Today we announced the closing of Resolute V, a $100M seed and pre-seed fund, and for the first time, a $50M Opportunity Fund.The primary focus of Resolute V will be the same as the firm's previous four funds—to identify and jumpstart founders who are in the early stages of development by not only p
Words can’t describe 2020, so we won’t try. Instead, we’d like to share some Resolute highlights from the year to give you an overview of what’s been happening across the portfolio.The headline is that it has been an especially exciting year for the Resolute family. We’ve made 11 new investments bac
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What inspired you to start Liquid?I spent four years building FlexTeam (still running) which recruits teams of executive-level women for business consulting projects, and the talent that we found outside the traditional employee talent pool just blew me away. Each professional had a different reason
Since George Floyd’s tragic killing and the wave of protests that have followed, we have been asking ourselves what we can and should do. Here is what we are thinking.Speak up. While we ordinarily don’t see it as our role, as a VC fund, to opine on social and political issues, in this case we believ
With her boundless curiosity and drive to solve a variety of problems, Linda embodies the founder spirit. Need proof? Airin is Linda’s seventh start-up.It was during her time at Axiom Recovery-- which she founded just prior to Airin-- that she realized she still had another mission ahead of her. Axi
We want to introduce you to one of Resolute's newest founders, Barak Kaufman, who co-founded Intello with Shlomo Dalezman. Intello is the intelligent platform to manage the lifecycle of your software applications. We caught up with Barak, and here are a few interesting details about him...1. Tell us
We are thrilled to announce the closing of Resolute IV, a $75 million fund with the same focus as our first three funds: to be lead investors who provide “first check” capital to extraordinary founders at the very outset of their journey, and to provide them with a highly supportive network of peers
Maayan is busy. Though she had a baby girl in early May, she’s actively signing on new customers, and just added diabetes management and an activity tracker to Hello Heart’s cardio health app. She was also included in a recent article in Forbes! You’re a rockstar, Maayan!
It’s been a record-setting fundraising summer for Resolute Founders: Opendoor raised $325 million pushing the company's valuation above $2 billion; Signifyd raised $100 million in a Series D round led by Premji Invest; Greenhouse raised a $50 million D from Riverwood Capital; Reonomy closed a $30 mi
Congratulations to UJET on their recent $25 million Series B fundraise! UJET’s software lets customers reach support agents directly in a smartphone app, on the web or by phone. Anand Janefalkar, founder and chief executive officer of UJET, says the company gives equal priority to all channels, so c
It's been an incredible year for NodeSource, punctuated by the announcement of their Series B raise.As CEO and founder Joe McCann wrote in the announcement post:...it's no surprise that NodeSource has added dozens of new customers in the past eighteen months, including PayPal, Delta Airlines, GoPro,
Big congrats to Kurt and Andrew and the Clubhouse team on raising a $10 million Series A, led by Battery Ventures.Kurt gets the award for most unusual initial pitch setting -- accompanying me on a last minute emergency shopping trip to get a new fridge the day before Thanksgiving. Always the cool cu
Resolute was busy on the road the last 2 weeks, visiting our Founders in Southern California and New York. At the end of October we enjoyed hosting a cocktail party in Venice Beach, while watching the World Series, and the following week, we had a cozy dinner in Greenwich Village. There is nothing l
Super excited for Resolute-backed AppZen, as they announce their $13 million Series A today.AppZen has built an artificial intelligence platform for the back office which has resonated with happy customers including Amazon, Comcast and Intuit.Anant Kale, CEO and Co-Founder of AppZen, has really buil
Yesterday, the Resolute Ventures Family sailed the San Francisco Bay in one of the America’s Cup racing boats! The boat was the USA 76, originally used by the Oracle Racing Team in 2003, at the America’s Cup in Auckland New Zealand. Not only did we learn how to read the currents and winds, we were i
It was the Spring of 2012. I was still running around trying to hustle more capital for Resolute I, and was in LA for a couple days. Along my circuit of meetings, I stopped in to visit Paul Bricault at Amplify, who walked me around and introduced me to a few of their teams. For some reason I can't f
We are thrilled to welcome Caroline Talley, our new Director of Founder and Network Development! Caroline will work with us and our Founders to make the overall Resolute experience be as authentically positive, helpful and enjoyable as possible.What struck us in getting to know Caroline is how excit
Shout out to Chris and Christian and the TrackR team on raising its $50 million Series B, led by Steve Case's Revolution Growth Fund.It's been just two years since our original seed investment, and the company has been on quite the roll since -- including a Series A with Brad Feld from Foundry Group
Last month we held our annual founder summit, where we bring together all of our Resolute-backed founders for a mix of fun, workshops, and just some quality time getting to know each other.This year was amazing, and we have a few photos back from the event that we posted in our community section.
