E984: Vice Ventures Founding Partner Catharine Dockery raised $25M to invest in vices: marijuana, sextech, gambling, alcohol, vaping; shares insights on hacking her way into VC through cold emails & a strong investment thesis, capitalizing on early markets hungry for investment
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2019
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
4:29 How Catharine came up with Vice Ventures
7:00 What was the response when Catharine began raising her first fund?
7:19 What does harm-reduction mean for Vice Ventures?
9:21 Getting Marc Andreessen to invest in her fund
13:32 Strangest emails Catharine has received since starting Vice Ventures
16:01 Investing in cannabis
20:15 Investing in psychedelics
26:33 Investing in gambling
31:16 Who are Catharine's typical LPs?
32:15 Investing in alcohol
39:33 Investing in sextech
44:06 Vice Ventures strong thesis against harming others
47:22 Is Vice Ventures hiring?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This Week in Start-Up's is brought to you by Walker Corporate Law, a boutique law firm specializing |
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| 0:38.8 | Apply for the next launch accelerator cohort. |
| 0:41.6 | Applications are due October 14th. Learn more and apply at |
| 0:45.6 | launch accelerator.co. Hey everybody welcome to this week in startups. I'm your |
| 0:50.5 | host Jason Calicanis. I'm an angel investor here in the Silicon Valley. I invest in I don't know this year |
| 0:55.8 | 2018 companies pretty crazy I got an investment company of 15 it's called launch you can |
| 1:01.5 | visit launch. CO and see all the different things we do. |
| 1:04.8 | We got an accelerator, we've got the syndicate.com, and once in a while I'll have other |
| 1:10.7 | investors on to explain their thesis on how they invest. Some folks |
| 1:16.5 | invest by stage. I happen to be one of them. I invest in companies when they have |
| 1:21.6 | three or four people that's called kind of the seed stage. |
| 1:25.8 | And then maybe I'll participate in the Series A when they're growing and they're at three or four |
| 1:29.8 | million in revenue. |
| 1:30.8 | Other people do mid-stage, Series B and Series C financing, we count those up like letters, |
| 1:36.5 | ABC-D-E, all the way to maybe an IPO. And there is no specific signs to that it's just sequential lettering and then there's |
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