Eva Ho

Building on the success of Rocket Studio with Simon Kirby and Pivotal with Dominic Joseph we decided to merge with Impact Counsel, led by the awesomely talented John D., Erim Jones and Robert Fok earlier this year. We’ve combined our significant and complimentary skills, experience and passion for growing amazing businesses to create a new breed of VC - Creative Capital Ventures Group (CCV). Fund 1 is focused on Sports, Media & Entertainment. Joining us on this exciting journey is media titan Tom Rogers (ex CEO Tivo & CNBC). We have also assembled a mighty team of Venture Partners bringing their expertise into our team, with the legendary Harvey Goldsmith leading our Immersive Entertainment category, and Cam Blackwood (Platinum award winning record producer) and his team at Rezonate heading up Music Rights acquisition. Creative Capital Ventures is designed to disrupt traditional VC models and accelerate the growth of innovative start-ups. We’ve already secured €18 million in commitments and are raising €35 million in total to fuel the next generation of game-changing businesses. What makes CCV different? •⁠ ⁠Founder-Led Expertise: Our team comprises serial entrepreneurs and operators who have built, scaled, and exited successful companies. We know what it takes to drive rapid growth. •⁠ ⁠Speed Scaler: Through our unique venture studio model, we’re not just funding companies—we’re actively accelerating their growth, shrinking the timeline from seed to exit. •⁠ ⁠Industry Focus: CCV focuses on high-growth sectors like Sports, Media, Entertainment, and Lifestyle, with a unique emphasis on IP acquisition to drive returns in stable asset classes. If you're interested in learning more about how CCV is reshaping the venture capital landscape, let’s connect!  More updates to follow! #VentureCapital #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #Startups #ScalingFast #CreativeCapitalVentures https://lnkd.in/eiuWVtvT

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Today, Two Chairs announces $72M of new funding to continue building a world where everyone has access to exceptional mental health care. Since late 2017, when Maveron led the Two Chairs Series A, the need for mental health services has grown considerably as our society has become lonelier and more isolated than ever. At the same time, our culture’s willingness to openly acknowledge these challenges is greater than ever. Sadly, the rapid growth of Two Chairs affirms the fact that our society is in desperate need of better mental health support. Two Chairs has built a business that believes clinical quality is the defining characteristic of success. Alex Katz has always emphasized the paramountcy of measurement-based clinical outcomes, which the team works tirelessly to achieve. In the process, Two Chairs has illustrated that embracing the ‘move fast and break things’ mentality doesn’t always work. Instead, Two Chairs opted for a different approach: they went slow to go fast. They built a proprietary algorithm that matches patients with the perfect therapist at the onset and hired a team of W2 clinicians oriented toward providing the highest quality care available. Even as the Two Chairs team has grown, their culture has remained small. This has enabled more intimate relationships within the team and between clients and clinicians. Reflecting on this milestone brings me back to the founding of Maveron and the values we hold dear. In 1998, my friend Howard Schultz and I founded Maveron to help entrepreneurs build companies that improve the lives of everyday people—their employees and their customers. There is perhaps no better example of this than Two Chairs. *** Thank you to TechCrunch's Marina Temkin, CFA for the great write-up. https://tcrn.ch/4aMt7yG

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Not all of the investments that Kindred Capital VC makes can be a 13 year sourcing process.... but... this is one of those very fortunate moments in which a relationship that started over a decade ago in the Bay Area where the brilliant A-H. Hleileh and I overlapped has now turned into an incredibly exciting opportunity for Kindred to lead his and Ron Holifield's first institutional round at Civic Marketplace. We believe: 1. Local government procurement is one of the most underserved areas in technology today, and has failed to keep pace with the private sector. They deserve better. 2. This is a huge opportunity, with US local governments spending alone amounting to over $1.5 trillion in annual spend, which is only going in one direction... 3. As the brilliant Kip Harkness shared with me in our diligence phase, "this industry moves at the speed of trust." And this is a unique founding team with A-H. Hleileh and Ron Holifield at the helm who bring together two critical ingredients: 1) decades of trust-building within this domain, and 2) a team who can build beautiful and scalable technology platforms. Onwards!! 🚀

