Apr 27, 2022

This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Slow Ventures raised a new $325 million fund, bringing its AUM to $770 million, Insider has learned. The new fund sailed to its target because of investor fervor for Slow's creative strategies. It bought solana at $0.04 a coin when other VCs shunned it. Now, it has set its sights on DAOs. The biggest players in venture capital aren't all that adventurous, said Kevin Colleran, an early Facebook employee turned venture capitalist who cofounded his own firm, Slow Ventures. "So much of what is called 'venture capital' has simply become a matter of piling capital into things which everyone sees and knows is 'working,'" he wrote in a blog . "Our job is to push the envelope ahead of the herd of large funds." Now, his firm is growing its financial might to stay ahead. Slow told Insider it raised $325 million in new capital across a seed fund and a growth fund, bringing its total assets under management to $770 million. The fundraise highlights investor enthusiasm for the firm's methods, which include investing in crypto tokens and buying equity in " influencers " for a percentage of their profits. The firm filed paperwork in the fall to raise $195 million for its fifth seed fund and ended up oversubscribed and turned new investors away, Colleran said. He added that Slow didn't need more money to achieve its goal of leading seed rounds. The average check size hovers around $1.5 million, and most initial investments fall below $3 million. "It is never fun" to reject "new limited partners who want to invest their money with Slow but it's the right decision given our fund model," Colleran told Insider in an email. Established in 2011, Slow grew out of a small angel fund backed exclusively by five friends from Facebook's early days. Over the years, the firm's investor pedigree helped it nab lucrative stakes in tech companies like Slack , Airtable, Allbirds, Postmates , and Robinhood, and raise fund after fund. Last year, it took the unusual step of writing small checks directly to people, like content creators and serial entrepreneurs, for a share of their earnings. Buying equity in an influencer might be a gamble, but seed investors are in the business of taking risks. "We invest in usually a person — in an idea — before anything's built," Sam Lessin, a general partner at Slow, told Insider last year. "So much of our analysis is around 'do we trust the person?'" How one investment paid for a fund In 2018, Lessin took a bet on an engineer who he once tried to hire at Facebook. Anatoly Yakovenko had an idea for a faster blockchain for financial transactions and raised money to develop it through the sale of digital tokens. This was during a "crypto winter," when bitcoin prices plunged, digital-token sales had a reputation as fly-by-night operations, and venture capitalists pulled back from blockchain startups. Still, Lessin bought into solana at $0.04 a token and doubled down the next year at $0.23 each. Solana traded at $100.60 as of Friday afternoon, down from its peak of $260.06, according to Coinbase . And Colleran said that one investment was big enough to pay for the firm's $145 million fund "many times" over. He declined to be more specific. Will Quist, Kevin Colleran, and Sam Lessin are among the firm's leadership. Courtesy of Kevin Colleran The firm has since issued some of its tokens to its limited partners who wish to hold them, instead of selling the coins and returning cash proceeds, Colleran said. Investors jumped at the opportunity, he added. For its next act, Slow has set more ambitious plans. The firm is wading into decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which are loosely formed groups on the blockchain. They've been used to fund companies, run social clubs , and even bid on a copy of the US Constitution. Slow doesn't care to buy assets so much as use DAOs to run companies, a twist on the corporate structure, Lessin told Insider in an email. Its first entity, Slow DAO , is buying land in Montana as an experiment. The firm hopes to prove the model and get a repeatable process for creating DAOs that it can use many times for other purposes. "Using DAOs to help humans better coordinate capital and labor in the real world is the name of the game," Lessin said. In his blog, Colleran said the firm would continue to look for nonobvious opportunities. "We take pride in funding founders from the earliest days," he wrote, "before everyone else comes knocking." Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. Subscribe to push notifications