We sent this letter to our investors this week and in our continued fund comms transparency, felt there may be some value in sharing an anonymized version publicly.
Dear Compound I investors,
As you all know by now, the impacts of COVID-19 are being felt globally both from a health and economic sense. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen markets decline sharply, as they attempt to process the true ripple effects and duration of a population standstill across various continents. While there is plenty of information floating around the internet to follow what is happening (we highly recommend Daniel…
Below is our slightly edited for confidentiality 2019 annual letter to our investors.
Dear Compound I investors,
In 2019 we invested in 4 new companies, followed-on into 11 existing companies, and saw 2 companies exit. In total we deployed $xM into new investments, $xM into existing investments, and saw proceeds of ~$xM due to exits from Indio and Clear Genetics.
In total the fund has now invested $xM of the ~$50M of committed capital into x companies, and called $xM, with an MOC of ~x.
We’re excited to share with you our annual letter surrounding our portfolio, views on the…
We’re hiring an Investor at Compound
We’re looking to expand our investment team at Compound by hiring a non-partner investor. We want this role to be someone that works closely with the partnership to help us across the entire firm from our seed stage investing, to incubations, to fund-level management. For the right person, we think this is a very special role that exceed many comparable titles in terms of learning curve and responsibilities. The role can be based in either NYC or SF.
When we think about adding to our investment team, we optimize for bringing on people that can help scale our difficult-to-scale, thesis-driven…
Josh Nussbaum will be moving into an EIR role at Compound
At Compound we spend a large amount of time going deep in the industries we not only care deeply about, but also believe will generate venture scale returns over the coming decade. We do this by focusing our time and passion for emerging technologies towards research and building theses across given categories.
Often we build strong enough conviction in a given industry and concept that we go out looking for very specific types of companies. …
By: David Hirsch & Nicole Imhof
Compound is launching our Innovative Leadership Series, featuring interviews between Partner David Hirsch and Compound’s network of Advisors and thought leaders. This month, we’ve interviewed Mindy Grossman, President and CEO of WW and longtime investor and advisor to Compound. She plays an influential role in helping our founders navigate branding, company culture, and generosity.
“Culture trumps strategy,” says WW President and CEO Mindy Grossman. …
Compound’s review of the market in 2018 + forward looking thoughts on 2019 as told to our investors
Below is a modified-for-confidentiality version of the annual letter we sent to our Compound Fund III investors.
Dear Compound III investors,
Over the course of 2018 we invested in 11 new companies, made 3 follow-on investments into existing portfolio companies, and invested in 11 new blockchain companies.
We also had 1 exit in Sayspring and 1 dissolution.
After an incredibly productive 2018, we’ve decided to reflect on our thoughts on the status of the markets we operate in, as well as the sectors we invest in looking forward to 2019.
Overall VC Market Conditions
In 2018, venture capital as an asset class saw the…
Specific areas we’re excited about at Compound
Last updated: 8/20/19
At Compound, sometimes we work backwards from deep research in categories we’re interested in and sometimes highly intelligent and bold founders open our eyes to new possibilities and frontiers. While we remain excited about the latter, we wanted to take the opportunity to publicly share the areas that we’ve identified from our research in the same spirit that Union Square Ventures has spearheaded with their threads and theses. This is meant to be a living, breathing document that we’ll update over time as we continue to learn.
As always, we’d love to hear from you if you’re…
Announcing grants for decentralized apps (dApps) & our evolution as a VC firm.
At Compound we’re constantly thinking about where the world is going and what change is needed to get there. In our latest fund, this has manifested itself in companies surrounding decentralization, automation, machine learning, computational biology, and more.
Our core goal as seed-stage investors is to find human outliers early, and help them go from the proverbial 0 to 1. Sometimes this culminates in us making a seed investment into their company. …
We’re very excited to finally announce both our new fund and our new brand, Compound. Since the change from Metamorphic Ventures to Compound is the bigger piece of news, we’ll start there.
When we started Metamorphic Ventures, the thesis was built around the idea that the smartphone (the iPhone was only a few years old) was going to change everything, from the way that we connected with one another and the way that we transacted. At the same time, consumer startups had fairly binary outcomes and would need to raise a lot of capital before achieving success and subsequently, liquidity…
Compound
Compound is an early stage VC firm that invests in early stage technology companies disrupting or enabling traditional industries.