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Having a Cars and Capital event tomorrow in Southern California with Oren Klaff. If you want to join message me. https://lnkd.in/gDQ4D39u Oren Klaff Bridger Pennington #InvestorEvent #FamilyOffice #InvestmentOpportunity #CarlsbadEvent #PrivateEquity #WealthManagement #InvestmentConference #CapitalRaising #NetworkingEvent #IndustryLeaders #FinancialGrowth #InvestorsMeetup #WealthBuilding #BusinessGrowth #InvestmentForum

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Over the years, we at GFR Fund have solidified our investment thesis, which is that we invest in "emerging digitally native communities." These communities can be built around games, social media, and any consumer applications. Now, founders have many easy-to-use tools to build user communities, such as Discord, X/twitter, Instagram, etc, and we believe the founders should start building communities even before they launch a product. The communities can help founders: - reach PMF faster - acquire users cheaper - retain and engage users longer - build better UX/UI, and - hire early employees Below, you can see how RTFKT and Omeda Studios built the community and then worked with them to create a product the users really wanted. We would love to talk to the founders who think the community is essential in building a product!

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I met Hersh Tapadia and Darrell "Jeremy" Freeman in late 2016 at NC IDEA LABS (formerly Groundwork Labs). We were a bunch of kids working on startups. We thought we had it figured out. You know the rest of that story....we had no clue! But Hersh and Jeremy did have it figured out. Not the specific thing they were working on. They pivoted a few times out of Groundwork Labs. But what they knew how to do as well as any founders was to be curious and listen to their customers. They WERE their customers. They were engineers building for engineers (leaders and teams). They were humble and knew what to ask. They were great at learning. Then they brought on Adam Dahlgren and the founding team felt complete. "Off to the races" means something different to every company. In Allstacks' case, it meant taking the disciplined, thoughtful, thorough approach to growth. And while the team is way more focused on executing for their customers than cheering about a funding announcement, it's also important that they do get their cheers. This is day 1 for these guys. They're building something incredibly big and incredibly impactful. And they're doing it the right way. And as a final side note, when I think of people I want in my corner - to confide in, to learn from, to grow with - I think of Hersh. He's a founder's founder. A CEO's CEO. And one heck of a guy.

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And my second investment at defy is in 🐶 zeroETL puppies 🐶... I mean PuppyGraph, which is all the beauty of a graph database, none of the data migration or continuous upkeep of a graph database. Sounds like magic? So are puppies 🐶 . Puppygraph is NOT a graph or a database. It is graph analytics engine that answers graph questions on your existing data warehouses, whether that is a Databricks datalake, Google BigQuery or postgres. Compared to SQL, it's faster, handles way more complexity, scales and has almost no upkeep. How did I get to conviction? 1. Tailwinds - 🌊 Lakehouses 🌊 have helped enterprises put all their data in one place, enabling Puppygraph to unlock insights previously unavailable. - 📚 LLMs! 📚AI and RAG cannot easily traverse fragmented data. Puppygraph's Graph RAG unlocks insights with their Knowledge Graph and spoonfeeds to the LLMs. 2. 👯 Team 👯 We have graph experts from Google, LinkedIn, Databricks, Tigergraph, and Instacart who are uniquely able to build this solution. 3. 💸 Customers 💸 . My alma mater Coinbase is a proud user. The feedback from my former colleagues was off the charts! A blockchain is very much a graph database and Puppygraph tracks down fraudulent transactions that go through mixers and helps identify patterns. Huge congrats to Weimo Liu Danfeng Xu Lei Huang Zhenni Wu Gary Hagmueller, defy.vc is proud to be an investor!!

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💰Sharing a List of 80 Black-led VC funds (US based): About this list: I realized that I couldn’t find a current list of Black-led funds as of 2024 when a lot of new funds have launched over the last couple of years including GPs Sydney Paige Thomas, Terri Burns and more. I have been gathering a list of these funds in my network, and that I could find publicly over time so wanted to share with the ecosystem. Only 2% of VC funds are Black-led: I found 80 funds (maybe there’s more!). There are 3,417 VC firms in the US (according to NVCA). Founders - These funds invest from pre-seed through growth, some with a focus on diverse founders, others more broadly. ⅔ of them have OPEN funding applications that I’ve linked in the sheet. LPs - As mentioned, a number of these funds might not be in the databases used for tracking, so hope to get some more Black-led funds on your radar! VCs - maybe there are some funds you should get to know for deal sharing, etc 👉🏾Link to full list here: https://lnkd.in/gktBhY-W

