Not Boring Capital

LP Update IV

Funds I & II

Q1 2022

Hi Not Boring LPs 👋 ,

Welcome back! Hope everyone had a phenomenal first quarter.

As usual, we’ve been busy here over at Not Boring Capital. And by “we,” for the first time, I really mean “we.” I’ll explain below, but we’re starting to build out the team. We’ll keep it small and light to start, but the goals are twofold:

1. Build out products that allow us to help companies in the highest-leverage ways possible.
2. Get smarter about, and then explain, the absolute edges of what’s commercially viable.

In the last update, I wrote that we wanted to continue pushing out the weirdness curve. Given the number of investments we’ll make, we have more room to take risks. I mentioned DAOs, climate, and companies with more regulatory risk as examples of the types of investments we might want to make. I think we’ve done that, and I’ll highlight some of my favorite examples below. Ideally, we’ll push further out to the limits of what’s possible and commercially viable in the worlds of bits and atoms.

In Q1, we invested $12.7 million in 48 companies (39 new and 9 follow-on). That brings the total for Fund II through Q1 to $21.1 million invested in 98 companies (85 new and 13 follow-on). We’ve been able to write larger checks into competitive rounds, and have stayed close enough to our best portfolio companies to be able to invest meaningful checks in follow-ons for nine of them in the last quarter alone.

What’s been fascinating to me is that while Not Boring Capital’s core thesis has remained consistent from the beginning, the details are gaining resolution each quarter. It feels like we’re on a bit of an exponential curve and learning new things every week.

For example, we’ve leaned even further into web3 this quarter, with 50% of our dollars going to web3 investments. Part of the reason for that is that we’re seeing great deals in the space thanks to writing a lot about web3, but part is that web3 is starting to touch more industries.