Ep. 316 How I Raised It with Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures
episode
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
47 min
1 speaker
4 chapters
transcribed 14 days ago
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
If you can pattern match across verticals, if you can pattern match across the ecosystem, if you're very disciplined in terms of what it is that you fund and why and what you're actually looking for in terms of people and theme. you'd rather be a generalist fund. You're gonna make more money as a generalist fund than as a a deep specialist.
Hi guys, welcome to the Howard Raise the Podcast, the show where you get an inside look at how real entrepreneurs and VCs raise capital for their businesses. I'm your host, Nathan Beckard, and today's episode is with Sam Lesson of Slow Ventures. Slow is an early stage VC fund that invests across fintech, SaaS, crypto, healthcare, and more. And they also have a dedicated fund focused on the creator economy, which is pretty unique. In this wide-ranging episode, we talk about what Slow invests in across its five funds, why Slow is a generalist fund, how Sam and Kevin raised fund one from ex-Facebook employees, why Slow decided to launch a dedicated creative fund, and what that fund is investing in, his advice to emerging managers, and much more.
If you're tuning into this podcast to learn how to raise capital for your business, be sure to check out foundersuite.com if you're a startup or fundingstack.com. If you're a VC or advisor, both platforms will give you access to an awesome collection of tools for raising capital, including a massive investor database, a new get intro tool that'll help you get warm intros to those investors, a CRM to manage a raise, a virtual data room to run due diligence, plus pitch deck hosting, investor updates, email tools, and much more. Last but not least, if you enjoyed this conversation and think someone else would too, please share it with them and hit that subscribe button to get all. our latest episodes.
Thank you. Now sit back and enjoy this chat with Sam. Welcome to How
I Rais
It.
The podcast that goes behind the scenes with entrepreneurs who've raised capital. We uncover the tips, tricks, and techniques they use to get investors to write a check. Strap in and turn it off.
Hi, welcome to another episode of How I Raised It, produced by Foundersweet.com and Fundingstack.com. Today I have Sam Lesson of Slow Ventures. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Likewise. Are you guys doing anything for tech week, which is going on as we speak?
No. I think the idea of San Francisco Test Week is ridiculous. Every week is tech week in San Francisco. It's like I would be more excited about San Francisco not tech week.
Good point. Good point. Yeah. I guess the only interesting part is I've been going to a bunch of events and it does draw in like people fly in. Everyone I've met is from somewhere else.
That makes sense because if you live in San Francisco, you don't need to go to Tech Week. You are Tech Week all the time. It's like I will say my only in my only commentary is I've had several founders come in for meetings and they're staying in the shittiest hotels because every hotel is like ten thousand dollars a night because of tech week. So it's great for the hotel industry. Go hotel industry.
Well, frankly, you wanna see that survive. You wanna see restaurants.
Totally.
I'm into it.
Daniel Lurie, the mayor of San Francisco, must love it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. All right. Well, let's uh jump into it. So, what is slow ventures? What are you guys all about?
You know, I'm not sure we're yeah, what are we about? We've been doing this like ten years ish. Um, you know, there's a uh every every everyone has a good founding story where you can kinda pick what date is the real founding. But the upshot is is you know, we've been doing it pretty professionally since twenty fourteen. Uh we've invested five funds um in our core seed product, plus a few opportunity funds, plus we have a creator fund that we do and a bunch of exploratory stuff. Um And look, we're the we're hyper generalist early stage seed investors. Um we try to be first, we try to be right, uh we try to back amazing people doing important things in important spaces, and we mostly waste money, but every once in a while we don't.
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
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