Slow Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, is raising two new funds, including a $165 million fund VI and a $110 million opportunity fund, according to two regulatory filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
Both filings indicate that Slow Ventures has not yet raised funds toward either vehicle, although that could exclude existing commitments from its limited partners.
Facebook alum Dave Morin founded Slow Ventures in 2009, according to a TechCrunch profile, later adding former Facebook execs Sam Lessin and Kevin Colleran to the team. Colleran is now managing director and Lessin a general partner, though Morin left and founded a competing VC firm, Offline Ventures, with his wife in 2020.
Slow Ventures invests in a variety of sectors, including consumer, fintech, and crypto, according to a list of portfolio companies on its website. Top investments have included Robinhood, Nextdoor, Pinterest, and the cryptocurrency Solana.
Colleran declined to comment.
‘Big things take time’
In the crowded field of early-stage VC firms, Slow Ventures is notable for its management team. Lessin was a classmate at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, who later acquired Lessin’s file-sharing startup, Drop, in 2010. Lessin joined Facebook, eventually rising to the rank of vice president before leaving to found another startup, Fin. His wife, Jessica Lessin, is the founder of tech and venture news site The Information, where Sam Lessin is a frequent contributor. (His profile on the outlet’s website lists his position as “intern.”)
Colleran was one of the first 10 employees at Facebook, according to his LinkedIn, working in advertising sales before joining the venture giant General Catalyst as an investor. He began working at Slow Ventures in 2013. A third partner, Will Quist, joined in 2015, previously working at Industry Ventures.
Slow Ventures has taken a generalist approach, investing across verticals into a number of blue-chip winners. In a mission statement on its website, the firm touts its strategy as deviating from the “factory” model of venture capital, which it argues prioritizes speed and scale over quality. In contrast, Slow Ventures touts its eponymous strategy: “Big things take time.”
The firm has raised several large rounds, including $325 million across two funds in 2022, and $220 million across two funds in 2019. That has included previous “opportunity funds,” which typically refer to separate vehicles where firms can reinvest in existing portfolio companies.
Compared with its VC counterparts, Slow Ventures has been at the forefront of nontraditional approaches, including investing directly in cryptocurrency. The firm made an early bet in Solana—a cryptocurrency whose value has skyrocketed after a tumultuous past couple of years. TechCrunch reported that Slow Ventures paid $0.05 a coin, with the cryptocurrency currently sitting at around $215. The firm also experimented with a crypto concept called decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, to purchase land in Montana, as well as a controversial strategy to invest in people’s careers for a slice of their future earnings.
Lessin has also drawn headlines for his work outside of Slow Ventures, including a bid to join Harvard’s Board of Overseers amid tension over the university’s leadership earlier this year. Despite an endorsement from Zuckerberg, Lessin’s campaign was unsuccessful.
