Alexis Ohanian, Reddit cofounder, enterprise capitalist, and enthusiastic Twitter person, quietly introduced a brand new initiative final week out of his enterprise agency, Seven Seven Six (776): the 776 Titans Fund. The brand new fund, because the agency describes it, plans to “give attention to rising managers, every with their very own influential distribution channels and distinctive operational expertise in backing start-up ventures.” The agency added in an announcement that every fund will function independently and can obtain an preliminary $500,000 funding from 776, together with entry to Cerebro (the proprietary working system of the agency), and ongoing assist from Sequence, an enterprise digital finance platform whose seed spherical was led by 776.
Already, three groups have acquired checks from Ohanian & Co.: Marques Brownlee of MKBHD Ventures (Brownlee has grow to be famend for his tech-focused movies on his YouTube channel and is focusing broadly on early-stage startups); brother and sister Allyson and Wes Felix of Crenshaw Ventures (Allyson is a five-time Olympian and founding father of a way of life model, and the 2 plan to spend money on web3, metaverse and fintech corporations); and Cleo Abram of Enormous If True Ventures (Abram is an Emmy-nominated video producer and journalist who’s searching for moonshot concepts).
To search out out extra, we reached out Ohanian final week with some questions. He responded to them through e-mail.
TC: Is the “Titans fund” a carve-out of the $500 million in capital throughout two funds that 776 introduced final month or a separate fund of funds? Additionally, how a lot cash is there to speculate altogether?
AO: It’s a carve-out from Fund II, and we’re investing round $10 million.
What’s the standards for funding?
We’re searching for people who nice founders will completely need to make room for on their cap tables. Why? The mixture of distinctive distribution and/or their popularity and expertise. We’re searching for the issues that conventional VCs don’t have. This differentiation is what one of the best founders are searching for — all the things else is simply capital.
What’s so particular about Cerebro and the way does it assist 776 scale its operations?
Cerebro is the working system we’ve constructed that we use for all of the work at 776. Our crew, founders, LPs (and shortly, Titans) have their very own logins and workflows.
I began like every good product supervisor and listed and ranked all of the duties I do as a VC after which sorted probably the most invaluable ones that have been most productizable and began constructing. First was the community — we now have a large one which founders bought a lot of worth from, however it’s not very environment friendly to ask a human “Are you aware somebody at Twitter” for an intro. Databases are significantly better for that question, so our community search and intro instrument was the primary product we shipped, which lets founders search over 44,000 contacts anytime they’d like, request intros with one-click, and have them routed to the individual on the crew with the strongest relationship to that contact.
[These fund managers] will get their very own entry to Cerbero, which is able to assist them be extra environment friendly and efficient at deploying capital — and it ought to unlock some very attention-grabbing advantages to have this federation of funds plugged into our world mind.
What number of managers does the agency intend to seed fund right here?
The Historic Greeks had 12 Titans (the Olympian pantheon of gods we all know at present), however with the joy and alternative we’ve seen, it’ll be extra like 20.
Would 776 spend money on a nascent fund that already exists fairly than assist somebody enter on this planet of investing?
Our foremost focus is backing new managers. A lot of them have angel invested earlier than, however we’re not ruling out backing a Fund II.
You’re centered on diversifying the world of investing, however fund of funds efforts are clearly additionally a wise technique to see offers that GPs may miss in any other case, so I’m questioning: do you plan for the managers to have very totally different areas of focus or may 776 fortunately again quite a few different managers who’re investing in web3 sort offers? Relatedly, does 776 use scouts or do you intend to make use of scouts in some unspecified time in the future?
We imagine all of those managers will produce outsized returns — the objective right here is all the time excellence — and plenty of of them are going to have overlap with a generalist agency like ours, although we do loads of web3.
Listed here are some themes we’ve backed thus far: generalist, crypto, shopper, coverage, laborious tech, and building. Due to Cerebro, we’ll have insights into the businesses our managers are funding, however there’s no expectation or ask for them to be [scouts for us]. They’re Titans operating their very own funds that we’re lucky to be LPs in.