NextView Ventures

“I knew he was special, and he walked into our offices to pitch DraftKings along with two other extraordinary co-founders, and we passed, not because of, like, regulation, but because we misunderstood the market size.”

“We're currently investing out of our fifth fund. In fact, we have two. We have a seed fund, and we have a opportunity fund. The seed fund is a hundred and thirty-five million. The opportunity fund is sixty-five million.”

“We try to write checks between a million to three million dollars into pre-seed and seed rounds.”

“All of our LPs were basically investing two to one from the seed fund to the opportunity fund.”

“We basically do a ranking of the portfolio every quarter from a perspective of where we want to deploy or follow on capital. And we do that because we want to make the decision apart from a financing opportunity, right? Because what ends up happening is when s…”

“I think the third is like, there's an alternative, which is we just raise a bigger fund overall. But I think everybody kind of loses in that case, right? Because, you know, it's hard to deploy that much money. The fees effectively are higher if you don't do, b…”

“But like, really, I think most LPs, they spend like 90% of the time on the deck. And the track record, and that's all there is.”

“We do have an equal partnership.”

“You basically find the people who are willing to say yes and just trust you. You try to tally up as much as possible, preferably enough to do a minimum viable first close, close that capital, get into business, and allow yourself time to be able to cultivate t…”

“We had a pretty influential institution drop us in our third fund. And they did it the ninth hour.”

“We have since changed that where we do have a data room, but the data room is a preliminary data room and it is intentionally incomplete. And the reason it's intentionally incomplete is I want to see an LP. If we offer the data room, I want to know they looked…”

“Typically a year, you know, if I think about like our timing, if we're looking to do a first close in say Q one of a given year, we are probably giving pretty clear indication of where our timeframe is at least like 18, if not 24 months before that.”

“I generally am a believer in like building an anti-fragile LP LP base. And so in a weird way, like, even though I said earlier, I really, you know, I don't mind concentration. I also don't mind a lot of small checks if you can handle it from a timing standpoin…”

“The last fund was the easiest to raise. So that was the fifth fund. ... Yeah. Yeah. It was a DPI story.”

“One of our biggest hits is attentive. And we invested in an uncapped note and that changed my mind because we never would have done it before.”

“We actually, at NextView, write an investment memo for every single seed investment we make.”

“We actually have a two-step voting process where We vote very early on when we meet with entrepreneurs, then we vote, then we actually vote again when we make the final decision-making process.”

“For follow-on funding, we actually make it unanimous entirely.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“The cost of starting software businesses had come way down. And the best venture funds had accumulated larger and larger amounts of capital, and so there's this natural disconnect with founders.”

“Yes, our current fund is forty million dollars.”

“Our average check size is probably about 500,000 dollars, but we actually have scaled our investment quite a bit depending on the stage of the company.”

“The job of a seed investor is to invest in a company before product market fit, and try to take the company to the other side of product market fit and into sort of early validation and early growth.”

“I think there are a lot of later stage investors that are gonna get their hands slapped pretty badly as you know, the value, the late stage valuations that work Get worked out in this market.”

“There seems like there's no downside to raising more money, but there actually is. And the downside is actually around a lack of focus scrappiness And over investment in overhead before there's really the sort of core machinery to support it.”

“There isn't a really obvious trend that companies that raise a lot of money pre-product market fit end up doing much better than the ones that don't.”

“This company called Dia & Co. And, you know, they essentially nearly bootstrapped for their first 15 months of life.”

“I would generally advise for 18 months. I think the lever is less sort of the time, and it's more the headcount.”

“Like selling a third of your company before product market fits seems pretty painful. Versus trying to sell, you know, 15, 20% of the company for less money, but getting you to a point where you have a lot more leverage the next time you have to go to raise, r…”

“The most important aspect is, you know, what do other founders say about you? And not just what do other founders in your portfolio that are the best performing founders, right? Because like every company that's doing great, the, their investors spend a lot of…”

“NextView was the first to move on it in Boston in the early stage world.”

“The best way to differentiate, I think if you look across at software industry is content marketing or value add opportunities and projects and things like that.”

“So for us, it doesn't really make sense for us to do a lot of, you know, sales consulting, because a lot of our companies don't have sales teams yet. They're seed stage companies.”

“Rather than go run out of the gate, create some custom, beautiful blog, better is just use out of the box tools, you know, WordPress, Squarespace, whatever, and just really focus on what you're putting out the door. And for a company, it should be matching, ba…”

“So I launched it in July of 2014. If you look at the report from last month, so we're recording this in May, so if you look at April of 2015, of the top 10 most highly trafficked blog posts, About six or seven of them. I think it was seven of them were publish…”

“And that email list is really the biggest Kind of asset that I could grow for the firm. And I think that extends to product driven companies as well, not just VCs.”

“And that's one of the initiatives that we're focused on at NextView right now with Platform, is we have this proprietary system that we're running for our startups to surface and interview and hire the best talent.”