Second Annual Summit at La Jolla Athenaeum
In April 2024, I had the honor of hosting over 40 LPs, founders, and coinvestors at the La Jolla Athenaeum for our second annual summit. The purpose of our Annual Summit (AGM) is to bring together LPs and founders to highlight the growing Behind Genius portfolio and provide an update on our progress and partnerships.
At Behind Genius Ventures, we seek to back the best technical storytellers building the future of work and play at their earliest stages across the US & Canada. Since its launch in 2021, Behind Genius has backed 43 companies including Coastal Carbon, Coast, Hearth Display, and Break Sports across a $5M Fund I & $8.9M Fund II. At this year’s AGM, we highlighted six portfolio founders, announced Behind Genius Fund II, and shared our vision for the future.
We’re a generalist firm investing across the future of work and play. The diversity of sectors we invest in was represented across our presenting founders solving problems across climate, sports, elder care, education, the creator economy and of course - applied AI.
Elder Care: Dhaval Patel, CEO of Lotus, spent 8 years at Apple. He was also born with twisted knees, and his frustration with turning the lights off at night led him to a question - If he, an Apple engineer with 37 patents, didn’t have smart home tech to assist him, what was happening in the homes of the 72 million Americans who have disabilities? He spent nine months interviewing people in their homes to determine what problems they were facing, and invented Lotus - a wearable ring using infrared technology & a magnetic switch cover being used to increase agency in elder care facilities.
Education & Applied AI: While helping his children with their homework during COVID, ProfJim CEO Dr Deepak Sekar was incredibly disappointed by their Zoom classes. After selling his last robotics company to DoorDash, Deepak began to tinker with early versions of AI to create better online learning. In his presentation, Deepak demonstrated ProfJim creating a full and interactive lesson plan taught by an AI avatar using a simple prompt in 30 seconds & discussed how their technology is being used in school districts and corporate learning environments throughout the country.
Climate & Applied AI: Coastal Carbon cofounder Thomas Storwick wanted to be a seaweed farmer after graduating with his masters in chemical engineering from UWaterloo. But after interviewing 250 seaweed farmers, he realized they all shared an enormous problem - they couldn’t see at scale what was going on underwater. He teamed up with his now-cofounder Kelly Zheng, then working on her PhD in applied machine learning for satellite data at Waterloo to build Coastal Carbon. Thomas’s presentation focused on their vision to create foundational multimodal AI models for the natural world, starting with seaweed. Coastal Carbon embodies a core investment area for us - a “clipboard company,” a company solving a problem for an industry still reliant on clipboards. Patented underwater clipboards in this case.
Sports: BreakSports is the largest recreational sports booking marketplace in the US, and COO Kim Patel did not shy away from sharing the impressive metrics they’ve been able to achieve - 160k+ unique users, partnerships with Walmart and Visa, expansion into golf after huge success with racket sports. In addition, the usage data they collect and relay back to landowners of these courts enables them to make better business decisions. Post-COVID, our approach to consumer investments has been guided by the tongue in cheek phrase “touch grass, make friends” - and Break Sports is a shining example.
Creator Economy: In the saturated creator economy, two things drive outcomes: results and deep data. Kristen Wiley, the CEO of Statusphere shared her frustrations through her journey as a CMO of a microinfluencer agency & an influencer herself, which resulted in her creating Statusphere, a leading consumer to consumer marketing platform. Trusted by over 400 brands including Unilever, Cosmopolitan, OPI, and Conair, Statusphere allows brands to easily scale micro influencer campaigns with personalized fulfillment, AI matching, and custom reporting.
SMS Marketing: As the youngest sales hire ever at Twilio, Textla CEO Luke Brickman came to deeply understand the problem small and medium businesses faced when trying to set up their marketing. He presented on what he’s learned building Textla, leading the charge for affordable SMS marketing for millions of small and medium businesses.
All of the founders shared a bit about their experience working with Behind Genius Ventures, and the phrase that stuck out again and again was that we are a “warm and supportive” firm who “punch above our weight” when it comes to helping these companies grow.
Partnership Initiatives:
Our investment associate, Andy Sran, presented on our expanding partnership initiatives with Google Cloud, NVIDIA, and AWS. These partnerships are instrumental in saving our portfolio founders upwards of $250k, adding significant value beyond our investment. One of our values at Behind Genius is “punch above our weight,” and I believe the partnership initiatives spearheaded by Andy speak to this value.
Emerging GP Landscape:
Youngrok Kim of GREE shared insightful perspectives on the emerging manager landscape & the challenges involved in raising a Fund II in this marco environment. He shared more about why GREE invested in Behind Genius, highlighted in this recent Fast Company article:
“Work and play will be very different, generation by generation,” says Youngrok Kim, the founding partner of the GREE LP Fund, which has invested with Behind Genius. “I really look to [Doherty] to find some new business models and companies in those spaces.”
Fund II Launch Announcement:
I had the pleasure of announcing our $8.9M Fund II, anchored by Cendana Capital, with significant participation from MIXI, GREE, and Dropbox cofounder Arash Ferdowsi. The story behind Fund II was featured in Fortune shortly after the AGM, marking a significant milestone for our firm.
Vision for the Future
Our vision for the future is Behind Genius Ventures is to build the next generation venture firm focused on backing the best technical storytellers. We support the growth of our portfolio through community events and content efforts, and are deeply rooted in our values:
1. punch above our weight
2. simple not easy
3. principles first
4. take creativity seriously
5. show our work
Event Evolution and Feedback Integration:
Building on the success of our first AGM (you can read about it here) and focusing on feedback from last year, we made several enhancements:
Founder Focus: We placed a greater emphasis on highlighting the 14 founders who traveled to San Diego, hosting them in our Founder Houses, and organizing a Founder Offsite day.
Including Core Community: This year, I opened up our AGM from just our investors and portfolio companies to include some of our coinvestors and community, which was wonderful. Also a very special treat to have my parents in attendance!!
Memorable Experiences: Our investment associate, Andy, suggested an ocean kayaking adventure. Watching dolphins play as the sun set was an incredibly memorable experience and a perfect conclusion to our summit.
Thank you to Charie Juaneza for photography, Girard Gourmet for lunch, our wonderful venue hosts at the La Jolla Athenaeum, my SDSU venture capital team for volunteering, our Behind Genius Ventures team, LPs and founders for attending. The success of this year’s summit is a testament to the strength of our community and the continued growth of our portfolio. I look forward to many more successful AGMs in the future as Behind Genius grows.
