Originally posted in 2018, this blog has been updated as of March 2022 to reflect Laconia’s current investment focus, strategy, and process. If you remember reading something different before, you’re (probably) not hallucinating! For additional resources, you can check out our FAQ, sign up for an office hours session with our investment team, or submit your information for funding consideration.
Hey there!
From Jeffrey, David, Geri, and Reena - welcome to our playbook :)
If you know us well, you won’t be surprised to learn that transparency, collaboration, and community have been core to Laconia since 2015. We hope to demystify venture capital’s insularity and enable founders to more easily access and navigate the venture world.
In line with this foundation, this 5-part blog series publicly sharing our story, thesis, and process. Below are the five posts:
Laconia’s Story: Who We Are & Why We Do This (this blog)
So, how did we get here?
David and I (Jeffrey) met after living parallel lives for decades. Both of us came up through the ranks in sales, marketing, and management roles, eventually founding, running, and selling multiple media & tech companies. Much of this involved raising money.
Intrigued by the other side of the venture capital table, we had both begun to angel invest, eventually crossing paths in 2010 as members of the New York Angels. During the next 18 months as our friendship grew, we spent more and more time co-investing together and with others, until we reached the point of “What’s next? Where can we go with this?”
We knew we loved working with founders and supporting the next generation of tech companies, and our operational skill set matched the seed/Series A stage. However, the last thing we wanted to do was start another typical venture firm. We wanted to create a fund that brought together the best practices of angel investing with the best practices of institutional venture capital; a fund we would want to invest in!
In our eyes, that meant leveraging not only our LPs’ capital but their knowledge and network, while also providing operational experience to our portfolio companies during their critical early development stage. The Laconia vision was, and is, to combine our core values with institutional-level infrastructure, due diligence, and governance to drive better returns and build better businesses.
We are now seven years into this journey, and our investment team consists of myself (Jeffrey Silverman), David Arcara, Geri Kirilova, and Reena Jailwala.
We consider ourselves entrepreneurs, and Laconia is our startup. We are small and scrappy, constantly iterating as we fine-tune our strategy. Our first two funds are now fully deployed, and we couldn’t be more excited to have a fresh pool of Fund III capital to invest.
Here are a handful of examples & outcomes of our core values in our day-to-day work.
Transparency
We provide straightforward & honest feedback to founders, whether in mentor meetings or during our investment process. No founder should ever leave a meeting with us wondering what we thought.
We give our LPs access to our investment deal room including appropriate due diligence materials and meetings. In turn, our LPs bring us tremendous industry expertise and network contacts to strengthen our portfolio and due diligence. In one instance, LP feedback was so instrumental to our process that we decided to triple our investment allocation into one of our portfolio companies.
When co-investing with other VCs, we share our due diligence materials, helping all involved parties make the most informed decision.
Collaboration
Internally within Laconia, we operate by consensus. We do not have separate books of business, and we leverage our complementary areas of expertise to make better investment decisions.
Externally, our entrepreneur and board meetings are working sessions where we hold CEOs accountable without playing “gotcha”. We always work side by side with our founders and co-investors as partners.
Community
We host virtual and in-person events that unite our LPs and founders. On more than one occasion, these interactions have resulted in LPs making additional intros for founders that have resulted in long-term customers.
We host tight-knit unique VC events that strengthen connections among fellow investors.
We organize functional roundtables, workshops, and offsites for our portfolio executives, building the Laconia family.
We are building the largest and most accessible onramp into the venture capital world through the Venture Cooperative.
The next blog dives into our investment thesis & parameters. In the meantime, let us know if you have any feedback here or on Twitter — @jsilverman22, @djarcara, @geri_kirilova, @JailwalaReena.