FPV Ventures

Every year, Forbes publishes the Midas List, which is their ranking of what they consider to be the top 100 global VCs who were luckily enough to have invested in one or more big winners. If you're in Tech, it's super obvious when the list comes out because you notice that the investors you're connected to, who were lucky enough to make the list, often put up LinkedIn and Twitter posts patting themselves on the back saying how "humbled" and "honored" they are to make the list. Some even go as far as to tell you how many years they've been on it, as if that makes them that much better of an investor than the hundreds of way more eager and hungry folks, earlier in their journey, waiting to take their spot. What many of these self-congratulatory posts forget is that the real humility comes from witnessing the journey that founders whom they are invested have to muddle through. It's an intense roller coaster ride, and the real honor goes to them, for better luck or not, for beating the odds, overcoming incredible challenges, and checking all of the temptations that can force them off the tracks, so that they can build an outlier company. For me, that was being lucky enough to get to have a front row seat with Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht from Canva. From learning of their early challenges of having to raise capital when hundreds of investors told them no, to seeing how they relentlessly focus on releasing features that users love and fuel growth rather than burning money on marketing, the real honor is in watching them both wildly succeed. And the best investors know that real humility and joy come not from making a list, but in working with founders who, every day, continues building something that makes something hard much easier to do, that makes really sick people less ill, or helps more people make a better honest living. So with that, I want to say that I am humbled to be working with amazing founders doing just that, and honored to be a small part of their journey, and that it's my 16th year continuing to do what Iove doing since I get to invest in folks like Mel and Cliff. And to those that made the Midas List, I really do know how many years of patience it takes to do well in this business, so yes, my heartfelt congratulations go to you as well. And for those of you who really want to know why Mel and Cliff are so humble and humbling, check out Cliff's interview about why and how he is giving away 95% of his wealth in Canva to help reduce extreme poverty, among many other things that he wants to help fix, which you can find in the link below. That's the real accomplishment that everyone will pat you on the back for, whether you want it or not. https://lnkd.in/e8nVdTZM

Fun chat last month talking all this hype at TechCrunch Disrupt. No escaping hypes, so just focus on solving problems and it won't matter if you are riding the wave up a hype cycle or crashing back down on the other side and no one cares. Best companies talk about what they're solving not the hype words.

There are times when you get to chat with another industry expert and have so much fun you forget where the time went! Was so fun talking all things AI and financial sector with Visa's President of Technology, Rajat Taneja, at Fortune's Brainstorm AI last week! I love an underdog story….I know weird calling giant financial institutions underdogs, but if you asked most folks what was the slowest industry to adopt cloud technologies 15 years ago when I was CIO @ Morgan Stanley, surely financials were up there at the top!  But now, I’m excited to see financials starting to lead the way on many of the AI transformations vs other non-tech industries this time around! Here’s to financial companies reclaiming the torch 🗽 of innovation and leading the charge on AI. Here's looking at you Jeff McMillan, Lori Beer, Jim Fowler, Gleb Reznik, Larry Feinsmith, Alisha Lehr, Ivano Togni, Jonathan Lofthouse, Miles Farrel, David DeVera, Judy Dinn, David Gordon, George Maddaloni, Darrin Alves To founders selling to large enterprises: tackle those hard, previously impossible problems. Just like Uber solved an old problem in a new way that wasn't possible until we all had phones stuck to us in the mobile transformation, the best AI-driven companies will make some of the impossible possible. https://lnkd.in/g5aJM9jS - Thank you Terri for moderating!

