Archive for category: Events

At a time when the world’s problems seem more intractable – in light of the California wildfires and Las Vegas shooting – there is hope that social capital will be leveraged to address the climate change, poverty, access to healthcare and improving education. It certainly is a rising trend, as recent data shows that the impact investing market in the U.S. has a floor of $114 billion, although the actual market size is much larger.

While a critical mass of impact investors gathered in San Francisco for Social Capital Markets (SoCap), the world’s leading conference on impact investing and social enterprise, the NVCA seized the opportunity to bring participants in the venture ecosystem active in this space together to discuss its opportunities and challenges. Not surprisingly, the event attracted more than 70 attendees from a wide spectrum on the investing scale: both new and established, large and small venture capital firms, limited partners, entrepreneurs and foundations. Read more

Last week, NVCA held a digital class on Successful Fundraiser’s Philosophy: How Micro VCs Get Off the Ground & Succeed. With micro VC funds playing an important role in the startup lifecycle—micro VC funds closing in 2016 finished with $1.5 billion in commitments, according to PitchBook—NVCA and our members are an important resource for new fund managers who are getting off the ground and learning to navigate the fundraising process. The formation of new venture capital funds is critical to the future of innovation, and NVCA was pleased to be able to provide the ecosystem with tools and insights to help expand the VC community.

We began the webinar with an insider’s perspective from Cindy Padnos of Illuminate Ventures on how micro VC is evolving and what were some of the lessons that she learned from the process of raising her first institutional fund. Padnos described what it was like for her to launch a new VC firm, from Illuminate’s proof of concept fund, to how she brought in original investors and how the success of that fund helped her close Illuminate’s Fund 1 in 2013, from which Illuminate has made 15 investments and so far has had 3 M&A exits. Read more