Exploring The Everyday is an interview series exploring interesting individuals or companies who are trying to make an impact on the lives of everyday people. You can learn more about this series here, or read our past interviews here. What do you think about when you hear the words, “lab grown meat”? Are images of Frankenstein and […]

  Exploring The Everyday is an interview series exploring interesting individuals or companies who are trying to make an impact on the lives of everyday people. You can learn more about this series here.   Universal Basic Income is a hot dinner party topic around the country right now. There are a lot of opinions on […]

I’m very pleased to announce that Dorothy Ren has joined the investment team at NextView! Dorothy will be based in our New York office and will be focused on expanding our relationships with high-potential founders and operators in the New York startup community. Dorothy joins us most recently from Spark Capital, where she had the […]

It occurred to me yesterday that I’ve been in the VC business for over 10 years. I’ve been writing checks for 8 years, and was lucky to get my start in the industry with the team at Spark Capital where I was able to witness some amazing early investments as part of that team. As […]

What? Another d2c gourmet pet food company? Another full-stack short-termrentals startup? Another affinity-based co-working space? It seems as though in many categories, especially in consumer internet space, a handful of startups pursuing quite similar or even apparently identical ideas launch within months of each other. What’s going on with these apparent copycat companies? Are the barriers to entry so low and information disseminating […]

Yesterday was Singles Day in China, celebrated on 11/11 each year and theoretically to honor young adults who are not in relationships. In practice it is essentially an invention by retailer Alibaba who holds massive online sales on this day across their platform (Taobao, Tmall, etc). Alibaba reported over $30B in GMV yesterday across its platform of […]

Almost seven years ago, I wrote a post about the difference between a “no” answer and a “no yet” when pitching early-stage VCs. This was back in January 2012, a simpler time… when there was only one kind of seed round, when Series A firms invested pre-revenue, etc. No, this is not some waxing nostalgic post. But […]

Five years ago, as the mania around seed fundings was accelerating, Founders were very eager to announce their seed round to the world. It marks the beginning of the journey with hard work & the real business success to be accomplished ahead, but a milestone nonetheless. And seed VCs, especially as new firms were being […]

  It’s almost exactly 5 years since Aileen Lee first coined the term “unicorn” in reference to startups with $1 billion+ valuations. I was wondering what ever ultimately happened to that group of OG unicorns, so I looked back at her original post in TechCrunch from November 2013. To analyze what’s become of the OG Unicorns, it’s […]

I see hundreds of fundraising decks each year. I’ve been doing this for eight years now, so I’ve been able to see some longitudinal trends during that time. There are a couple trends that I have noticed emerge over the last few years that I think have become industry standard. The problem is that I […]