Following the closing of our seed fund last summer, we have been hard at work on our priority number one: serving our entrepreneurs. In this one area, we aspire to constantly push the bar higher, striving to excel in the “venture concierge” aspect of the venture business (to paraphrase Vinod Khosla).
We organized our first Felicis Community event in May where we assembled nearly 80 of our founders and brought in industry luminaries to discuss top of mind issues around the start-up funding landscape, whether to pursue an exit or raise more capital and how to recruit and retain great talent. One of the insights from the event was that the incredible accomplishments and sheer diversity of our founders had never been showcased. To that extent, we’re proud to be featuring all our CEOs and Founders in our new Community Page. We will be adding an internal email list for them shortly as well, with the hopes of fostering dialogue and sharing of experiences.
We hope to connect multiple worlds and backgrounds: our Founders started companies in 6 countries (US, Canada, Israel, Brazil, Estonia and Finland) on 4 continents. We have over 175 Founders in our Community, whose companies have created close to 3,000 jobs [estimated from LinkedIn employee counts] – please note that this figure does not count the 20 companies that have been acquired and our investment in LinkedIn, which was made at a later stage. We could not be prouder.
While we are excited about the tremendous business success of our companies including some that have become household brands world-wide like Rovio, we’re even more enthusiastic about how they have been quietly making the world a better place in key areas like Education (Inkling, Piazza, Mindsnacks), Healthcare (Practice Fusion, Fitbit, Azumio and DNANexus) and Energy Conservation (Plotwatt). Great inspiration for us, to work even harder to contribute to their awesome performance.
