IA Ventures — OG seed, Fund IV and more of the same
It has been more than ten years since I first conceived of IA Ventures (here are some thoughts from bygone days). During this time I had the amazing good fortune to collide with my two partners and close friends, Brad and Jesse. Somewhere along the way I turned 50 and my wife and I celebrated 25 years of marriage. I also saw both my boys go off to college to study and explore at my beloved University of Michigan. Life has been a whirlwind! And the business has done pretty well, too.
In 2016 we saw one of our first seed stage investments go public (TTD), and on IA’s 10th anniversary, witnessed another of our Fund I seed companies successfully launch its IPO (DDOG). We’ve also experienced the acquisition of IA portfolio companies for nine-figure sums including Recorded Future and Simple. Since our founding, we’ve seeded another 70+ companies including TransferWise, DigitalOcean, Komodo Health and DataRobot. We’re truly proud of every single founder we’ve partnered with: starting a company is hard under any circumstance, and regardless of outcome the respect we have for our founders runs deep.
Ten years in, venture investing continues to be among the most humbling, yet fulfilling, jobs on the planet. The data on your performance is sparse, volatile, and lags by five to ten years — while the market changes daily. With that backdrop, it’s seductive to fiddle with the product, and many venture firms understandably do.
We’ve resisted those adjustments at IA. We’re still a small partnership of 3 investors, based in NYC, leading seed stage investments with high conviction. Our funds remain $160M and we invest them over four years. We work closely with founders to achieve key product, customer and financial milestones within 12–18 months and put them on a path towards a powerful, impactful future. Regardless, we stay with them along the full journey no matter where it leads. We did it this way in 2010. We’re still doing it the same way in 2020. Same mission. Same people. Just with a decade of evidence that our own startup is on its way toward achieving escape velocity. I can’t think of many venture firms where the core team, strategy and approach has remained unchanged for a decade. This constancy is an important feature of the IA Ventures product.
Another critical but hard-to-observe feature is our relationship as partners. Every IA portfolio company has a lead partner, yet we act as a group. We each know the ins and outs of every IA portfolio company, as well as each other. The fact is we spend a lot of time together. A LOT of time. We don’t have individual offices; we share a single space. When we’re in town we eat lunch together. In those tens of thousands of hours together and well over a thousand lunches, we’ve learned that our best insights emerge from random, unplanned interactions that happen simply by being around each other. We’re all committed to seeking truth and betterment, even (and especially) when it’s inconvenient, frustrating or painful. That kind of exploration is possible only because we know and trust each other deeply.
Somewhere along this journey IA Ventures ceased to be the firm *I* founded to the firm *we* created. Make no mistake, the IA Ventures product is an amalgam of the three of us, three very different people from varied upbringings, with vastly different work experiences, widely varying ages and even stunningly different personalities and affects. But we share all the important stuff in common: transparency; values; caring and concern for our founders and their employees; intellectual honesty; thick skin; and a relentless growth mindset that drives us to explore how we can be our best selves, individually and as partners. Ten years later, I am so excited to come into work and interact with my partners whose intellect, heart, keen instincts and honesty make me better, each and every day. And it is because of all this that starting with IA Ventures Fund IV, a $160M fund that we’ll start deploying next month, that Brad, Jesse and I will become equal partners. Same fund size, same seed entry point, same mode of deep founder engagement, both before and after the first investment has been made. And I couldn’t be more proud or excited for the three of us and what the future holds for our partnership and the IA Ventures community.