Very excited for Resolute-backed Clutter, as they announced today a $64M Series C.Clutter's clear message is that it offers full-service storage so you never have to visit a storage unit again.When I first met Clutter's co-founder Brian Thomas, what struck me most was his sense of purpose, but also
When I first reconnected with Ro Gupta, co-founder of CARMERA, over two years ago, we quickly took a stroll down memory lane on what it was like to be part of the movement to democratize publishing. I had worked at Automattic (WordPress), and Ro had been at Disqus.When I asked Ro what he was now wor
Huge congrats to Resolute-backed Signifyd on closing a $56 million Series C led by Bain Capital Ventures.When we first met Signifyd founders Raj Ramanand and Michael Liberty, they were two PayPal fraud and risk veterans with a bold idea. Instead of offering E-commerce merchants software to help them
Congrats to Resolute-backed GREATS on raising a $10 million Series B, led by consumer private equity firm JH Partners. We're thrilled to welcome JH onto the team. As investors in iconic retail brands including Bare Escentuals, Design within Reach and Alex and Ani, JH brings awesome hands-on experien
When I first met Anand, the CEO and founder of UJET, back in 2015 - he immediately impressed me as a passionate, mission-driven founder who had a vision for how to fix the standard but painful customer service experience that is all too familiar.Anand and his team promised to "bring joy to customer
The more things change, the more they stay the same. When we first started Resolute, we sought out to invest in great founders at the very beginning of their journey. And today Raanan and I announce Resolute III, a $65 million fund for investing in early seed opportunities. Our bread and butter will
Today, we’re proud to announce that our portfolio company TruSTAR has raised a $5M Series A, led by Storm Ventures.TruSTAR is the first security intelligence exchange platform built to incentivize information sharing. TruSTAR's platform gives customers control over their data while providing an unde
Congrats to Fig on closing a Series A co-led by Spark Capital and Greycroft Partners. Fig is out to completely revolutionize how video games are funded and published. With "Fig Game Shares," non-accredited investors are able to invest in the future of a particular game title. In 2016, Fig hosted 4 o
Real estate and property management has been around forever, but no one approach to this property rental industry has arisen as the most efficient in regards to optimizing revenue. Being a $75b industry, it is fair to say that the opportunity cost of lost revenue due to inefficiencies has lost rent
We are thrilled to welcome TrackR to the Resolute family, and to join Brad Feld of Foundry Group in the TrackR's Series A financing.TrackR is a Santa Barbara, California-based startup company of 15, founded in 2009 by Chris Herbertand Christian Smith, whose mission is to completely automate the proc
We are excited to announce our recent backing of Orbitera. Orbitera is a cloud commerce marketplace platform that caters towards software vendors, service providers, and organizations to help implement cloud ready services. As companies are currently migrating over to cloud technologies by the mass
I am excited to announce that we have recently added Clutter to the Resolute family! Clutter is an easy to use, on-demand storage solution that minimizes the pain and hassle associated with traditional storage offerings. With clutter, storage is a one button process for the consumer, and Clutter w
Fig, or Loose Tooth Industries, has developed an online platform for developing video games. By bringing together fans and investors, Fig is looking to redefine the way video games are produced, hoping to inspire new community relevant games by enabling the studios to work with their fans. This new
Today, Microsoft announced that it has acquired our portfolio company, Sunrise, the leading calendaring app. Huge congrats to Pierre, Jeremy, and the entire Sunrise team.They’ve had a single-minded focus on delighting their users, and we are all thrilled that that focus has paid off. With Microsoft,
Congrats to Greenhouse on raising a great Series B led by Benchmark Capital, only 6 months after closing its Series A.We are excited about Greenhouse first and foremost because we think they are building a powerful business. But Greenhouse’s success also is nice validation for two features of Resol
Node.js is currently the largest open source project in the world. In essence, Node.js is a platform that uses javascript to power all the back end development needed to integrate multiple technologies into a single service. Nodesource is leading this open source project, running conferences, and
Today marks what may be my proudest and most exciting day in the brief history of Resolute Ventures – the opportunity to welcome Raanan Bar-Cohen as my Partner.The founding and launch of Resolute has been a true labor of love, with all the requisite moments of doubt, frustration, pride and joy. I a
I am happy to announce our recent partnership with Greats, an up and coming men’s sneaker brand. They are disrupting the sneaker industry by creating a channel for men to buy high quality footwear at an affordable value price. They are able to do this by cutting out the traditional wholesale model
Yup, you heard it here. We are looking to hire a Resolute Rockstar (aka, Principal), based in SF, to assist with facilitating our founder community, enabling the sharing of knowledge and best practices amongst founders, and managing our imminent (sorta) Seed to Series A blog.The Role: The Resolute
The tech world surely has a ways to go to achieve gender equality, but I’m here to tell you there are some awesome founders out there right now who happen to be women. Hopefully, the abundance of high caliber women founders will lead to more gender-neutrality in VC investing. It has for me. With
Big congrats to the folks at Shop-Hers, who have quietly been amassing quite the rabid set of buyers on next-to-no capital. Not anymore, having raised $3.5 million from Floodgate, Bono, and others. Techcrunch has the story here.
