Recently, we were contacted by a female entrepreneur who is a long-time friend. She had experienced sexual harassment by a well-known VC but was terrified of going public about it. While she was struggling with all of the issues one would expect around this, she was also worried about being sued. She felt like she had the emotional resources to cope, but she didn’t feel that she had the financial resources to withstand a lawsuit.
Using litigation, or the threat of litigation, to intimidate a person who has been harassed is a common tactic. It’s another example of the power dynamic in a harassment situation. The powerful harasser continues threatening behavior against the person who was harassed who now has to face a legal battle, often against a person with far greater financial resources.
We were discussing this challenging situation and Jason came up with the idea that we help create a Sexual Harassment Legal Defense Fund for the venture capital industry, to help VCs and entrepreneurs who have been sexually harassed. We started working on it, figuring out what we actually needed to do to put this together and operationalize the idea.
On January 1st, a group of 300 prominent actresses and female agents, writers, directors, producers, and entertainment executives formed Time’s Up Now to fight systemic sexual harassment in Hollywood and in blue-collar workplaces nationwide. As part of this, they are raising over $16 million for the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund.
Rather than create a separate organization, we’ve decided to commit $200,000 to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund. Half of it is coming from Foundry Group and half is coming from the Anchor Point Foundation.
In addition, we’ve reached out to Time’s Up to volunteer to lead a sub-segment for entrepreneurs and VCs who are sexually harassed. We are beginning to reach out to all of our VC peers and encourage them to join us in this initiative.
We’re committed to ending sexual harassment. While it’s important to adopt policies such as Our Zero Tolerance Policy On Sexual Harassment and help facilitate curated resources such as the Venture Inclusion Network, we are committed to engaging with and supporting organizations like Time’s Up to help build real support for people who experience sexual harassment.
BREAK THE INTERNET TO SAVE NET NEUTRALITY
We have just hours. The FCC is about to vote to end net neutrality—breaking the fundamental principle of the open Internet—and only an avalanche of calls to Congress can stop it. So we decided to help “Break the Internet” on our sites. You can also support on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube or in whatever wild creative way you can to get your audience to contact Congress. That’s how we win. Are you in?
We are pleased to announce thatFoundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Data Nerds. With offices in Kelowna, B.C. and Denver, Colorado, Data Nerds is building a platform that allows businesses and consumers to quickly and easily obtain valuable property information that is otherwise extremely hard to get.
The U.S. real estate market is worth at least $29.6 trillionand the annual transaction value is upwards of $491 billion. This adds up to over 125 million homes in the US and over 3,200 individual counties that hold valuable data about each of these properties (all of whom make property information available differently). The amount of data created in the last 20 years surrounding these homes is massive, yet underutilized.
Given the sheer volume of data, legacy vendors charge exorbitant amounts for minor manipulation and presentation of data. Local counties are either still paper-based or have outdated technology platforms for a person or business to interact with. One would think that with today’s processing power that all of this data could be aggregated with real insights that benefit consumers and businesses alike. Data Nerds is solving this problem.
Data Nerds currently sells two products under the brand name Estated: Property Reports “a carfax for homes” and Property Data API. With their property records product, the company has aggregated, digitized, and standardized millions of property records to create a platform that allows consumers to quickly and easily obtain valuable property information that is otherwise extremely hard to get. By unlocking this data, consumers have the ability to make better real estate decisions about the biggest purchase in their lives. This data is also what powers their API product for their own products and those of their customers in various industries.
Data Nerds fits into our Glue theme in that we see their data and intelligence platform invisibly powering many future applications, although they do have a direct-to-consumer product as well.
Data Nerds was founded by Josh Fraser and Evan McIntosh. The company was a participant in the 2016 Boulder Techstars class and we are excited to work with the team. One fun fact: this is our first co-investment with Next Big Ventures, a seed fund created by the founders of Next Big Sound, a previous Foundry Group portfolio company. Given the similarities of these two businesses, it will be additionally fun to work with our friends on another company.
