NextView Ventures has announced the successful completion of its largest venture fund to date, totaling $200 million and consisting of a $135 million early-stage vehicle and a $65 million opportunity vehicle. Equally important, the fund welcomes Stephanie Palmeri, a co-founder of All Raise and a previous partner at Uncork, to its ranks.
Palmeri, who serves as a board observer for Poshmark, said, “Joining a partnership as an equal is a really significant statement to the market around how you appreciate the people you work with.” It tells you a lot about what the fund values when you understand that the partners are equal,” one entrepreneur said. Palmeri did not want to say whether or not she was an equal partner at her former company.
Having a clearer picture of the path ahead is especially useful in the venture environment, where “partner” has become a somewhat nebulous job term that doesn’t always contain decision-making abilities. Here, Palmeri has the same percentage of carrying in the fund as the other partners at the firm, Lee Hower and Melody Koh, as well as the firm’s co-founders, Rob Go and David Beisel. After the first fund was established by NextView more than a decade ago, Palmeri is the firm’s second female partner.
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In an interview with TechCrunch, Go explained that typical venture capital firms use partnerships in which newer partners take years to build up credibility and come to hold an equal share of economics. Go believes that the way NextView operates leads to “less political infighting.”
The founding partner has stated that the company values teamwork above a “federation of lone wolves,” and that they place a premium on “having a peaceful, no-drama, and well-functioning relationship.”
Go, the CEO of NextView sees the hiring of Palmeri as an opportunity to broaden the company’s focus beyond the New England region. Forty percent of its investments over the past few years have been in the Big Apple, with about a quarter located in the Golden State. They anticipate increased clientele and funding opportunities for their portfolio company now that Palmeri is located in the Bay Area.
Back in 2011, when Go and his partners launched their seed fund outside of Silicon Valley, “people thought we were crazy,” he recalled. After COVID the partners realized they needed to do something about the “gaping void” left by NextView’s absence from the Bay Area.
With the addition of Palmeri, the company claims it is one of the few national seed distributors with a presence on both coasts. Andreessen Horowitz, a multi-stage firm that just closed a $400 million seed fund, takes a similar approach.
The company, commonly known by its acronym a16z recently announced that it would be relocating its headquarters from Menlo Park to the cloud, opening new locations in Miami Beach, New York, and Santa Monica in addition to its already established locations in San Francisco and Menlo Park. NextView, meanwhile, not only invests in Austin, Seattle, Miami, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, and North Carolina, but also has operations in San Francisco, New York, and Boston.
Palmeri elaborated on why the company’s San Francisco location is so advantageous for supporting remote-first, dispersed firms that may eventually need to penetrate large U.S. markets, saying, “those ideas emerge from anyplace…”
It’s likely that when planning to raise Series A capital, the company may look to these markets for the additional funding it needs. It’s possible that NextView’s advantageous location may set it apart in the increasingly cutthroat business world. Since its inception, the company has made investments in more than 173 new businesses.
Sixty-two percent of the company’s most recent fund, a $100 million investment vehicle, reportedly went to co-founders who identify as minorities or women. Two of the five companies it has invested in with its most recent fund are led by minorities and underrepresented groups.
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