Asylum Ventures is a $55 million inception-stage fund based in Brooklyn, New York.
What does this mean to us? It means we believe the best founders are true craftspeople - building something truly new, and that the company is an expression of who they are and what they want to see in the world. A founder's art can take many forms including the product and its design, a unique business process, a culture, the story that is told about the future.
Like many of the most well-respected artists in almost every medium over the generations, founders often pursue their missions while being deeply misunderstood, perceived as crazy and misguided. Many of the founders we respect most, from Steve Jobs to Brian Armstrong to Melanie Perkins to Brian Chesky, all went through their unique artist journeys, in overlooked markets, and eventually emerged as prescient generational leaders.
In the 15 years since the last financial crisis, venture capital has gone through a dramatic shift, growing from a cottage industry to a much larger institutional asset class. In other words, venture has become “bankified.”
A pillar of our initial thesis for our previous firm Notation -- that small seed firms would get too large -- now feels quaint. Seed firms did indeed get much, much larger, but perhaps the even bigger change was that already large funds became truly massive, building platforms, suites of services, and staffs that rival the largest buyout private equity firms.
Our hunch is today and in the coming decade, founders at the earliest stages don’t want to work with “institutions” that treat their companies and people like an asset class. See Nick’s recent tweet thread. We believe that founders at the earliest stages want to work with partners who are human and who care as much about them as people as they do the companies they’re building. These types of founders want to work with firms with soul and perspective, not generic big banks.
Two examples of companies from the entertainment industry that inspire us include Asylum Records (we liked the name too :-) and A24.
Founded by David Geffen in 1971, Asylum Records became one of the most successful indie labels in history built in response to the large institutional record labels at the time. Similarly, A24, arguably the most successful indie movie studio today, launched in response to the big institutional movie studios that in the words of a director, are “run by accountants at this point.” A24 is not the biggest studio and their films have only modest budgets, but despite that - they make the best films, as evidenced by the recent 7-time Oscar win for [Everything Everywhere all at Once](‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Is Big Winner at the Oscars), one of our team’s personal favorites.
David Geffen, founder of Asylum Records (image credit).
An image from GQ article, *How A24 is Disrupting Hollywood.*
Asylum won’t lead the largest funding rounds or fund the biggest budget companies, just as A24 won’t produce the next Marvel blockbuster. Rather, our goal as a small firm is to invest in the best early-stage startups and work with artist founders as true partners.
In part, we’re building Asylum to figure this out, and we don’t have all the answers just yet, but we think it means: