My partners and I are thrilled to continue collaborating with fantastic entrepreneurs to help build enduring, iconic and meaningful companies. Last week, we completed the fundraising of Venrock 7, a $450M fund focused on disruptive early-stage tech and multi-stage healthcare companies. For many VCs, the process of raising a new fund brings a helpful opportunity for self-reflection — a chance to take stock of the world, the disruptive technical forces likely to bring change and a candid assessment of one’s abilities to thrive in this environment. While we are always observing the world around us and making adjustments to our areas of focus and investment strategies, every four years or so, we too go through a rigorous process of prophesy and self-evaluation. Like an entrepreneur presenting their company to a VC, we pressure test our strategy with LPs during the process of raising a new fund. We came away with some exciting observations about both ourselves and the world. I am pleased our LPs share our view of our abilities and have entrusted us with the resources necessary to help build some great companies.
At Venrock, preeminent among all of our abilities is a belief in the importance of a performance-oriented and supportive culture — internally and with our entrepreneurs. We believe we will not excel as a partnership if we do not truly admire and respect each other. We are good at listening not just to the entrepreneurs with whom we meet, but to each other, distilling each other’s wisdom and foresight. And we work hard to preserve this culture internally. Each day, I feel my partners are behind me 100% and are rooting for my success, as am I for theirs. Equally important, however, is a focus on performance. We are in this business to make money for our LPs, and that can only be accomplished by investing in great companies and participating in their upside. In my almost six years at Venrock, I have never been more excited by the team surrounding me, our expertise, our intuition, but mostly our deep mutual respect and support for each other.
Areas of Excitement
There are plenty of important trends to discuss in tech. Here are just a few areas that really excite me:
New York
New York continues its ascent and importance to the tech ecosystem. As a firm that has been in New York for decades, we have now made a deeper and even more meaningful commitment to investing in early-stage New York City tech companies. We are doubling down in New York with a larger team and have invested in some of the largest and most important tech companies here. Appnexus, Dstillery, Smartling, Dataminr and a few others not yet announced represent what we hope to find in our investments — hungry, passionate, and brilliant entrepreneurs bent on creating enduring and very large companies, sometimes creating new industries themselves. As a firm, we are confident some of the greatest tech companies of the coming decades will be founded in New York City and we hope to find them and invest in them early.
AdTech -> Marketing Cloud
Traditional adtech is evolving into the SaaS marketing cloud. We continue to focus on the highest-value layers of the adtech and marketing services stack as consumer attention continues its migration away from traditional to online media. Ad-supported business models continue to dominate the internet, are performance-based and offer brands better control and measurement of their ad dollars. Our unwavering belief in the long-term primacy of ROI-driven advertising leads us to seek out the most innovative and best-performing ad products and the technologies underlying them, especially as ad formats and consumer media platforms change from desktop web to social mobile stream to app to OTT video and beyond. We focus on the emergence of best-in-class tools for marketers to help them take control of the entire marketing funnel, from prospecting to conversion to long-term customer relationship management.
Blockchain
The emergence of the blockchain may be one of the most promising technical innovations of the last five years. We see the highly inefficient and expensive legacy payment and money transfer mechanisms being pressured by the far lower-cost methods made possible by blockchain-driven solutions. We are excited by innovations in addition to Bitcoin that can be built atop the blockchain, especially contracts, IP transfer solutions, voting solutions, ticketing, identity, and eventually distributed computing.
Video
Readers of this blog know of my passion for the disruption of legacy media companies. I am particularly excited by the changes underway to the video ecosystem. The emergence of mobile as both a video creation and consumption device is sucking attention away from the traditional TV screen but also democratizing the creation of engaging video. I believe changes in the traditional TV value chain are well underway and I look forward to finding more companies catalyzing these changes.
And More
We continue to explore the intersections of technology with education, financial services, branded commerce, enterprise software and, of course, healthcare and healthcare IT. As always, we believe in the power of entrepreneurship to bring progress, efficiency and new capabilities to markets and are thrilled to have fresh resources to invest in great entrepreneurs embarking on exciting journeys.