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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Today marks a groundbreaking moment for BLCK VC and our fellow collaborators—Diversity VC, All Raise, 2Gether-International, SomosVC, StartOut, and VetsinTech—as we proudly announce the launch of the Diversity Data Alliance. This important alliance underscores our unwavering commitment to nurturing a venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystem abundant in equity and inclusiveness. By standardizing and linking our data, we empower ourselves with the essential tools to track deeper trends that have, until now, eluded us to identify and fill funding gaps for historically excluded investors, founders, and operators. We can’t change what we do not measure, and now with the Diversity Data Alliance, we're now equipped to do both. Join us in this mission. Learn more and get involved: https://lnkd.in/eEZKdrac #DiversityDataAlliance #BLCKVC #VentureCapital #MeasureToChange

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My amazing cousin, Cleven Ticeson (https://lnkd.in/gWis4xX6) , a 14 time Emmy award winning producer for KCTS9 in Seattle, is a hero of mine. I grew up watching the educational shows like Bill Nye and the performing arts they would showcase. He was following the work I have been doing de-siloing the Black professional class working in venture scale entrepreneurship in the Pacific Northwest and composed a news reel covering Dreamward Group that moved me not only because he is my hyper-talented and dear cousin but because it voiced and gave me the perspective of the decades that what we’re building has been missing from the mass culture and my culture. Lewis Rudd once told me that the hardest target to hit is an invisible one and my dear cousin hit me right in the heart by speaking in his video about the unseen, but nonetheless felt, absence of inclusive capitalization of startups. Felt by the generation of Black people that watched the tech industry grow not only painting Black technologists and Black founders out of the heroic saga of tech, but Black funders as well. I am so glad that Dreamward Group is able to paint the target and make it visible through our work. Venture Capital, the financial backing of the tech industry, just like tech itself, had an evolution with foundational moments in the 70s on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley yet it’s mechanics, drama, and operation are largely unknown to the public that isn’t working in tech entrepreneurship. It’s trajectory and heights of accomplishment with Andreessen Horowitz and Madrona Ventures are parallel and analogous to Google and Amazon…But only the later two brands are household names to people outside of the industry. The world knows the story of Black people being excluded from Tech, It knows the story of Black people being excluded from executive leadership. It experienced the Obama administration and the depravity of the Trump backlash and had to ask itself why it had actively or passively participated in writing off Black professionals. Some of the world hears of Black founders getting less than 2% of invested capital, but even on hearing that, they don’t know the story of Black people being excluded from the role of deciding which startups get funded using a yet third party’s (often their own government’s) money…That is the story of Venture Capital today, and that’s what Dreamward is changing for the future.

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Great time on the Embracing Erosion podcast w/Devon O'Rourke! We talked about: 🚀 How to scale a company from concept to 9-figure exit 🔄 How to break away from the traditional consulting model and apply product approaches ⏩ Why it’s important to iterate quickly and often with messaging 💸📈What signals are important to pay attention to when investing in startups and much more!

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Prime Coalition has long taken a different tack to climate finance compared to its for-profit brethren. It makes the usual venture-style investments in startups through Azolla Ventures and also helps philanthropists direct their money to climate-related projects that it deems high impact. Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce. #climatetech #climateVC #climatefinance

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Looking forward to discussing how changing demographics and culture norms are affecting investment opportunities in longevity, health and well-being at The Care Summit today Alongside Cake Ventures' Monique Woodard, Ziegler's Dan Hermann, Oak HC/FT's Billy Deitch and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jennifer Edwards, we’ll dive into the trends shaping how we are investing in the space: - Last year marked one of the most significant social and economic moments in modern times: The number of older adults—those aged 50 and over- surpassed the number of children under the age of 15 for the first time. - In 2020 the 50 plus population contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34% of the total. That equates to about 3x the revenue of the world’s 100 highest- earning companies in 2020. - The U.S. population grew by 24.5 million from 2010 to 2022, and Hispanics accounted for 53% of this increase – a greater share than any other racial or ethnic group. - Women around the world and across all ages drive 64% of consumer spending

