Slow’s Newest Seed and Opportunity Funds… More of The Same!
We wanted to share with the Slow community the launch of our fifth seed fund (Slow Ventures V), and Slow’s second Opportunity fund (Slow Opportunity II), representing together $325M in new capital commitments for us to invest in the coming years. In total, Slow now manages $770M of investor capital and has invested in more than 550 companies over the past decade.
Megan Lightcap (previously at Olive and L Catterton), Clay Robbins (previously at 0x Labs and Square), and Yoni Rechtman (previously at Tusk Ventures) have all recently joined Slow and will be investing from these new funds alongside the existing team.
There is no change in strategy from our earlier funds. Our point of entry remains at the Pre-Seed and Seed stage and then we continue to support and invest in the later stages as these companies continue to grow. As we have since the beginning, we will seek out and support companies from the earliest days — long before a new thesis is proven or before it is simply about scaling. We love entrepreneurs who ask ‘what if’ and take calculated risks on new markets, business models, and technical innovations.
Our goal is to be intelligently non-consensus. So much of what is called ‘venture capital’ has simply become a matter of piling capital into things which everyone sees and knows is ‘working’. Our job is to push the envelope ahead of the herd of large funds. We have now done this very successfully in a wide variety of spaces — from telemedicine to collectables, fintech, consumer, and Web3 — and are always looking for the next frontiers. Currently we have several new ideas we are exploring, from launching and managing DAOs to investing in individual humans in exchange for a piece of their future value creation, all in an effort to find the next great and unrealized truly ‘venture’ opportunities.
We recognize that we are all talented in different but complementary ways. We make sure that founders get the best from Slow, not just value from the investor on the team who they are closest with. We care about impact, not facetime. Time is always money, but even more so at the seed stage. We want to make sure that founders are spending their time as efficiently as possible, even with us. We don’t take board seats and we don’t demand in-depth investor meetings. We want to help founders understand how the venture game is being played. Lots of guidance and advice founders rely on is quickly out of date in this rapidly changing market so we help founders better understand the dynamics at play and ensure they are spending time and money as wisely as possible. Our primary job is to help our founders unlock future venture capital if they are getting ‘yes’ answers to their most important hypotheses. We’ve honed our network and processes to give founders the best opportunity to raise the capital they need from the most appropriate top tier investors focused on their sector and stage.
Over the years of our Slow journey, we have watched as some of our 550+ portfolio companies have found homes in the public markets (including Robinhood, Nextdoor, Astra, Pinterest, Amplitude, Allbirds, etc), some eventually ended up as part of larger companies (Livongo, Slack, PillPack, Freshly, Giphy, Postmates, etc), and hundreds more are still building their companies independently (Airtable, Ro, Embark Veterinary, Citizen, Human Interest, OpenPhone, Teamshares, Good Dog, Very Good Security, etc). More recently, we have benefited from our early support of great crypto projects like Solana, Klaytn, Algorand, Chia, and many others.
To us, it really isn’t that complicated. We remain as we have always been, generalists who believe in backing great people with great hypotheses, trying to prove they are correct. We take pride in funding founders from the earliest days, before everyone else comes knocking, we believe the best things take time, and we take pride in delivering capital to founders when it really matters.
Onwards!
Kevin Colleran, Sam Lessin, and Will Quist
