Not Boring Capital Fund 1

Investment memo Not Boring Capital Fund 1 used to raise $9.9m. The funds were deployed in 6 months.

About Not Boring Capital

Packy McCormick made his name creating the ‘Not Boring’ newsletter and leveraged that into becoming an investor.

In his LinkedIn words:

Not Boring is a media & venture capital firm.

Not Boring Media produces content at the intersection of business, strategy, technology and web3. The Not Boring newsletter, written by Packy McCormick, is the #1 Business newsletter on Substack with over 115,000 subscribers. Not Boring also produces the “Not Boring Founders” podcast – which is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Not Boring Capital invests in companies with stories to tell, and helps tell them.

He raised $8m in 2021 for fund 1 and then $30m for fund 2. He started out with the “Not Boring Syndicate”, investing in $4m in 20 companies.

Not Boring Fund 1

Fund 1 will invest mainly in Seed through Series B companies, with the very occasional pre-seed and growth-stage investment. He’s looking for Worldbuilders, founders and companies executing on complex, non-obvious strategies towards huge visions.

Raise amount

The SEC imposes limits on that – like the (absurd but unfortunately hard) accredited investor rule and the rule that says you can either raise more than $10M with fewer than 100 Limited Partners (LPs, the people who invest in funds) or raise less than $10M from up to 249 LPs.

For Fund I, we hit the $9.9M cap with 133  LPs – a lot for a small fund, but not as many as I’d like!

Flywheel

The short version of the pitch is that Not Boring is and does a few things — newsletter, syndicate, investment memos, sponsored deep dives, Twitter, podcast, and Twitter Spaces — that come together in the Not Boring Flywheel.

The Flywheel should help me do the three things I need to do to run a successful fund:

1. Pick the right investments. I spend all of my time thinking and writing about emerging trends and public and private company strategies.
2. Convince founders to actually let me invest. In the memo, I give examples how different Syndicate deals came together, some directly, many via referral. Ultimately, people connect with people, and by putting myself out there, founders get a good sense for whether or not they’d like working with me.
3. Help portfolio companies succeed. Not Boring has an expanding toolkit to help founders, particularly with distribution and storytelling.

Investors

The memo, along with peoples’ familiarity with Not Boring, helped me raise over $7 million from some amazing LPs over the past three months.

I pinch myself regularly when I look at the incredible roster of funds and people backing Not Boring Capital. Thrive Capital, a firm that I’ve looked up to since they invested in Harry’s (where Puja worked) and passed on Breather (where I worked), is the anchor LP in the fund. LPs include Bain Capital Ventures, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon (a16z), Neil Mehta (Greenoaks), Josh Kopelman (First Round), Giana Bianchini & Jane Stecyk (Mighty Networks), Saurabh Gupta (DST), Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal (Acquired), Winslow Strong, Lan Xuezhao (Basis Set), Ankur Nagpal (Teachable), Jeff Lo & Eva Weng, Sung Ho Choi (Fubo), John Borthwick (Betaworks), Medha Agarwal (Redpoint), Michael Batnick (Ritholtz), Jeff Richards (GGV), David Lee (Samsung) Niv Dror, Moshe Lifschitz, Todd Goldberg, and Rahul Vohra (Deploy), Stefanie Silverman, Boris Wertz (Version One), Rob Alexander (Capital One), Nick Abouzeid (MainStreet) Doug Imbruce & Molly Borman Heymont (Podz), Adam Nelson (FirstMark), Henry Ault (Eco), Jonathan Wasserstrum (SquareFoot), Dror Poleg, Morgan Sze (Azentus), Benny Page (Epidemic Sound), Jonathan Forster (early Spotify), Nikhil Basu Trivedi (Footwork), Tetsuro Miyatake, Pankaj Agarwal, Andreas Lan, Thomas McGannon, plus some of my closest friends, family, Twitter friends, and Not Boring Syndicate backers.

Not Boring Capital Memos

Packy opted to write memos rather than a pitch deck. This is not a common thing to do. Around 5 startups have done so, and I think the only public example is CapitalX (see in the collection).

About writing memos

Packy wrote:

A venture capital fund is kind of like a startup. New fund managers (General Partners, or GPs) put together a deck (or in my case, a memo) highlighting the types of companies they’re planning to invest in, and how they are uniquely positioned to invest in the very best of that type of company, and they go out to pitch investors (Limited Partners, or LPs) on how that will translate into above-average returns.

In a traditional PR announcement, this is the part where a journalist would say, “McCormick plans to invest in technology companies across many stages of their life, and believes that his ability to help companies tell their stories will help him get access to deals (we’re skeptical, although founders may be attracted to Not Boring’s audience of 60k readers).” Or something like that. Fair, but not particularly compelling.

Instead of trying to boil it down to a pithy one-liner, I’m going to just share the actual memo that I wrote and shared with all of my potential LPs, lightly redacted and heavily annotated with commentary and clarification on certain ideas, examples, and terms.

Not Boring Capital Fund 1 Memo

Fund 1, LP Update 1 – Q2 2021

He shared an LP update which is rare to see, so enjoy reading.

Fund 2

You can see fund 2 here:

Not Boring Fund 2

Fund 3

There is no deck shared yet, but Packy wrote:

• $30 million Fund with a hard cap at $50 million.
• Updated strategy more concentrated, early stage, Hard Startups, new team members.
• Early Fund III Investments in biotech, energy, education, web3, and supply chain alongside Lux, a16z, Thrive, Sequoia, Greylock, 8VC, and more.
• Backed by many of the same excellent LPs as Funds I & II.
• Opening the Fund to accredited Not Boring readers.

In the reading list below you can link to his full post.

Supporting reading

• Introducing Not Boring Capital– This is a fab rear as one would expect!
• Announcing Not Boring Capital Fund III –  A $30 million Fund to invest in Hard Startups and tell their stories

Deck collection

You can see all the other venture capital pitch decks in this collection  by smacking the button below:

VC Pitch Decks