Lee Hower

Co-Founder & Partner, NextView Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderexecutive@leehower ↗nextview.vc ↗

Lee Hower is a seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded NextView Ventures to invest in early-stage startups. He previously served as an early employee at PayPal and was part of the founding team at LinkedIn, leading corporate development and operations.

9statements → 5claims → 5claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.89/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 6said about them ↓

5 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 4 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Lee argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up

Hower: Autonomous Vehicles Won't Be Everywhere in Two to Three Years

“I happen to be of the opinion that we're not going to have self-driving autonomous vehicles everywhere in a very, you know, in the next two years or three years, but I do believe that there's a massive opportunity in transforming transportation, which is a hug…”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 19:43 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

100% certainty 3

100% certainty 4

100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

267 words/min while actually speaking · 6.9 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Lee Hower: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 20 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,484 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Lee Hower is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 3/10

pushed back at the host 1/10

setup questions received 78%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 15:26“Can I ask, how would you respond to people that say opportunistic is another word for lacking strategy?” ▶ 18:43“Okay, this is a really hard question for me to ask. What innovative new products or technologies do you think are calling the hype cycle, and what are sustaining and durable?”

What they said9 What others said6 Episodes1

Everything Lee Hower said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Hower: $100M exits return seed funds but fail multi-stage fund thresholds

“If you own 10% of a company that exits for a hundred, hundred fifty billion dollars with a 40, 50, 60, seventy-five million dollar fund, you can still return a meaningful portion of that fund with a, you know, a 102 hundred million dollar exit. Obviously, the …”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 13:10 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Prediction Held up

Hower: Autonomous Vehicles Won't Be Everywhere in Two to Three Years

Insight

Hower: No 'subprime model' exists in venture capital due to power laws

“There's no subprime model to venture capital investing, right? You can't invest in the mediocre companies at a cheap price and produce a good outcome because the distribution of outcomes is a power law. It's not a normal distribution.”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 12:06 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Opinion

Hower: Standalone chatbot and messaging AI companies are overhyped and unsustainable

“I think not sustaining, there's a lot of emphasis on Sort of chatbots and messaging AI happening at a messaging layer. I think that's actually going to be critical in many, many ways to a broader array of applications, but I think undue emphasis has probably b…”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 19:03 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Assertion Supported

Hower: PayPal went through three CEOs and burned $10M+ monthly in 2000

“During my first year working there in 2000, you know, we had essentially three different CEOs over the course of that year. You know, at our worst point, we were burning, you know, more than ten million dollars a month.”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 6:24 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Insight

Lee Hower: High valuations without progress create severe overhangs

“At any point in, in the life cycle, You can create a valuation overhang where if a company raises capital at an exceptionally high valuation and can't hit value accretive milestones along the way to merit that, that valuation, they put themselves at a challeng…”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 11:45 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Assertion Supported

X.com and Confinity completed a 50-50 merger in spring 2000

“The two companies ended up merging a fifty-fifty merger of equals in the spring of 2000.”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 3:10 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Assertion Supported

Hower: Average seed funding rounds were $1M in 2010

“When we started investing in 2010, you know, your average seed round was about a million bucks or slightly larger.”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 10:26 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

Assertion Supported

Hower: Dedicated seed funds were scarce in Boston and NY in 2010

“And at the time that we started in 2010, you know, there were relatively few seed funds here in the New York area and the Boston area. Fast forward to today, you know, 2017, there's obviously been a proliferation of seed investors.”

Lee Hower Mar 8, 2017 ▶ 10:00 20VC: Why Valuation Is Of Critical Importance At Seed, How To Understand Innovation Cycles & Having 3 CEOs and Burning $10m a Month with Lee Hower, Co-Founder @ NextView Ventures

The other half of the tape: Lee Hower's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 4 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Rob Go 4 Harry Stebbings 2