“Relationships will always separate signal from noise.” I’ve known Jeff Wald for more than a decade. When I was building a company in the human capital space, he was one of the people I leaned on for advice. So when BoomerangHR announced its $12.7 million seed round on September 14, I wanted to hear the … Read more
Matt McCooe was one of the people who helped me find my way into venture capital back when I was at Columbia Business School, so this one was overdue. He has spent the last several years running Connecticut Innovations (CI), the state’s strategic venture capital arm. CI put $58 million to work last year through … Read more
Some corporate venture spinouts aren’t really spinouts. They move the portfolio and leave the people. The parent decides the fund is no longer core to its strategy, a buyer takes the assets off the balance sheet, and the investment team goes off to do something else. Sim Blaustein and his partner Urs Cete went a … Read more
Tejpaul Bhatia and I go back to 1999, when we were fresh out of college, working at the same dot-com company in New York. We’ve stayed close ever since, through his first angel investment in a space company, his run as CEO of that same company, and now his new venture, Nebex, which has been … Read more
Mantis Venture Capital is the firm The Chainsmokers founded. Gaurav Bhogale just made partner there, becoming the first non-founding partner in the firm’s history. You might think that they’re a consumer fund given the background of the founders. And as Gaurav shared, you’d be dead wrong: “What I usually tell founders is think of everything … Read more
Jeff Stewart backed one of my companies about a decade ago, so it was great to have him on this week to share what he’s been building toward ever since. He’s the founder of GPO Fund, a growth-stage venture firm launched in 2018 with a specific mandate: back growth stage founders who want to expand … Read more
Carta has done 13 acquisitions in 14 years. Four of them happened in the last 15 months. Davis Thacker has personally led or helped lead 11 of those deals. So when I sat down with him to talk M&A strategy, product vision, and where Carta is taking its platform, there was a lot of ground … Read more
Lindsay Kaplan co-founded Chief, built one of the most talked-about communities in tech, and then left to go on a year of soul-searching (and like many founders, angel investing). Coming out of that walkabout was Lindsay joining up with our friends at Bullish as a Venture Partner. In her new role, she’s hunting for “weird” … Read more
Chieh Huang has seen disruption cycles before. As co-founder of Boxed (the bulk shopping app that went public via SPAC), he built a company that employed thousands of warehouse workers. Now he’s betting that AI will trigger the biggest workforce transition in a generation. And he just launched Pelgo to help people land on the … Read more
I just wrapped up a conversation with Andrew Pignanelli, co-founder and CEO of The General Intelligence Company of New York. His story of closing an $8.7M seed round from Union Square Ventures is one of the wilder fundraising journeys I’ve heard in a while. Big thanks to Yohei Nakajima, who was a seed investor in … Read more
