Netizen: Sam Lessin

Saturday, May 07, 2022

Sam Lessin

@lessin @KevinColleran @slow Hello Sam. I just sent a pitch email to your Slow email. Last met you at your Loft/office in Brooklyn when dinosaurs still roamed (long time)
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) May 7, 2022

A DAO To Topple Putin By Christmas

Sam Lessin General Partner, Slow Ventures Lessin was a personal investor in crypto before his firm made numerous bets including blockchain privacy startup Aleo (valued at $1.5B), blockchain platform Chia Network (valued at $500), and Solana. ........ Other than crypto, Lessin backed cloud software startup Airtable, valued at $11.7 billion, and rocket launch company Astra, which went public at a $2.1 billion valuation in 2021. ........ Lessin founded Slow Ventures in 2015 alongside Kevin Colleran and Dave Morin (who has since left). The firm has raised $750 million over the last seven years. ......... Once Facebook's vice president of product management, Lessin now works with pal Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Arielle

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. ........ 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. ......... 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. ........ 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 care about impact, not facetime. Time is always money, but even more so at the seed stage. ....... 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 ........ 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. ........ 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.

Sam Lessin’s Lessons From Backing Solana, $350M For Jump Capital And A Red-Hot Recruiting Software Raise In Santa Monica