Our Investment in Pi Charging
We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016 has made its initial Series A investment in Pi Charging, Inc. Pi delivers wireless power to multiple devices safely and at high power (up to 10W) from any angle without requiring a charging mat. They achieve this magic using their proprietary breakthrough: the world’s first magnetic field-shaping algorithm.
Pi was founded by Lixin Shi and John McDonald, who met at MIT. Their vision was to change the state-of-the-art in wireless charging, not with charging pads, microwaves, lasers, or ultrasound, but with a long-range magnetic charging transmitter. These transmitters will work with the Qi wireless standard, so your new iPhone 8, iPhone X, and many other current and future devices are compatible, and won’t require a special case.
We were originally connected to Pi by Jeff Clavier, Founder and Managing Partner at Uncork Capital (fka SoftTech VC). As we spent more time with John and Lixin, we found them to be awesome humans, and their vision, product, and tech chops meant we wanted to get involved with Pi.
While wireless charging is still in its infancy, consumers are starting to expect it in new products, and we are excited to partner with this incredible team to create the future of charging.
We recently invested in K9 Ventures’ third fund, a $42M “pre-seed” fund with a strong focus on emerging technologies (more on the pre-seed naming convention in a minute). Manu Kumar, who runs the firm, did a nice job of talking about his fund and its strategy here. We are excited to formally partner with Manu and count K9 among our Partner Funds, as we’ve known and followed Manu for many years. My partner was a personal early investor in his initial 2009 fund, and I got to know Manu through UTIMCO’s exposure to K9 Fund II in 2012. We’ve been impressed watching Manu build K9 and were excited to see him launch The Kennel space.
Manu may deserve credit (and perhaps blame) for coming up with the term “pre-seed.” He positions himself as a “frighteningly early” investor, and he lives up to that label, as he often invests at the formation of an idea before it becomes a company. Many times these founders come and spend time daily at The Kennel, where Manu can work with them closely while they develop their ideas. Formation stage investing is best done in a high-touch manner, and The Kennel provides a great space for Manu and his founders to collaborate.
Manu tends to pick a similar profile of founder as we do; we both favor gritty, grinding, technical founders, who don’t always come from traditional backgrounds or pedigrees. We want them to have strong character and be humble yet driven. The K9 portfolio is a mix of software and hardware companies that feel very familiar to us, as the style of company is very similar to what we invest in directly. We’ve only co-invested once (in Occipital), but I’m hopeful that we will find other companies where we can collaborate.
On a personal note, I’m particularly excited to have the chance to work more closely with Manu and K9. Manu and I are almost exactly the same age, and we both are going through some of the same life experiences with our children, who are also very close in age. It has been fun to see Manu going through the challenge of growing children while also trying to help grow companies.
Manu has been public with his views of appropriate fund size, choosing to keep it small and execute his strategy with the right capital base. We applaud his discipline in the face of LP demand (and smile at his matching fund size to his age, as well as the answer to life, the universe, and everything). Manu prefers to keep playing his pre-seed game, while many others have drifted up market and are finding that elbows get sharper and valuations increase unreasonably. Manu is also known to hold out for an appropriate valuation and is willing to pass on a financing without suffering FOMO. This is a particularly difficult thing to do as a solo GP and requires a lot of confidence to understand that other opportunities will arise, and those where you do invest are far more important than any deals you might miss.
Many LPs decline to invest in solo GPs for a variety of reasons, including the concern of key man risk; however, we are comfortable that Manu has the experience and strength of conviction to continue executing his strategy and are delighted to invest in someone with the high emotional intelligence that Manu has.
We were lucky enough to be on the short list of potential investors for Manu when an opportunity arose in this latest fundraising. We already had the relationship and were happy to formalize it with a commitment to the new fund. Congrats to Manu on the new fund, and we’ll see you at The Kennel!