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Team San Diego! I though you may find this as surprising as I did...we are not alone. Read this quick article from Jon Prentice's (Silicon Valley Bank) interview with with James Newell (Voyager Capital), published in GeekWire on Seattle's innovation ecosystem....they lament the SAME issues as we do in San Diego: * Lack of angel investors, (Especially, it calls out, given the local giant tech co's) * "We need low-conviction check writers." * Lack of "cachet associated with being an angel investor" - We have similar efforts (as described in the article) to drum up angel activity: NuFund Venture Group and, Interlock Capital (read the article and you'll see why the Interlock effort is tops as relates to "paying back into the ecosystem") Connect.org strives to 'connect' innovative companies with investors of all types (angel, VC, PE...) - just see "Innovation Day". Their Springboard program provides another great way for experienced entrepreneurs to give back through mentorship...as for the companies going through Springboard: "Ask for advice, and you often get $$" Your thoughts on the article or San Diego innovation ecosystem? https://lnkd.in/gfwq6mfq

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👀 Looking at our recent investments at Draper Associates, here’s what standout founders nailed, making our decision to invest much easier (and faster): 💥 Visionary Tech with a Bold Vision – These founders are not here for incremental wins; they’re reimagining what’s possible in across tech - biotech, robotics, aerospace, and beyond. Their vision is big and audacious, tackling complex problems that demand breakthrough solutions, others have not been willing to try. 👊 Clear Passion & Purpose – The drive in these founders is undeniable. They’re committed to their mission with a depth of purpose that shapes every choice. One founder, for example, took two years completely off to learn and meet everyone in longevity biotech. This level of grit and dedication is rare but essential for the most impactful founders. 🌟 Assembling All-Star Teams – They bring together top-tier talent from diverse disciplines: experienced business leaders with successful exits or industry experience at top companies, technical co-founders with deep expertise, often PhDs or industry pioneers, and even published authors. It’s a complementary team, unified by a shared vision. They make the: "Why this team?" obvious - at a glance. 💻 Data-Driven to the Core – These founders present data insights that show why their approach is unique, especially against a competitive field of companies. This data is delivered with clarity and they make the complex simple. Many are published in top journals, adding depth and credibility to their approach, and reinforcing that they know their tech inside out. ⚡️ Memorable, Clear Vision – They don’t just pitch; they make the future feel tangible, with a vision that’s both compelling and concise. If I can relay their pitch in under 30 seconds to my team, they’ve killed it. 📣 Transparent & Proactive Communication – The best founders don’t wait for questions. They come prepared, often with a comprehensive FAQ doc, give timely updates to our questions, and are candid about challenges. This level of openness builds trust and strengthens our partnership. 💸 Milestone-Driven Funding Strategy – Each funding stage aligns clearly with already achieved or upcoming achievable milestones. They’ve mapped out a roadmap that minimizes risk at every step, giving us confidence in their journey. 💰 Revenue Milestones Along the Way – Even if it'll take a decade to hit revenue on their big vision, these founders find revenue generation stops along the way to profitability. They share a trajectory that connects early wins to revenue, showing how every step is a building block toward their bigger vision. Overall, the best founders are incredibly thoughtful, prepared, and fantastic verbal / written communicators. #founders #startups #fundraising #VC

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Apply now to get a coveted spot for the Venture Lane B2B Pitch Night Event! 🚀 🥇 On November 19th, Venture Lane | Startup Hub is hosting our exclusive Pitch Night 👉 - a rare opportunity for Boston's B2B tech founders to tune their pitch and get in front of awesome mentors, investors, and industry leaders. ⏰ Apply by November 1st to secure your spot! 📲 Find the application link in the comments below. #B2BTech #Startups #Fundraising #BostonStartups #PitchNight #VentureLaneStudio

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Participating in Cohort 14 of the VC Lab has been an energizing experience so far. I am learning so much about the ins and outs of being an emerging fund manager and how to succeed in this space. Today they hosted a panel for Women in VC that provided some real world advice from some fantastic panelists. The curriculum is rigorous for sure, but rewarding. If you are curious about why this is such an exciting area check out this article. #venturecapital #vc #investing https://lnkd.in/gMMM_mwp

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Startup Founders: here is a SUPER interesting list of emerging and first-check VC firms, many of them new or under-the-radar. Why should you care? Because... 1) emerging VCs are often easier to get in front of and, 2) since they are still building their track record, they will often hustle harder to make your startup a success. (Excellent work, Anne Gherini! :) #startups #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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