Launching Coelius Capital

It is my distinct pleasure to announce the launch of Coelius Capital I, a $45m venture capital fund to invest in early stage technology companies. Whew, it is actually a little weird to say that…

Five and a half years ago I was a lost little puppy, confused, beat up and uncertain what was coming next. We had just sold Triggit, an advertising technology company I had started with my sister Susan Coelius Keplinger, Bobby Dunn and Ryan Tecco in 2005. It had been a wild journey. Ten years, seven pivots, a rocket ship ride from $1m to $30m in revenue in eighteen months and a horrible, brutal ending at the hands of a partner betraying us. I was in the middle of the worst two years of my life. It was like a sad country music song. If I had a dog, it would have run away. If I had a truck, it would have broken down.  

And then, like many good Silicon Valley stories, I found redemption in work. AngelList had just started their syndicate product and my good friend Gil Penchina kindly showed me the ropes. One of the companies I had been advising, Branch Metrics, was just closing their Series A from NEA and Alex Austin kindly let me syndicate a small allocation. I wrote the deal memo and pushed it out into the ether, unsure what would happen next. Twenty four hours later the deal was filled, overnight I had become a venture investor. Amazing.   

That year while I licked my wounds, I wandered around and made a few more investments using syndicates. I will always be eternally grateful to Kyle Vogt at Cruise, George Deglin at OneSignal, Vidyuth Srinivasan at Entrupy and Daniel Heer at Zeotap for letting me play pretend VC and invest in their companies. I fell in love with the job and it dragged me out of the depths.  

Barely a year later and GM bought Cruise for $1B. Amazing. Suddenly everyone thought I knew what I was doing and the doors flew open. There is nothing quite as sweet as dumb luck.  

Over the last five years I have had the incredible good fortune to learn this job from an amazing collection of people. The AngelList Syndicate is now over 2000 strong and they are constantly helping with ideas, deals, diligence and pointing out when I am being an idiot. Over forty amazing founders let me enlist in their journey and they are constantly pushing and pulling me up the learning curve. The amazing team at Industry Ventures have been the best partners I could ever imagine. And most importantly, I would like to thank the entire technology community from the very bottom of my heart. We live and work in a very special time where helping others is the norm, where knowledge and connections are shared, and where the folks with the biggest hearts seem to always win. May it be like that forever. 

Onward...