Shout out to GymPact for being named to Business Insider's Top 50 Coolest Small Businesses in America. Way to go Team GymPact!
A more recent addition to the Resolute Family, Eido Search is a very cool company that uses advanced information processing techniques to draw insight from financial time series data. The technology is today being used by traders, analysts, investment managers and strategists in Equities, Futures/FX
Adora Cheung, co founder and CEO of Homejoy, is an old friend of ours here at Resolute. She ran product for LOLApps, a company I backed several years ago, and subsequently worked with me and the great folks at Pier 38 and Dogpatch Labs.So when I heard last fall that she was doing a new startup with
Big congrats to Resolute-backed Greenhouse on their successful completion of a $2.7M raise, led by Social + Capital Partnership's Mamoon Hamid.Techcrunch had some nice coverage:Greenhouse turns the messy hiring process into a well-oiled machine for fast-growing startups like Airbnb, Upworthy, and Ge
Resolute-backed Runnable launches today, a cool service that allows you not just to find software snippets, APIs, etc, but also to modify them and run the modifications in your browser. As the development of software and services transitions to a more distributed, crowdsourced process, which often
When your 15 year old's classmate, or your 83 year old Mom's friend, randomly falls in love with your app or service.And so congrats to Resolute-backed Happier: My 15 yr old daughter emailed me today. Which, in and of itself, is a minor miracle. One of her classes was discussing iPhone apps and as
Satya Patel recently wrote a post on “The Value of a Board at the Seed Stage.”I love the Homebrew guys and would be thrilled to have them as a co-investor in my deals, but I must disagree with Satya’s argument.My view is that board meetings actually are a bad idea at the seed stage, particularly whe
Amidst the sound and fury spurred by AngleList's announcement of its new Syndicate, commentators missed an important reality: Angel Syndicators may now have the financial wherewithal to lead financings, but in most instances they lack the time, interest and/or experience to actually do the work of
Like everybody else in the business, I've been following the Angel List Syndicates story closely and giving a lot of thought to what it means for the early stage ecosystem. I don't think any of us really know. But my gut is that it is a big deal. Venture Capital has been going through a pretty maj
Congrats to the Happier Team, whose app was just named by Time as one of the top 50 apps in 2013.In Time's words:You don’t have to go too far on any social network to find daily doses of negativity. New app Happier offers up a refreshing palate-cleansing: It’s a social network for good stuff. Upload
In 2005 I was introduced to a kid who had just dropped out of college in Texas and moved to San Francisco to pursue his dream of building an open source software platform. The kid was Matt Mullenweg, and the software platform was WordPress.These were the very early days of the social web, and I cer
Congrats to the team at Tidepool for their launch today at TechCrunch Disrupt!Tidepool is Building mobile applications for improving Productivity, Mindfulness and Resilience For use by consumers who are self-trackers and wellness adopters To maximize productivity and quality of life Through fun
Founders (and the investors who back them) face the perennial challenge how to build barriers that will keep competitors at bay. Historically, tech VCs have focused on projects solving difficult technology problems that won’t be replicated easily, quickly or cheaply.While certainly a viable strateg
I received an email from one of my founders the other night that made me feel like a proud daddy. No, it wasn't that they IPO'd, or raised $20 million, or closed a big deal, or got TechCrunch to wax poetic about how awesome they are. It was relating to me the support she was getting from fellow Re
(reprinted from The Wall Street Journal).The single best thing you can do to raise an angel round is find the right anchor investor. Just like wolves and sharks, angels often travel in packs. There’s the Google diaspora, the Paypal mafia, YC alums, liquid Facebookers, the list goes on.Your challeng
There is a great interview with Crispin, Porter + Bogusky CEO Andrew Keller on Think With Google. Here is a summary by way of some excerpted quotes:The digital age, and social media in particular, have changed the social contract between people and brands. The expectation of the relationship has be
I had a board meeting yesterday with a company that is now about 4 months out from completing an accelerator program, and over the course of the meeting it became clear to me that there is a pretty distinct transition for a team exiting an accelerator program and becoming a funded seed stage startup
Paul Graham just wrote a great post called Startup = Growth. Few would disagree with his premise -- that the essence of a startup is fast growth.Graham goes on to explain what I'd call the "YC Theory of Startup," whereby a founder's goal is to grow a certain percentage (say, 5%) per week, from the
Big congrats to @Seth and the @DJZ team on their launch of DJZ, as covered today in The New York Times! I'm thrilled to be a part of the team here; and thrilled that this marks the 6th time in our brief history that Resolute is backing a founder we've worked with before.I've been a friend and fan o
Yesterday I tweeted a phrase I came across that strikes me as great imagery for seed stage entrepreneurs:From small acorns might oaks grow.It is a long, long journey from a seed stage startup to, using the metaphor, a Mighty Oak, but I do believe it makes a difference to have the Mighty Oak ambition
Ben Horowitz had a characteristically great post last week, on GigaOm, called "A Good Place to Work."Lots of wisdom in there for entrepreneurs and operators, both as to why you should make your company a good place to work, and how.But, as an incurable people-collector, something else stuck with me.
