Think Deep Tech.

At Boost VC, we’ve already backed over a dozen great robotics startups trying to make this future a reality, and for almost all, we were the first Yes. We love to invest in the most ambitious founders solving the hardest problems, and we love to join their journey as early as possible. 

I want to articulate the way I think about investment opportunities. I think it’s something that is poorly explained from the position of an early stage investor, so I’m going to do my best to define my mental model.

To begin, Venture capital is the asset class of human endeavor. Or it used to be, and Boost VC is bringing that back along with the other Deep Tech investors.

We at Boost believe that NFTs are inevitable, that all roads lead to punks. We know that truly great investments can often take many years before the market realizes their inherent value, and we’re excited to hold our punks for many many years to come.

You want to invest in the next OpenAI or Spacex… so we built a Deep Tech Demo Day Platform for the whole ecosystem! Sign up to invest in the next great startups here.

Deep Tech Demo Day is on April 2. (Next Tuesday) Twice a year the best early stage investors nominate incredible founders to the platform. We work with 20+ funds on this feat!

Crypto founders chronically overvalue the go-to-market of their products, and undervalue the go-to-market of their tokens. When I say “the token is the product” I’m not being facetious — I actually believe that for anyone trying to build a valuable company in crypto, your first and primary goal should be to attract permanent attention and liquidity to your token, AKA to sell it to anyone who will hold it for a very very long time.

Every year, I revisit the presentation I give to founders. This year I had a realization that Boost VC was past 4000 days of existence. I had yet to see someone look at a startup or VCs progress in terms of number of days, so I dove in.

1. Is the earth’s climate changing? I believe yes.

2. Are humans causing this change? I believe yes, even if not, we should probably check this box and figure it out.

TLDR: FOUNDER START Capital is an experiment to help more deep tech founders get started with a $50k check!

Every once in a while I’ll write a note to our founders or my team that doesn’t get published publicly. The goal is to summarize a moment and time, but some of the concepts or advice are enduring.

Tomorrow you can all buy shares of a Spot ETF for Bitcoin. We are investors in 21Shares who is partnered with Cathie Wood’s Ark with the $ARKB Spot ETF.

I’m sure you have heard from your crazy Bitcoin friend that the Bitcoin Spot ETF was approved today, or depending on when you read this the approvals were on January 10, 2024.

Random thoughts on fundraising.

Boost VC has had an affinity for extreme solutions, we didn’t go into Fintech, we went after Crypto, we didn’t go after 3D software, we went after VR, we didn’t go after Carbon credits, we went after Ocean Data and Geo-engineering.

The universe wants to stay the same, but the earth demands change.

Boost VC will no longer entertain marginal solutions of the future. This is not bashing those marginal solutions that may be a necessity and may even perform well as an investment — It’s just not what we do.

Four months later I invested in a company called Vergence Labs, a company that was acquired 5 years later by Snap, and became Snap Chat spectacles. I still have the first versions of the glasses. The founders once used computer vision to control a drone in our offices, it was wild.

Halloween was particularly fun yesterday! Boost VC had our Spooktacular pitch day with a grand prize of a $25,000 investment. In the end only one startup walked away with the $25k prize, however the quality of founders was INCREDIBLE! CRYPTO IS BACK!!!!

Fellow crypto enthusiasts and startup aficionados! I'm thrilled to invite you to the most exciting event this Halloween season - Boost VC's Pitch Day for Consumer Crypto Companies. This spine-tingling showdown will feature ten innovative startups as they present their game-changing ideas to a panel of AWESOME judges from Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Colosseum, and yours truly. So, mark your calendars for October 31st, because this is an event you won't want to miss!

At Boost VC we invest in a lot of startups and with that we get a range of personalities, and with that comes a wide range of salary management philosophies. I’m not going to say that any specific one is right, other than the one that builds a successful company.

📣 Gus Domel, PhD has been promoted to Principal at Boost VC! 🔥

Boost VC’s mission is to be the most active Deep Tech investor in the world. To date we have backed over 300 Deep Tech startups and are managing $200m+. At Boost VC, we are quirky Sci-Fi lovers and obsessed with helping Deep Tech founders. Gus joined us 2 years ago as our very first investment associate and hit the ground running. We are so excited to be promoting Gus to Principal and continue making Boost VC the epicenter of Deep Tech together!

