G20 Ventures is the capital partner that helps Web3 communities grow with smart money, great storytelling, and the right connections.
Human-scale venture capital, behind awesome-scale communities.
We think venture doesn’t scale.
In a time of billion dollar funds and yacht club crypto-punks, we think VC - in every generation of the Web - is still a business of human relationships. It’s hard. It takes focus, and enough space for reflection to spot patterns in the dots.
We think good business is personal, and take a “People First” approach to investing. We value clarity, directness, and simplicity. We show up for meetings, prepared and on time. We pay attention, and offer help with humility. We do work. We help entrepreneurs win, whether we invest in them or not.
We don’t put up with jerks, don’t optimize transactions at the expense of relationships. We’re not focused on scaling our own business, but on growing the businesses we invest in, and the capital entrusted to us.
It all started with a cooking class…
We worked at a big fund for a long time, with all the perks and politics every big fund has. We did well, but thought we could do better.
In 2013 we set out to build something different, starting with a hand-picked group of 20 of the best people we’d worked closely with over the years. Startup founders and CEOs were the core, but we invited the best position players we knew in product, sales, marketing, finance, ops, and HR. It began as a small club of great people passionate about startups (our first event was a cooking class in Cambridge,) with no poseurs and no assholes. In time it became a resource, and a platform we could all use to focus our work supporting entrepreneurs. We all invested, with an eye toward creating a fund with low overhead, and high impact. Eventually some limited partners asked to come along, and the fund tripled from what we’d all put in.
We started calling our group “the G20.” When the time came to name our fund, that’s what we called it too.
We looked for great teams in love with big problems, at or approaching the inflection point of customer validation. Our focus for the first 3 funds was on early-stage, East Coast, and enterprise software. It was a concentrated risk model focused on companies we could really help, where everyone mattered and no one was disposable. Only 3 companies fell out of those first funds, a track record almost unheard of in VC, and something we’re really proud of.
Where We Invest
We look for great teams in love with big problems, at the inflection point of customer validation. Our sweet spot is $2–5 million in Series A, though we can invest earlier in emergent technologies.
We’re a stage-specific fund, investing on exciting businesses at they point product-market fit is in sight, and it’s time to shift from selling to building a machine that sells. We can invest earlier in emerging technologies, but those deals are the exception and not the rule.
Our current fund will be deployed into early-stage enterprise software, with a specific focus on the East Coast where our network is strongest and we can do the most good. We generally prefer technology risk to market risk, and won’t invest in anything 100% consumer-facing. We look for a solid core team that really understands the problem they’re trying to solve. We reserve capital for every deal we do, meaning we want to be with the entrepreneurs we back all the way to the finish line.