Co-founder & Partner NextView Ventures, previously LinkedIn co-founder and foot soldier in PayPal Mafia. Obsessed with the big picture.
Joined March 2008
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- Followers 20,614
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The biggest IPO and M&A exit in VC history have both occurred in the past wk.
VC is starting to segment based on capitalization (small-mid vs large/megacap).
The public equity markets did this in 1980s-90s, PE buyout world did in the 2000s, and now something similar feels inevitable for venture.
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Lee Hower retweeted
Jun 16
Every VC firm will tell you it has an AI initiative. The technology is the easy part.
The hard part is the operational rebuild almost no one has the will to do.
New in Carried Away, my blog on how AI is upending VC itself: "A New Engine, Not a New Paint Job."
carriedawayvc.substack.com/p…
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Not that long ago a $60B exit for a VC backed company would’ve been a once in a generation thing. It’s almost an afterthought now in a world of companies valued in the hundreds of billions or trillions in the private and public markets.
Congrats to Cursor. We now live in the mega cap era of startups & venture capital…
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Lee Hower retweeted
Jun 10
Honored to be named to the first-ever TIME100 Sports list 🙏🏼 truly so many athletes and execs I admire on it. Sport has been core to our foundation at whoop and I’ve always believed that the best athletes inspire us to dream bigger in performance and life. thank you @time
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My @NextViewVC partner David has been writing online about VC for many years. Today he's launched a new post / newsletter about the fundamental ways AI may truly disrupt the actual work of venture capitalists. I continue to enjoy collaborating with (and learning from) Dave in this brave new world for VC.
carriedawayvc.substack.com/p…
Jun 9
When I tell my fellow VCs in private I believe that AI is going to take our jobs, I'm usually laughed off.
Today I'm launching a new blog, Carried Away, to make the case in public.
🧵
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Congrats on another podium @lewishamilton.
Proud to celebrate another exceptional result alongside Scuderia Ferrari HP.
@ScuderiaFerrari
#F1 #MonacoGP
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Robots are cool. Robots actually delivered to customers generating revenue is cooler 🤖 💵
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Bravo. Exciting new opportunity for @navierboat
So THIS happened.
Super excited to work with Dubai based JIH and its Maldives affiliate HARIM on our most ambitious project yet!
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The number of companies closing seed financing is down nearly 40% from the peak in 2021 and 2022.
Jun 3
There’s one metric I watch to predict what will happen in venture markets
It’s not dollars deployed.
It’s not average valuation.
It’s the NUMBER and YoY GROWTH RATE of startups funded in a given year
Case in point…from ‘95-‘99, number of startups funded nearly 3x’d
We know how that ended…
Great numbers of startups create an unsustainable dispersion of talent and growth capital that bottlenecks companies getting to large outcomes
So where are we today? Round count is actually DOWN from ‘24-25. Below even 2019 levels.
Makes you think…🤔
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I look forward to this every year, and our gathering a couple weeks back with founders was wonderful. Thanks to all who were present
May 27
Earlier this month we wrapped up NextView's 3rd annual Founder Retreat in Sonoma County's Russian River Valley 🌲⛺️🛶
Same format as always. Same goal as always.
Founders getting real and connecting with each other.
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Lee Hower retweeted
May 25
Every year, I share this video of French caretakers who take sand from Omaha Beach in Normandy, and scrub them into the letters to give them the gold coloring.
They do this for all 9,386 US soldiers who died.
France also gave us this land as American soil. #MemorialDayWeekend
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This is very good.
The individual points may be reasonably well understood by those who have been building or investing in hard tech for awhile. But taken as a whole, it is particularly thoughtful (as usual for Leo).
May 22
Deep tech startups aren't just harder versions of software startups. After 10 years investing in sw & 5 in deep tech, I wrote a post about their key differences.
Core theme: what makes deep tech harder upfront also makes the winners much harder to copy.
codingvc.com/p/deep-tech-com…
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NVIDIA just reported >$82B in revenue for Q1 2026.
To put that in historical context for other megacap tech, it's only within the last 10-15yrs that companies first exceeded that on a *full year* basis.
Microsoft (2014 - $87B)
Alphabet (2016 - $90B)
Apple (2011 - $108B)
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Lee Hower retweeted
May 20
Anthropic exp $10.9B Q2 revenue, up from $4.8B in Q1, and $559M of operating profit for the Q.
Compute is 56 cents per dollar of revenue, lower than I expected.
Q2 projection:
$10.9B revenue
-$6.1B compute
-$2.7B sales & marketing
-$1.5B other costs
=$559M operating income
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Lee Hower retweeted
May 19
Congrats to NextView Partner @stephpalmeri, named to @BusinessInsider's Seed 40 — a list recognizing "the women whose early bets have helped shape the startup ecosystem."
"Lists like this are fun, but the real story is always the founders." - @stephpalmeri
More below 👇
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This IPO illustrates the power of an individual partner over the brand name firm in VC. Pierre Lamond was a partner of both Sequoia and Khosla. But instead of those firms backing Cerebras, it was Eclipse (the firm he joined at the age of 84) that backed this little known chip company, multiple times, in the early years. What a way to wrap up a career (he was born in 1930, same year as Buffett).
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