We’re now officially two years into building Notation. It’s been both the greatest opportunity, as well as challenge, in our professional lives. We recently did our annual partner review, and came away more excited than ever about the future for Notation and for our portfolio companies. We have some big announcements coming soon too…so stay tuned :-)
In looking back at the past 24 months, our first year was really about laying down some of the initial foundation of the firm — closing our first fund, loudly waiving the pre-seed flag in NYC, building out our part-time partnership and community, opening our office in Brooklyn, establishing our way of working with Notation founders as well as each other—among a dozen or so additional critical functions.
As we reflected on our second year in business, our conversations consistently led us back to the Notation portfolio companies and founders — how much they’ve accomplished in such a short period of time, and how fortunate we’ve been to have helped around the edges along the way.
So we figured we’d keep our 2016 year in review post short and sweet and to the point, highlighting the nine new companies we partnered with last year:
- Alice — The easiest way for employers to implement pre-tax spending. Their solution uses machine learning to understand which employee expenses are eligible and automatically saves companies and employees money.
- Simple Contacts — Mobile contact lens exam and fulfillment. Go check this product out, it feels like magic (for real).
- Arta — Shipping marketplace and API for high-end items. Focused on fine art today and quickly scaling into new categories.
- Timber — Modern application logging built for developers. If you’re an engineer that wants to be in the beta, holler at us asap!
- Stealth Insurance API Co — Coming soon…
- nTopology — Advanced CAD for advanced manufacturing.
- Bulletin—Enables online merchants and brands to sell IRL.
- Uru —Content-aware video advertising. The company uses computer vision-powered ads to understand and harmonize video content.
- Stealth Cloud Gaming Infrastructure Co—Coming soon…
In reflecting on this group of companies, our strategy and themes at Notation are in many ways as clear to us as they’ve ever been, although we recognize we have some work to do to message these to the broader community. We continue to be squarely focused on the pre-seed stage in NYC, where we led or co-led seven of the nine investments above (the average total size of each pre-seed round was about $675k). To us, “pre-seed” means investing with high conviction in pre-product-market fit teams as true first capital in. We particularly love working with strong product teams at company formation stage on critical items like team and product building, as well as customer development and fundraising.
As technologists ourselves, we continue to prefer founding teams that have real technical chops and are tackling hairy technology problems. Seven of the companies we backed in 2016 have deeply technical founding teams, half of which are building Internet infrastructure companies. The other half have strong CV and/or ML components and are building defensible data advantages that will be critical to their long-term success.
We’ve also partnered with several companies going after stodgy old industries that haven’t evolved in decades (ie. Simple Contacts, Arta, Stealth Insurance Co), all of which we believe are building technology driven solutions to fundamentally change how these markets function. These companies are collapsing what tend to be complex processes and physical infrastructure, and dramatically simplifying distribution via a layer of software, often exposed through an API.
One of our new goals for 2017 is to get a lot louder about all of the awesome things that our portfolio company founders are up to. We’re planning to be a lot more proactive in messaging the core Notation themes, as well as hopes and dreams for Notation as a firm in the future. If you have any suggestions for us or know of founders that fit these descriptions in NYC, please don’t be shy and let us know.
Now back to work. See y’all out there!
- Nick + Alex
