Twenty nine year-old Mike Brown, who started by investing Richard Branson’s money in the Virgin Group and later became a co-founder of AOL, left his job to launch Bowery Capital, an independent VC firm. The firm, based in New York City, showed a début fund of 33 million in capital commitments. With this, Brown has become one of the youngest persons to open a venture capital firm.
The last year involved a lot of hard work for Brown as he travelled throughout the country, from one city to another to meet various wealthy individuals. He pitched the idea of Bowery Capital to these potential limited partners, many of whom were total strangers and lacked any deep knowledge of the tech industry. These meeting paid off as each limited partner invested around a million dollars. Brown will start as a sole partner and two of his AOL colleagues, Nic Pouls and Keegan Forte will join in as employees. Bowery says that as per his expectations, the fund will be used to back around 25 companies, initially starting via various seed and series A rounds. This will involve sums of around $ 250,000 to $3 million on each. Seed investments usually are the first money put into a startup venture.
As per Brown’s investment theory, the workers of the core digital world are moving up the corporate ladder into higher decision making positions. These people will prefer the development of newer technologies over the relatively older ones. This will result in a doubling of the figure spend in technological developments in the coming decade. Spending on both internal and external technological spending will rise for technological enterprises. Thus Bowery Capital will have the opportunity to invest in the early level technological and marketing initiatives within large firms.
Brown expects to have his hands full after the initial investments. His personal investments will also be added into Bowery Ventures accounts. It remains to be seen how Brown’s venture performs during the coming days. Starting up a venture capital firm by a young entrepreneur is not something entirely new. Previously, Joshua Kushner, who was aged twenty seven, started a fund named Thrive Capital and has since then invested in various companies, among which are Instagram and Groupme.