Heya,
so this news flash just hit me on TechCrunch.
Mary Meeker, the long-term Kleiner Perkins GP seems to have managed to obtain capital commitments for $1.25bn.
I first heard of her intention to split from Kleiner and raise her own fund in early January through this Crunchnews piece, where the fund target of $1.25bn was already announced. However, at that time, given that just one day earlier Dan Primark had put out a story on Axios on how August Capital was struggling to raise, I was skeptical that she would be able to hit this target. So this is news.
For those of you how don’t know Mary Meeker, she is probably most famous for her annual internet trends report. She was a stock analyst covering tech stocks at Morgan Stanley during the Dotcom boom and is thus the perfect person to consolidate internet trends in slides packed with data and raw information. I always learn a bunch from her report. Funny fact, two years ago she got me to take note of the Allbirds D2C phenomenon and got me to purchase my first pair a few months ago.
While her brand value is clearly large in Silicon Valley due to the internet trends report alone, my personal impression is that she is in many ways the archetype of part the 90ies financier VCs, which often had a finance rather than an founder-operator background. Thus, a few weeks ago, when Forbes published its new Midas List, and I saw Mary Meeker in the top ten, I was really happy to see a woman up there, but at the same time I was also slightly disappointed it wasn’t a woman VC with a bit more of an owner-operator DNA. Like for example Sarah Tavel from Benchmark (who discovered and pushed Pinterest while still at Bessemer and later took a PM role at the firm).
Well, now Meeker has raised $1.25bn under her own brand, which is an entrepreneurial success story of its own kind. The fund is called Bond, back in January I remember joking on Twitter that this is exactly what you would suspect an ex-banker to name their fund, but it does sound classy. Let’s just all hope that she will still find enough time to put out her annual report given all this dry powder she now has to deploy.
That’s it for today.
Ttyl,
Erasmus
Note: If you don’t like reading, I also do voice recordings of these posts while walking on Sand Hill Road (not really SHR, but some busy street).