Logos Fund LP Letter V: Our first 🦄 🦄 Led By Accel, 2 New Investments in Microacquire & Clay, and Logos Fund General Partner Chris Herd Speaks Out Against Jamie Dimon’s Return To The Office
This was an internal memo we sent to our LPs in The Logos Fund. To receive the full version and invest with us, join our fund as an LP here. Share this email with friends and tell them to subscribe here: blog.shanemac.com.
Hi team,
It’s been our best quarter to date. We had our first unicorn, we’ve had 3 markups already from a16z, Kleiner, and Accel, more people are talking about The Logos Fund’s leadership in the future of work, and we are just getting started. We are doubling down. When mobile happened, the first 2-3 years of investment were the biggest winners 7 years later. We believe this shift in how the world works is even bigger than the shift to mobile. This is the moment that will create the huge winners 5-7 years from now.
Things are getting interesting as the world tries to figure out how to work in the future. Employers want people back in an office but employees don’t want to go. The employees really are in charge.
Even Marc Andreessen has completely shifted his view on the future of work, a once strong proponent of building companies in Silicon Valley:
"It is perhaps the most important thing that's happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that's maybe even more important than the internet," he wrote. "Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people." He continued: "We may, at long last, shatter the geographic lottery, opening up opportunity to countless people who weren't lucky enough to be born in the right place. And people are leaping at the opportunities this shift is already creating, moving both homes and jobs at furious rates."
From an investing perspective, we think these 2 charts below speak for themselves as we look to invest in startups that are remote at the start. We can truly help those founders build unique companies with our remote experience much like VC firms in the past who believed you had to have an office nearby to be helpful.
Who we are: Shane Mac & Chris Herd @ The Logos Fund. Check our all investments here: https://www.logoslabs.com/companies
What we do: The Logos Fund invests in founders building startups defining remote work globally. The fund is a rolling fund looking to write $50-$200k checks. Our goal is to write bigger checks into the same amount of companies going forward. Any LP can join our fund online or increase their commitment here. (Feel free to forward this email to potential LPs)
New Investments
Microacquire - Startup Acquisition Marketplace (Seed led by influential operator funds and angels Naval, Andreas Klinger, Sahil, and 50+ more top investors)
- What is it?
- An online marketplace to acquire startup companies. We love this idea because acquisitions are happening 100% online. By using a marketplace + data, we can now facilitate very large acquisitions without ever meeting in person. The future is more deals with better transparency all happening remotely online. This is a massive shift.
- Why are we excited?
- The founder and CEO, Andrew, is one of the best founders we’ve worked with. A repeat entrepreneur who is really thinking about all sides of the business in a great way. Attracting capital to help buy more companies and data integrations to help better value companies.
- Round details
- REDACTED
- Location: Remote
- Founder: Andrew Gazdecki
Clay - Personal Relationship Manager (Seed led by Forerunner Ventures)
- What is it?
- Clay is the best contact book we’ve ever seen. Every business professional should use Clay to manage all of their work relationships. The big play here is to become the next Linkedin of digital relationships by mapping all the hidden networks (email, calendar, messaging). This team has been working on the product for 2 years and it’s by far the best thing I’ve seen since we built Gist in 2010. Give it a try and sign up today http://clay.earth
- Why are we excited?
- Amazing product founders. The future is managing all of your digital networks in one place. A new Linkedin will emerge that is more personal, more useful, and has access to the networks we use every day.
- Round details:
- REDACTED
- Location: Remote
- Founders: Zachary Hamed, Matthew Achariam
News & Updates
(Check out our updated news section on our site https://www.logoslabs.com/news. Go here to check out all of our investments https://logoslabs.com/companies)
- Remote 🦄 🦄 - Our first unicorn investment, read more about the $150m funding round here
- Practice REDACTED
- Spot (REDACTED) - Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman leads $5m round in Spot to go after audio walking meetings
- Spot launched and you can download and try it out here: https://www.meetwithspot.com/blog/walking-meetings-are-possible-with-spot
- Chris Herd & Jamie Dimon disagree on the return to the office! https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jamie-dimon-insists-his-workers-return-to-the-office-thats-a-bit-rich-11624587736?siteid=rss
- Chris's thoughts on the struggle of office vs hybrid vs remote had over 1m views
- New LP Highlights - Matt Barnes has been an LP since almost the beginning and I just wanted to highlight him because he comes from outside the tech world but has been so curious and excited about everything happening in it. Matt is the All-Star closer for the Boston Red Sox. I’m so excited to keep bridging the worlds between sports, music, and the tech industry. Welcome, Matt to our little world. I also wanted to welcome Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social. I’ve known him for a few years, have always been so impressed with the culture he built, and wanted to congratulate him on a very successful IPO! He’s a true CEO who defines one word to me: Cares. He truly cares.
- Thanks to all of our great LPs, couldn’t be more excited for what we are building together. Thanks, Aaron Batalion, David Ulevitch (GP @ a16z), Katie Stanton (Former Twitter Exec, Moxxie Ventures), Sam Shank (CEO Hotel Tonight, Head of Experience Airbnb), Des Traynor (Co-Founder Intercom), Ankur Nagpal (Ceo Teachable), T.A. McCann (MD Psl.com), Josh Elman (App Store Apple, Former product leader Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Robinhood)
- Big LP update - Shared Carry: REDACTED
Our final thought: The Verticalization of Zoom
We believe more today than ever that every service vertical will have a Zoom-like experience built to serve it that is 10x better than doing that service virtually on Zoom. This is a massive opportunity.
It reminds us of how mobile happened. Every vertical was a $$$B opportunity.
Mobile apps changed the behavior of consumers, every service vertical became a huge company by focusing on serving just that vertical with a better experience and building an end-to-end solution. Uber, Postmates, Hotel Tonight, Wag, Care.com, and the list goes on. Zoom is the mobile phone. It changed consumer behavior but it is not the best solution for every service vertical. These big companies will continue to be built over the next 2-3 years. See Future fit (Zoom for fitness trainers), Practice (Zoom for coaches), Steno (Zoom for courtrooms), Talkspace (Zoom for Therapy), and many more. We believe to do these right, you need to focus on a single vertical and own the entire customer experience.
We even dream about non-obvious use cases and verticals. Imagine Zoom built for auto mechanics. A virtual experience that could hear the sound of the engine, help the service team identify what’s wrong, know all parts and layouts of the car overlaid on the screen, and provide coaching on how to teach the person on the other end of the screen to service their vehicle. We love ideas like that. Seem a little crazy now, but will be obvious later. Reminds me of a silly “dog walker app” that is now worth $Billions. It takes that specific focus to design an experience that people love, the community adopts, and scales globally.
- Holler anytime! We’d love to invest with you, join us as an LP here: http://angel.co/v/l/ROSCk
Shane & Chris
P.S. Wanted to leave this meme that Chris shared on Twitter which has been viewed over 5m times.