The Humans of New Age Capital

Look at the team pages of the “top 50” VC firms and it’s pretty self-explanatory. Except it was much worse back in 2014 when we were building a fintech company (RIP LionShare 🙏🏿) and struggled to genuinely connect with VCs. At the same time we witnessed our Black and Latinx peers, who were running legitimate startups that were much farther along, struggle to raise any money. Venture capital funding to Black and Latinx founders was abysmal back then and has only slightly improved today. How can you honestly believe you support the best people building the future when you ignore entire demographics of innovators? While this reality was frustrating and clearly problematic, we also knew it was an economic opportunity to change the narrative of what it meant to be a successful entrepreneur. We launched New Age Capital in 2016 to be that authentic voice in an industry whose patterns never matched our swag. We knew if we could build an institutional venture firm that focused on investing in the communities we know best and help entrepreneurs build truly scalable, world class companies, we would create tremendous returns for LPs and ourselves as well as support the new age of global business leaders.

Authenticity. Empathy. Transparency. We live by these words. Our goal is to make the VC industry approachable and transparent to founders thus creating loyalty and affinity for our mission. This uniquely positions us to partner with the best founders from our communities who find mutual alignment on their entrepreneurial journeys because of New Age’s shared experiences, empathetic world view, unwavering authenticity, and strong cultural awareness. It’s our fundamental belief that following this path will inevitably lead to our outperformance as investors.

We care deeply about the core fundamentals of company building. From our perspective, the companies that we believe have the highest potential for success and represent the ideal candidate for a potential investment share the below characteristics:

◦ Founder Profile. The Founder & CEO must be representative of the communities we come from. This is core to our strategy and mission of supporting this demographic of historically underfunded entrepreneurs.

◦ Cultivated Relationship. It’s extremely important for us to get to know founders well in advance of needing to raise capital, ideally 3+ months. Within our portfolio, we’ve fostered relationships for 6 months - 2 years before investing. We believe deeply in our ability to assess people and potential which only gets better the more time to we get to spend with founders - observing how they execute on the business and how well they communicate as a CEO. This time also allows us to evaluate if and how we can actually provide tangible value to the growth of the company before we invest.

◦ Technology-based Solution. There are so many existing problems in the world that could and should be solved leveraging technology. If you are building software or leveraging existing software platforms to address the immediate needs of a customer, we’ll take a look.

◦ Early Product-Market Fit. The idea stage and beta stage is too early for us as there are usually not enough data points to validate the need for a product. Once you build something several early customers are willing to use and actually pay for, this is when we like to invest because it means you created tangible value in a market and figured out how to capture that value economically.

◦ Capital Efficiency. Math Matters. Unit Economics Matter. Financial Discipline Matters. It is a fundamental belief of ours that at the earliest stages of company building, frugality is a competitive advantage. As a founder you MUST understand your company’s finances because that is the only way to successfully build and fund a legitimate business.

◦ Strong Market Potential. We look for opportunities where the market is large ($1B+) and fragmented enough where a company with a superior product and aligned revenue model can reasonably capture enough market share to eventually generate $50M - $100M in annual revenue. It’s also important that the market has tailwinds in its favor thus increasing the size or value of the market.

◦ Strong Return Profile. We’re looking to invest in bangers 💥. Every investment we make has to have the potential to return our entire fund. $1B+ outcomes are the 🍒 on top.

Founders must have deep domain expertise within the industry they are building in and have the ability to execute at a high level with a fraction of the capital or resources of their non-underrepresented peers. We prefer to invest in founders who operate autonomously but also have a level of maturity that allows us to trust their judgment whether we agree with their decisions or not. We look for founders that embody humility, resilience, integrity, coachability, positivity and strong communication skills.

Once we’ve had an initial meeting and expressed interest in a company, we ask founders to send us monthly updates outlining the company’s progress and we schedule meetings every couple of months until the company is ready to raise their seed round.

Just fill out the I’M A FOUNDER form on our website. That is how we track our pipeline. Due to the high volume of submissions we receive, we unfortunately only respond to companies that fit our criteria.

The best time to reach out to us is when you have recently launched a product or have a few months of data post-launch. This gives us the time to build rapport and see your progress over time. If you have already started your seed fundraising process, reach out to us as early as possible as we will still need to build a relationship and do not make investment decisions quickly. If you are closing your round in 2 months or less, we are unlikely to participate.

We invest $850,000 to $1,000,000 with an ownership target of 10% - 15%.

Yes, we prefer to lead rounds and look to make introductions to co-investors.

Our investments process is straightforward. After getting to know founders and watching them execute over several months, we review all prior conversations, notes we took, and company updates provided by founders to determine if the profile of the company meets our criteria. If it does, we schedule a final meeting with founders to address any outstanding concerns. We then send the founder our offer to invest notifying them of the terms, the timeline, and attach a draft of the financing documents. We also make it explicitly clear that our commitment to invest is contingent upon us completing due diligence. We send over a formal due diligence questionnaire to complete and if there are no concerns, we move forward with signing the financing documents and wiring the money. This entire process normally takes one month but can last longer.

We invest through a post-money SAFE and require a side letter.

We do not take board seats, but we do behave as a de facto board and require quarterly update calls once we invest in a company until the Series A round is closed.

While we’re always excited to invest in a new company, the reality is there is still a long way to go before an exit. As seed investors, our primary focus is preparing companies to successfully raise Series A financing. We’ve developed a Series A Process in which we work with founders to set and achieve necessary milestones, create a curated list of Series A investors, provide pitch deck feedback, and help develop their storytelling capabilities. We also provide guidance and resources in regards to business operations and strategy. Lastly, it is paramount that we establish a growth mentality and an air of inevitable success within founders we back so they are prepared for venture scale growth. All in all, we’ll make sure you get your bread and you know the ropes.

Due to our fund size and concentrated ownership strategy with our initial investment, we will not be making follow-on investments.

To build the foundation of an enduring venture firm, we knew it would be important to have institutional LPs in our first fund. While the bar was extremely high to accomplish this as first time fund managers, we were able to partner with several amazing institutions: University of Chicago , Boston College, Villanova University, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Wellington Management, and Bank of America.

We also have several accomplished individual LPs within the venture industry including: Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Kate Mitchell (Scale Venture Partners), Peter Dolan (Makena Capital), Carmichael Roberts (Material Impact), and Jason Green (Emergence Capital).