Looking back at 2012
I’m a startup guy. And from day one, we’ve always viewed First Round Capital as a startup. We're building First Round Capital just like any entrepreneur would build their business. We are a company - not a “firm” or a collection of independent partners that come together for Monday meetings. We have customers (our entrepreneurs) and shareholders (our Limited Partners). In every part of our business, we try our hardest to innovate and delight our customers - and think differently about what a venture fund could be. Whether it's public initiatives like Dorm Room Fund or internal products like our propriety online collaboration tool, FRC Network, which connects the 7,000+ employees across our investments - we try to push ourselves every year to move faster and faster - and come to the office willing to invent (and to fail).
As each year comes to an end, we do our best to take stock and plan for the future. As companies mature, they often begin to solidify this process in an annual report - where they publicly share what happened in the previous year. For the first time ever, we're choosing to do the same thing. To open up our community and share where we've been and what we've done.
In the process of crunching the data and reflecting on the year, it's clear it was a busy one. This year was filled with 37 new companies in our Community, the addition of 5 new members to the First Round team, more than 50 new software product features built and shipped for our proprietary FRC Network, 55+ company only events, a ton of additional services, thousands of new relationships and one new fund.
You can find more details on all of those key milestones in our 2012 Annual Report (a huge thank you to our design partner on this project, Alice Lee - she really helped turn data into beauty) - and also some really interesting data - here are a few of our favorites:
- First Round Capital companies raised a total of $910,000,000 in 2012
- 5.5% of all dollars invested in Tech/IT companies by every venture firm in the country went to a FRC company
- The First Round Capital companies that exited (through M&A or IPO) in 2012 were worth 2,500,000,000+ at the time of exit
- The most common CEO name in our Community is David - there are 11 Davids
- The First Round Capital Holiday Video was viewed over 100,000 times, that's 164.2 days of human attention
- Every dollar First Round initially invests in a company is typically followed by $36 of follow-on capital from other VCs
- 2012 was the first year in our history where consumer companies represented less than 50% of our initial investment dollars
- Our partnership flew over 480,000 miles in 2012
So as we start 2013, we sincerely thank the 7,000+ employees across our community who worked millions of hours to help our 300+ founders build industry changing companies. We're excited to have the opportunity to support you in the year to come.
You can see our entire Annual Report here: www.firstround.com/annualreport2012 (and be sure to check out the premier of "The Making of Call Me First Round Style" at the very bottom).
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