announce the relaunch of our most popular resource ever: board meeting deck templates for seed-stage startups, now in conjunction with an investor update email template. Download Board Deck Template . Download Investor Update Email Template. Investor Update Email Template and How & When to Use It. We first released a version of the board meeting deck template template back in 2014 and then a revised version a couple of years later.

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NextView’s Early Stage Startup Guide: Product

View from Seed

Welcome to the first installment of the NextView Ventures Early Stage Startup Guides. Over the years, we’ve worked with, and talked to thousands of founders just starting out.

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What Do Your Customers Want to Buy?

View from Seed

After building NextView for almost 10 years now, I’ve been having more conversations recently with first time managers looking for some tactical advice. Raising one’s first fund is hard, and there are always a plethora of voices that will tell you that it’s impossible for many different reasons.

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Announcing NextView’s Health and Sustainability Accelerator

View from Seed

Last spring, we at NextView announced a new, virtual “Everyday Economy” accelerator at the height of the initial pandemic lockdown. It quickly became a success.

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Choosing a VC Is Like a Marriage. But Pitching VC’s is NOT Like Dating

View from Seed

There is a well-known trope that choosing a VC to partner with is like marriage. This is true. It’s a super important, near permanent relationship, especially for a lead investor that is likely to take a board seat for many years. But in my experience, the metaphor ends there.

Founder 280
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Coachability is Overrated

View from Seed

The most overrated attribute that some investors look for in founders is “coachability” Do I have your attention? It’s not that founders shouldn’t be coachable. It’s a good attribute. But I think there are two ways that an emphasis on coachability goes wrong.

Founder 280
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What Does Your Startups Mean to You?

View from Seed

I was doing a virtual AMA with a terrific group of underrepresented founders from Visible Hands last week and the conversation turned a little personal. We were talking a bit about the challenges of building a startup and how to persist and maintain a productive outlook in the face of setbacks. I reflected a little on my own experience as well as on the experience of the hundreds of founders we have backed at NextView.

Startup 227
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Dispense: Building the Transaction Layer of an Entire New Industry

View from Seed

Dispense recently announced their $2M seed round , which we are pleased to have led here at NextView. Dispense is a B2B software company, focused on transaction software specifically designed for the cannabis industry.

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Our Investment in Expressable: A Different Kind of Digital Speech Company

View from Seed

I’m pleased to announce our recent investment in Expressable, a company focused on delivering better speech therapy in our digital age.

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What’s the Deal with Seed Funds Waiting for Traction?

View from Seed

I sent a tweet out last week that elicited quite a few responses from both founders and investors: seed funds that don’t invest pre-traction =. — Rob Go (@robgo) November 4, 2019. I could hear the internet nodding in violent agreement. I thought I’d share a few additional thoughts on what may be driving this. First – there are a lot of seed investors out there that don’t actually want to invest in seed. What they really want to do is be a venture capitalist.

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Investing in the Care Economy

View from Seed

One of the themes that we have been investing against for some time has been in what we’d call the “Care Economy”. This comprises the time and dollars spent against caring for the needs of another person. It’s a truly universal experience, one that every one of us has and will grapple with several times in our lives. It’s an area that has been largely untouched by technology, but is quickly being redesigned through the ingenuity of entrepreneurs and the ever-expanding reach of digitization.

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The Midas List Then and Now

View from Seed

In a few months, we are likely to see the annual Forbes Midas list of top performing early stage VC investors.

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Congrats Jambb!

View from Seed

Congrats to the team at Jambb on their recent $3.5M seed round. The round was co-led by Arrington Capital and Animoca Brands, both investors focused on digital assets and blockchain-based investments. You can read more about the round here. We’ve loved working with the Jambb team in our first Accelerator cohort and are excited to continue to support the company in this next stage.

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Congrats Jambb!

View from Seed

Congrats to the team at Jambb on their recent $3.5M seed round. The round was co-led by Arrington Capital and Animoca Brands, both investors focused on digital assets and blockchain-based investments. You can read more about the round here. We’ve loved working with the Jambb team in our first Accelerator cohort and are excited to continue to support the company in this next stage.

Founder 223
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Off to the Races with Team Nextview

View from Seed

I became a venture capitalist, specifically a seed investor, to provide early support to the dreamers and builders working to positively change how we live, work, learn, play, and care for our planet and each other.

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The Next Chapter for NextView

View from Seed

While I walked away from that process with more questions than conclusions, our entire team has emerged from this period hyper-energized for the future.

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Welcoming Jack Abramowitz to Our Investment Team

View from Seed

I’m excited to announce that Jack Abramowitz has joined our investment team at NextView. He will be based in our office in New York and looking to invest in companies across the US. Although Jack is relatively early in his career, he brings with him a wealth of knowledge as an operator and investor from his experiences at fintech unicorn Better.com, Common Ocean, and Goldman Sachs.

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Fundraising When You?ve Been at it a While

View from Seed

Fundraising for startups is a mix of selling both promise and reality. In some respects, one of the often non-intuitive privileges of a seed stage fundraising process is that the company is so new. There isn’t much history, much reality, to get in the way of a good story.

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The Due Diligence Hierarchy of Pain

View from Seed

When a founder is raising money, he/she should expect that any serious investor will conduct some level of due diligence before getting to yes. This could look somewhat different depending on the maturity of the business. Seed stage companies will mostly face questions around the team and market.

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Our Scoring System at NextView (aka How We Evaluate Companies)

View from Seed

A few weeks ago, I published a post on how we make decisions and vote at NextView. Usually when we record our votes, we also score each company based on five attributes. This isn’t used as a “scorecard” where companies need to clear a certain quantitative bar to get through our process.

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Meet Summer: Our Portfolio Company Changing The Student Loan Landscape

View from Seed

Student loan is a generational crisis – there are 45 million borrowers in the U.S. on the hook for $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, tripled in the last 10 years. When we think about money in the context of everyday living for the next generation of consumers, it’s impossible to ignore the weight of the student loan burden. . Unlike many other aspects of personal finance, student loan is incredibly complex.

Portfolio 295
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Accelerator Spotlight: Poplin

View from Seed

Company: Poplin. Founder: Alexandria DeVito. “We believe Poplin has the potential to create a new category of pre-pregnancy wellness for the millions of hopeful parents that are either struggling with fertility or just want to do whatever they can to ensure a healthy, thriving pregnancy.

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Dispense: Building the Transaction Layer of an Entire New Industry

View from Seed

Dispense recently announced their $2M seed round , which we are pleased to have led here at NextView. Dispense is a B2B software company, focused on transaction software specifically designed for the cannabis industry. In recent years, cannabis has emerged as a legal industry, and thus, companies operating in this new market have often had to find or build new software stacks in order to operate their businesses.

B2B 202