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Backing the Future with DFJ Venture XII
by Steve Jurvetson, DFJ Partner
With this new fund, we will be looking to make seed and early-stage investments in trailblazing, purpose-driven entrepreneurs with ideas that have the potential to reinvent entire industries.
The DFJ team is excited to kick off 2016 with the announcement of DFJ Venture XII, our new $350 million early-stage venture fund. We were thrilled to have the support of our longtime limited partners, as well as the addition of a select number of new institutions that share our passion for backing extraordinary entrepreneurs who are changing the world. We were oversubscribed with interest, allowing us to get to a single close in record time.
We recently celebrated DFJ’s 30th anniversary, in partnership with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, by co-hosting a “Backing the Future” festival, where we paid homage to the visionary movie of almost the same name.
Looking back on those 30 years, we are most proud of the game-changing companies that we had the honor to support, most from their very early days. Companies like SpaceX and SolarCity, Teslaand Twilio, Redfin and Rethink Robotics, Planet Labs and Skype, and Baidu and Box. All led by brilliant founders with breathtakingly ambitious ideas and the drive and perseverance to push through innumerable obstacles to make their vision manifest. Looking forward, we’re eager to partner with the next new wave of exceptional founders with investments we’ll make from Venture XII.
While global markets have been turbulent, we believe economic disruption can create opportunities for new entrants (e.g., Tesla entering the auto sector in 2008), and when coupled with the compounding of Moore’s Law, this is an incredible time for tech entrepreneurs. With this new fund, we will be looking to make seed and early-stage investments in trailblazing, purpose-driven entrepreneurs with ideas that have the potential to reinvent entire industries. We are excited by the opportunities we are seeing in autonomous transportation, digital health, enterprise transformation, artificial intelligence, and the innervation of most industries over time by machine learning — a powerful process to build complex systems that transcend human understanding.
Venture capital is a dynamic and people-driven business. During the span of DFJ Venture XI, we have promoted Emily Melton to partner on the Venture team and Sam Fort to partner on the Growth team. I am also delighted to see my partner Josh Stein chosen as the Venture Capitalist of the Year for 2015. Our investment team remains small by design, with just six investing partners in our Venture fund and five in our Growth fund. This is driven by our deep conviction that small and cognitively diverse teams are the most effective at making complex decisions, particularly when dealing with incomplete and uncertain information, as is typical in early-stage investing. As we’ve observed with boards of directors and programming teams, five to seven seems to be the magical maximum team size, beyond which productivity decreases.
For our team to perform better than the sum of its parts and exploit the emergent “wisdom of crowds,” we need to embrace and celebrate our cognitive diversity. The interaction of divergent perspectives can be a powerful crucible for testing ideas and predictions about the future. In this context, diversity can be more important than ability, a powerful idea that first hit my radar at the Santa Fe Institute.
We will continue to celebrate and support the ideas and idea makers who push the boundaries of possibility, explore the frontiers of the unknown, and forge the future. People like Elon Musk, who we are proud to have backed in all three of his current companies; the Rive brothers, who we have backed twice (SolarCity and Everdream); the Box and Planet Labs founders, who we funded literally from a garage; Robin Li, who has transformed the Internet in China with Baidu.
As we scout for that next generation of entrepreneurial thought leaders, we will cast our net wide, but also pay special attention to places where the pool of talent runs deep. To that end, we were excited to recently announce the establishment of afellowship program for graduate students in the engineering program at Stanford — the DFJ Entrepreneurial Leaders Fellowship.
On behalf of my partners at DFJ Venture — Bill Bryant, Emily Melton, Bubba Murarka, Heidi Roizen, Andreas Stavropoulos, and Josh Stein — and DFJ Growth, our CFO Mark Greenstein, and our intrepid operations team and staff, we would like to thank our limited partners for entrusting us with their capital, and our incredible entrepreneurs, who choose to partner with DFJ to make their audacious dreams a reality.
About DFJ
Since the firm’s founding in 1985, DFJ has raised $4.5 billion of venture capital. DFJ has backed over 20 companies that have each achieved more than $1 billion in realized value through an initial public offering or acquisition.