The other day I was talking with a potential investor in my fund, and in the course of the conversation I took a fairly strong position that was a little outside today's conventional wisdom. To which the potential investor said he really liked my conviction, which is something he looks for in fund
Today I read that Ben Lerer raised $13 million for Thrillist. Thrillist started as a newsletter for guys, but after acquiring JackThreads, it is now a really interesting content + commerce play.It's easy to see Thrillist and others as leveraging commerce to monetize an audience. But I prefer seeing
A couple weeks ago Resolute-backed BlockBeacon launched its iPhone app. It’s a cool app. I like it because it gives me real time information I really want but can't easily find elsewhere. (Right now it’s only fully “live” in SoCal, but they’re getting to the ROW quickly).One of the awesome things a
Check out the interview here.
Against all odds, I am placing a bet on a subscription box business, Barkbox. This business strategy has been looked down upon in the VC world recently, but I couldn’t resist backing this dog goody bag business. I have worked closely with the Founder and CEO Matt Meeker for over 5 years now, as he
Ok, sure, there obviously is no such thing as a perfect pitch, I'm just trying to get better at using titles that actually attract readers (I'm gonna do a summer internship at Business Insider to really master the art).But I just received a pitch deck that was so clearly a really good pitch that I w
I’m thrilled to announce that Coder Dojo founder James Whelton will be joining Resolute .VC as our Hacker in Residence. At the age of 20, James has an impressive background across a broad range of tech, from computer hacking to iOS development to social platform data parsing and analysis. James also
Last week I posted a quote from the preface to David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and since then I've been thinking a lot about what Weinberger had to say. One of his more powerful themes is the notion that, just as the web originally was about connecting lots of "loosely joined" docum
Wow, even more true 10 years later:What the Web has done to documents it is doing to just about every institution it touches. The Web isn't primarily about replacing atoms with bits so that we can, for example, shop on line or make our supply chains more efficient. The Web isn't even simply empoweri
Those of you who have worked with me over the last few years probably know my assistant, Karen Saunders, pretty well. She is the greatest. Best. Assistant. Ever. Simply putting up with me is enough for a medal of honor. But it's much more. The following lecture she gave me yesterday will give you a
After years of pontificating about startups (both here and in board meetings), now that I am starting my own little venture it's time for me to start eating my own dogfood. Which, I have to say, is pretty cool. I'm thinking in a whole new way about the enterprise of building a business.For some as y
Weekly recap of the things I found myself thinking about this week.Of course the sadness that still reverberates over Steve Jobs' death. Reflecting on the irony that, just a few days before, my 9 year old asked me: "Dad, what are the times when something so important happened that you remember exac
Steve Jobs did not like government lawyers much.Which, unfortunately, is exactly what I was when we met back in 1997. (That part is a long story I won't bore you with here). But I spent a couple hours with him back then. And he scared the hell out of me. During that period of my career I was used to
In his post explaining his decision to join CrunchFund, MG Siegler includes a great quote from Greylock's John Lilly:One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, back when I was 23 and newly out of school, is this: look around and figure out who you want to be on your team. Figure out the people aro
This year has been one of pretty big changes for me on both the personal and professional front, which makes particularly apt the following New Years' wishes forwarded to me by my brother Bob, and which I would like to forward to my readers and followers:"The Hebrew word for year, 'shanah,' is based
I've been playing around with some lightweight CRM offerings and last night signed up for Worketc. And today I got an email from Dan, who introduced himself as "as your go-to guy while you're getting started with WORKetc."Turns out, Dan is the founder of WORKetc. Dan goes on:"I bet you are now won
So, the word leaked out yesterday. I was really touched by all the well wishes on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you all so much.At dinner with some of my favorite entrepreneurs I had the following exchange with Narendra Rocherolle, who, if you don't know, you should:N: So Mike, why are you doing thi
Effective today, I will be leaving Polaris Venture Partners, and setting out to launch a new seed firm.While I am excited by the prospect of building something new, it is difficult to leave the partnership I have been part of for 12 years. I feel lucky to have had the chance to learn the venture bu
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