Announcing Craft II: $500 Million for Founders Backing Founders

By David Sacks, Bill Lee, Jeff Fluhr, and Sky Dayton

We’re excited to announce the closing of Craft Ventures’ $500 million second fund. In combination with our first fund, Craft is now investing $850 million in early-stage startups (Seed, Series A, Series B).

Building great companies is a craft that takes skill, tenacity and focus. The craft of entrepreneurship provides the namesake for our firm.

The partners at Craft have all built successful companies as former Founder/CEOs. We know that the entrepreneurial journey is a long and arduous one because we have lived it ourselves. This gives us a deep respect for founders and genuine empathy for their inevitable ups and downs.

Before founding Craft, we also participated in many other entrepreneurial journeys as angel investors. We invested in some of our generation’s most iconic companies including Affirm, Airbnb, Eventbrite, Facebook, Houzz, Slack, SpaceX, Tesla, Trulia, Twilio, Twitter, Uber, and Warby Parker.

In a world where capital is abundant, our real value is advice and support. All of Craft’s partners invest in areas they got to know well as entrepreneurs:

• David focuses on Consumer and SaaS based on his experience as founding-era COO of PayPal and Founder/CEO of Yammer, which was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion. In particular, David looks for products that can go viral, either online or in the real world; he led the Series A of micro-mobility leader Bird.
• Jeff focuses on Marketplaces and Ecommerce based on his experience as Founder/CEO of Stubhub, now a multi-billion dollar division of eBay. Jeff has an interest in hyper-vertical service marketplaces; he led the Series A of Trusted Health, a nursing marketplace, and Seed round of Dray Alliance, an Uber-like marketplace for the drayage trucking industry.
• Bill focuses on Emerging Areas like gaming and culture based on his experiences as Founder/CEO of Remarq (acquired by Critical Path for approximately $300 million) and Founder of Social Concepts (now part of unicorn game developer Big Fish Games). Bill led the Series A of esports leader Cloud9 and the Series A of character universe Superplastic.
• Sky focuses on Hard Tech as a Venture Partner based on his experiences as Founder/CEO of unicorns EarthLink and Boingo, and co-founder of CloudKitchens. Sky led Craft’s Series A investment in global connectivity provider Swarm Technologies.

We are supported by an outstanding team of investors and operators, who help our portfolio companies with everything from recruiting and communications to legal and compliance. Everyone on this team has spent time at startups and understands the journey.

The world needs innovators — the pioneers and idealists who envision and create a better future. Many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs did not look like success stories when they started. They were underdogs, failures, renegades, non-conformists, outcasts, scrappy idealists that had a single-minded quest that drove them to succeed.

At Craft, our mission is to find this rare breed of greatness and support them through the existential, make-or-break moments. We’re here to assist when it counts most — when founders need expert advice from people who have done it before. We are Founders Backing Founders.

David, Bill, Jeff, and Sky