the Boost VC BLOG
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.
Is the earth’s climate changing? I believe yes.
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.
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.
Last week our portfolio company Radiant Nuclear announced a big investment from A16Z, Founders Fund and a few other amazing people like Ian Rountree at Cantos. Radiant raised $40m!
2 weeks ago, we announced that we would invest $1m across four companies for Deep Tech Demo Day. Today I wanted to announce that we did just that!! It was a hefty week to do all the interviews and investments.
I think that Deep Tech has a way of creating a perception that technology needs to be complicated to be useful, this Demo Day showed that Deep Technology is about simplifying the technology for a specific customer and market. The founders were incredible and it was difficult to choose our final list, but we did it!! The common thread was automation around every day life.
Deep Technology is ubiquitous. The advancements of the last 20 years all seem to be hitting the world at the same time, and it’s amazing how casually we can talk about these things that 30 years ago might have been insane to even imagine.
My children are going to wake up in a world where there is an assumed conversation with machines, and space travel will be a part of every day life. For some reason this makes me think about something there’s no name for other than “Relativity.”
Demo Days are super important for both the investors and the startups. I started my investment career by attending demo days at lots of locations. For the investor, the key is understanding what the heart beat of the industry is, and for the startup it’s about getting amazing exposure to as many investors as humanly possible. The Deep Tech Demo Day is no different! We love highlighting the heart beat of deep tech through our online portal, twice a year.
The Deep Tech Demo Day on April 4th, hosts 30+ startups nominated by 10+ Venture Capital funds in order to establish the heart beat of deep tech to the investor world.
At Boost VC we believe that capital should be in the hands of founders building at the peak of human endeavor. Our belief is that Deep Tech is the pinnacle of human endeavor and fortunately there are many VCs who specialize in assisting these founders. For Deep Tech Demo Day, our mission is to bring all those supporters together and give investment access to the industry!
Another reason that comic books are such an integral part of Boost VC's culture is the values that they often embody. Many of the best comic books are built on a foundation of optimism, hope, and persistence, and these are values that we strive to uphold in our work. From the earliest days of Boost VC, we have been committed to supporting and empowering entrepreneurs, and the stories and characters in comic books serve as a constant reminder of that mission.
On Monday, November 14, we hosted our first DeSci Pitch Day at Boost VC, and couldn’t be more excited about the energy of the DeSci community! We had over 50 great teams apply, of which 10 teams were selected to share their DeSci startups at the pitch day. To assess the pitches on their vision and viability, we had 4 judges, including Jocelynn Pearl (Ultra Rare Bio), Gus Domel (Boost VC), Patrick Joyce (ResearchHub), and Patrick Malone (KdT Ventures).
Each crash has been driven by actors over-promising, and pushed by individuals driven by the desire to make a short term dollar. And every time this has happened, we have new people who truly believe in the long term vision, and those people end up building new great technology that encourages the vision of P2P finance.
We believe science is the next space for disruption. In the same way that finance was disrupted by decentralized systems i.e. crypto, scientific systems and processes can also benefit from these structural changes. Decentralized science (DeSci) promises to disrupt scientific institutions...
This interdisciplinary skill set divides teams not into - Hardware vs. Software” but into “What problem do we have to solve today.” Some individuals are obviously more talented in specific tasks, but its interesting to see an entire market built on agility rather specialty.
Ready to check out 25+ awesome Deep Tech startups at Sci-Fi Demo Day? Join us Tuesday, October 4th to see some of the coolest Sci-Fi teams out there.
10 years, 300+ investments, $200m AUM and 4 funds later we pride ourselves on being the first check into incredible founders creating a Sci-Fi future. We have backed everything from jetpacks (2x!), comic book marketplace, many leading crypto startups, a heart rejuvenation platform, VR fitness, Nuclear fission and Space planes. No idea is too crazy.
The media is filled with experts comparing today’s market with the dot-com crash of 2000. But few, if any, of these experts actually lived and worked through the dot-com boom and bust.
Marc Andreessen is Founder and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Tim Draper is Founder and Managing Director at Draper VC. And both Marc and Tim were either running or investing in tech startups at the time…
Right then and there, during that realization we shot off an email to Marc Andreessen and Tim Draper - both who have lived through multiple market swings including the Internet, and 2008. We felt that these two titans could share experience and insights that could boost hope in the market.
The next important network for us to build will be in the future of Health. We believe there is a Sci-Fi future where you are proactive around your healthcare. Where no one is blindsided by disease. And there will be devices that monitor your health persistently rather than asynchronously from the comfort of your own home.
I still smile whenever a startup references “Cockroaching,” to me. They may not know it, but Boost VC in some small way impacted that phrase to be used over the last 7 years. To be a cockroach is to build in the winter, and build for the sake of building. There’s a state of mind that is created during hard times where you build to solve the problem that you set out to solve. Blinders on. Focus gets strong.
When writing about Venture Capital or startups on the internet… Just know… Fred Wilson did it already. Yes, Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. I’m getting back into writing again after a fairly long gap, and I’m starting to have deja vu when starting posts, where either it feels like I had already written the post, or Fred Wilson did it already… and more clearly.
One category we have been spending a lot of time in is healthcare, but not just any healthcare - Direct to Consumer Healthcare. We believe this is a crucial part of the Sci-Fi future.The way that Bitcoin made everyone a banker… the latest emerging technologies will make everyone a doctor.
Applications are now rolling!! Boost VC is looking for 10 ambitious founders using Sci-Fi tech to solve the worlds hardest problems. www.boost.vc/apply
Bitcoin and the crypto markets are taking a hit, along with everything else in the world this week. And when markets are dropping, I feel it’s important to remember why you were in the market in the first place, and this is a good reminder to how the market has changed… but also stayed the same.
I was very lucky to have become obsessed with Bitcoin early… because all signs pointed to “this is a bad decision.” I chose to invest in interesting people, and they mostly happened to be in the Bitcoin market.
So I wanted to spend some time thinking about where I believe are conventionally wrong early stage communities happening today.
At Demo Day, our goal is to nudge the stars to align. To create the first data point for a possible founder/investor relationship. To bring together interested investors, with interesting founders.
Boost VC is looking for 10 ambitious founders using Sci-Fi tech to solve the worlds hardest problems. www.boost.vc/apply
Boost VC is looking for 10 ambitious founders using Sci-Fi tech to solve the worlds hardest problems. www.boost.vc/apply
At Boost VC, we invest at the intersection of Amazing Humans, Sci-Fi Tech & Trillion Dollar Markets… Meet the companies from our Spring 2021 Demo Day.
We invest in startups at the intersection of 3 distinct pillars: Amazing Humans, Sci-Fi Tech, and Future Trillion Dollar Markets.
What is Demo Day? On Tuesday, October 13th we hosted digital Demo Day to showcase 14 recent investments to hundreds of early stage investors. Investors can view company profiles, chat with founders and connect directly with teams they are interested in meeting.
Tribe 14 starts today. We have invested in new startups, and will kick off our 14th program, and I’m still as excited as the first time 8 years ago. The experiment from eight years ago, has defined our organization. It has allowed for us to invest in more than 300 startups making Sci-Fi a Reality.
This week we had our first ever digital demo day. Hundreds of investors showed up live to view company profiles, chatted with founders over Zoom and scheduled meetings. With how well it went, digital demo day might be sticking around post quarantine!