🚨An early Google employee with 18 patents under his belt, Wesley Chan has since backed standout companies including Canva, Flexport and Robinhood. He joins us for VC Wednesdays. 🚨 ✒️FPV Ventures just raised a new $525 million fund. Where are you most excited to deploy that? It's always been about founders. We call ourselves snipers and find founders with that unique insight. So for example, I started my career at Google when there were less than a 100 people and it had more than 20 competitors all making money through display ads. Then came Larry and Sergey with this crazy white page idea — an ugly logo, a bar and button — to get you off as quickly as humanly possible. Their entire mantra was “10 seconds and two clicks,” and against the status quo. Canva was the same, with Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht’s insight that people under 35 thought image-first and would want DIY design. ✒️You've made some AI investments. How does your thesis differ from other VC firms? I've been through multiple boom and bust cycles, and mobile was probably the most interesting one — because it taught me that the incumbents accrued most of the value. A lot of people did infrastructure. They're all gone, or all part of Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta today. It was the applications, or companies with business models that were enabled by mobile being ubiquitous that won, like Airbnb and Uber. We look for ideas that are specialized. We have a stealth company using AI to do chip design, for example, which is so specialized that they won’t have 50 people competing against them. ✒️You built Google Analytics, Google Voice and helped build Google AdWords. How do you think Google is positioned in the AI race? They have unlimited access to data and compute power. If you have those, you're going to do well. I would not write them off. It's just that foundation models will commoditize. We all thought the iPhone was going to be the clear winner, then Google ended up creating Android. People are going to use multiple foundation models. Nobody's going to pick sides. ✒️You’ve said ‘there’s a hurricane coming.’ How can founders prepare for the instability ahead? Get profitable quickly. The best founders know that they control their own destiny. Jamie Dimon recently predicted a 60% chance of a recession. We're going to see capital becoming tight, inflation on goods from tariffs, and people pull back from investing until there's more certainty. ✒️ What’s one investment that you regret passing on? Uber in the seed round. I still remember the pitch. It was about town cars to the airport. I never understood or saw the future of UberX, where anyone with a car could create a taxi service and Uber would be the brokerage. I only saw the town cars, and I thought, "I don't like investing in things that only target rich people." I didn't see the evolution of it, and that was my fault. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn

Today, we announced that we closed $525M on our FPV Ventures Ventures Fund II.  This brings our assets under management (AUM) to nearly $1B, which will allow us to back another exceptional group of mission-driven founders that are resilient and build companies that will compound and weather any storm that may come their way. One of the pressing things that has been on everyone’s minds is how much turmoil there has been in the world and in the markets recently. Open any news website and the market has either swung wildly in one direction or has closed disastrously in another. It often seems for those investing that there is no safe harbor from where the world is going. Wesley Chan and I started FPV Ventures three years ago, with the belief that mission-driven founders and the exceptional startups they build create the best safe harbor and outlier returns for our investors.  Our aim was to back founders that were so mission-driven that the resilient companies they built would grow and compound no matter what challenges they encountered -- whether it be recession, surprise tariffs, world turmoil, or global pandemic.  And because of our time horizon of a decade or more, we could back startups that seemed a bit kooky today but would have the chance to grow to become outlier decacorns years into the future.  (It's not lost on us that Canva one of the best private companies, had 111 investors pass on them when Wesley met and led the Series A in them because no one truly understood what they were doing or thought they had a chance against any of the incumbents!) Our first cohort of portfolio companies in Fund I fit that profile. Whether it's Canva (who just launched a suite of AI features that are enabling them to grow at an even more profitable, breakneck pace) or Strand Therapeutics (who has cancer-curing drugs in clinical trials), we're backing companies that compound, who do well no matter what the markets may throw at them because they're focused on building products that stand the test of time. Three years ago - like many of the founders we’ve backed - we started with an idea on a Canva slide deck, and a dream to back founders who dared to build for the long term and who wanted partners who would ignore all the fads, FOMO, and hype of today. We were lucky enough to have backed Canva, Enveda, XOPS, PsiQuantum, Strand Therapeutics, and 30 other companies in the short time we have been around.  And like the amazing founders we’re working with, we hope to be the safe harbor who delivers outlier outcomes in these turbulent times.  We know there’s a hurricane coming, and our amazing mission-driven founders and investors have helped us build the strong foundation needed so that what we're building will be around and thriving for a very long time. And for that, we are immensely grateful.