It’s Obvious. Again.
Today marks the official launch of Obvious Ventures, the third chapter in the history of ‘Obvious.’ In order to tell you where we’re going, I should first tell you where we’ve been.
Chapter one of Obvious began back in 2006 when my long-time collaborator Biz Stone and I decided to create a new kind of Internet startup — at sort of “product lab” that would incubate various ideas, starting with Odeo (our podcasting site) and Twitter (a side product of Odeo). Twitter quickly took over “Obvious 1.0” and became our sole focus for the next few years.
Chapter two started when Biz and I, along with Blogger and Twitter alum Jason Goldman, rebooted Obvious Corp in the summer of 2011 with a plan to “build systems that help people work together to make the world a better place.” Our early efforts were a mix of startup investing, startup incubation, and blank-slate startup formation. Medium was formed during this time. In early 2013 both Biz and I made the decision to focus our time and energy on Jelly and Medium, respectively.
In early 2014, I started a conversation with entrepreneur and investor James Joaquin about how to best continue the “world positive” investing that we started with Obvious Corp. We began with the shared belief that great investment returns will be created by startups building scalable solutions to big world challenges. In contrast, we found that most traditional investors held the opposite view: that ‘doing good’ would somehow compromise financial performance and returns. So we hatched a plan…start our own fund.
Early in our planning stages we were joined by Vishal Vasishth, the former Chief Strategy Officer of Patagonia. Vishal shared our vision around startups combining profit and purpose, and brought a great mix of company building and investment experience to the team.
Today this vision and plan becomes real with Obvious Ventures. As you can see on our site, we’ve been busy and already have a portfolio of nine investments we can talk about publicly (and two more that we’ll tell you about soon).
James and Vishal run the day to day operations of the fund while I devote the vast majority of my time to running Medium. I’m excited to see the OV team growing, with Sami Inkinen, co-founder of Trulia, joining as a Venture Partner. I stay closely involved in the strategy and direction of the fund as we hone our investment lens. You can read more about that in James’s and Vishal’s stories here on Medium.
We’re really excited about our #worldpositive investing focus, and we really hope it spreads across the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs, startups accelerators, and investors. I hope you agree.