It’s interesting. Boost VC has been doing Demo Day’s for 11 years. Which is wild! In that time, no one ever asked us “Why are you doing Demo Day’s for your companies?” because it was obvious, we wanted to highlight our portfolio to investors in the ecosystem.

At Boost VC we have a mission to accelerate the Sci-Fi future! One of the best ways we have found to accomplish this goal is to host a Demo Day event, built exclusively for Deep Tech startups and Deep tech investors. And from that moment, Deep Tech Demo Day was born!!

On October 3rd, 2023 the 20th Deep Tech Demo Day event will be online!! We have a new product, new deep tech startups, but the same ambitions!! Sign up here.

In the fast-paced world of venture capital, where innovation meets investment, a critical chasm often hinders progress - a mere 19% of venture capitalists (VCs) possess scientific or technological expertise. This discrepancy creates a significant translation problem, particularly for visionary deep tech founders seeking funding and understanding from potential investors.

🎉 We just hired Derek Brown at Boost VC and could not be more excited!

As we scaled into $200m in assets under management and 200+ active investments across the 10+ years of building Boost, the complexity started to add up. We needed someone to come in and takeover the fund operations and find new ways to supercharge Boost as we continue to scale and fund the next 1,000 Deep Tech founders!

I was listening to Howard Marks’ book on “The Most Important Thing,” and the one category that is talked about, but not in name, is the “peer pressure” of investing. I wanted to shed some light here, it’s a topic I think about quite often.

There seems to be a lot of commentary right now around how difficult the business of venture capital is. It’s a business driven by grand slams… which we all know, but I keep reading about how hard venture is on a returns basis, in order to perform. I get it. That’s the nerve wracking part of the business, ten years of “Am I any good at this?” anxiety —But a watched pot never boils.

Today we kick off our 20th Boost Program. Something that began as an experiment 11 years ago, has become the starting point for hundreds of amazing Deep Tech startups to accelerate the Sci-Fi future.

Something that other Deep Tech investors should know about investing in Deep Tech Founders is to celebrate the wins!

My Previous Post: “How YC Became The Dominant Accelerator and Why all VCs Are Trying to Copy” prompted a lot of great questions from readers, and I wanted to give some of the questions I was asked some additional thought.

The most popular “startup accelerator” is YCombinator. They have championed thousands of founders for the last 17 years through their program and really invented a model for startup investing that allowed founders to experiment and validate their idea for a small amount of capital.

Deep tech investments hold immense promise and often spark enthusiasm among venture capitalists. However, balancing that excitement with rational decision-making is crucial to ensure the best possible investment choices. In our latest episode, Adam Draper talks with Maryanna Saenko, co-founder and Partner at Future Ventures, an early-stage VC firm that focuses on mission-driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology. Maryanna shares her thoughts on how to navigate the initial excitement and make informed investment decisions in the world of deep tech startups.

Deep tech founders are either technically gifted or great at building a business. But it’s seldom both, at least in the beginning. So, what should venture investors pay attention to when we’re choosing founders in these disruptive technologies?

On this episode of Boost VC, Adam is joined by Greg Castle, Founder and Managing Director of Anorak Ventures, a firm that invests in early-stage deep-tech startups. An entrepreneur and corporate marketer turned VC, Greg has invested in 120 companies, including Oculus, Flexport, and Mux. Greg explains how his view of venture investing has changed since he wrote his first check, explaining what he looks for in a founder and how he evaluates deep tech startups differently. 

Crypto is Deep Tech. And I say Crypto to describe the whole whole experiment that is “Digital Ownership on the internet.”

The history of Boost VC, is tethered to the story of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the first Deep Technology we built a network in. We were the first Bitcoin focused accelerator/fund. We targeted to invest in 100 Bitcoin startups before there were 100 Bitcoin startups to fund, and our current crypto portfolio boast some incredibly important infrastructure for the industry.