London-based podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings announced today his third fund totalling $400m, which will be split between $125m for seed investments and $275m for Series A cheques into tech companies. The fund is a big step up in size from his last pair of funds raised in 2021, at $140m.
Stebbings, who runs the popular 20VC podcast on which he interviews two high-profile founders and investors each week, has three investment partners working alongside him on the fund of the same name, along with a 13-person media team. The first fund’s portfolio includes AI-powered sales tools startup 11x, social app BeReal, AI model startup Poolside and equity management platform Ledgy.
The new $400m fund is backed by existing institutional LPs including the investment company of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Horsley Bridge and RIT Capital Partners, as well as some 40 tech entrepreneurs, including founders from Canva, Atlassian, Deliveroo, UiPath, Spotify, and Vinted. GPs from firms including Benchmark, Coatue, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and Accel also wrote cheques. Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner also invested.
20VC has no sector focus — and will only lead deals. The $125m seed fund writes cheques of $500k-$5m, and the $275m Series A fund writes cheques of $5-25m. Half of the portfolio will be in Europe, half in the US.
That contact book
Every week Stebbings meets two new LPs, he tells Sifted, using a trick learnt from the 2,750 interviews he’s conducted for his podcast.
“I learnt this from the podcast: At the end of each show, I’d say ‘I loved this… Who are three other journalists/founders/investors I should speak to?... Would you mind introducing me?”
That means every week he has two LP conversations, gets two more introductions from each, and has six names to add to his CRM, he says.
He also asks for three personal references from his podcast guests (few of which, he says, he conducts himself) — which means he can have “calls with multi-million dollar founders because I’ve got to do the reference”.
The investment team
Stebbings says one of the biggest concerns LPs had about investing in the new fund was how much time he had to commit to it. Thanks to his 13-person media team, Stebbings says he spends around 20% of his time on the podcast, and 80% on the fund. (“I do work seven days per week,” he says.)
On the investment side, Stebbings has grown the firm to help spend that $400m: as Sifted reported earlier this year, Stebbings brought on former Eurazeo investor Alexandre Dewez, who left at the end of August, as a partner. 20VC also confirmed that former DST Global principal Paul Bonnet joined the new fund as general partner. Kieran Hill has also been a seed partner at 20VC since 2021.
The firm also has three sub-funds, which specialise in sales, growth and product run by operators and professionals in those fields to source deals.
Each of those sub-funds has $5m to invest, writing $100k cheques at pre-seed and seed. Between them, they’ve done 30 deals in the past 15 months, of which nine have been followed on by the core 20VC fund.
The sub-funds hold a weekly investment committee meeting — on which Stebbings sits as an advisor — but have freedom to make their own investment decisions.
The operators who manage those funds, who include Spotify's CPO and CTO Gustav Söderström, OpenAI’s head of enterprise sales Maggie Hott, Shopify's former Luc Levesque and LinkedIn's CPO Tomer Cohen are general partners in 20VC’s legal entity, says Stebbings — and take all of the carry from those funds.
“My job is to find great founders before anyone else,” says Stebbings — “and I want to see the spinouts from their companies”.
There are no plans to expand the investment team further, says Stebbings. “Politics is a killer. I don’t want associates, and it’s super important to me that everyone can write cheques.”
Stebbings is the only partner with a GP commit, and says he channels most of the profits of the media business (“20VC makes millions a year”) into the fund.
The media team
Six people in the media team work on short-form video, which attracts 15m views per month on TikTok and YouTube, says Stebbings. “The portfolio loves us,” he says. “We’re like an outsourced media agency for them.”
The media team work on three main things for portfolio companies: helping with hiring (“we get the three best execs at a company to record a 20 second segment on why a candidate should join a company”); landing customers; and announcing fundraises (“in a cool way”).
Note: This article was updated on October 15, 2024 at 12pm with further quotes following an interview with Stebbings
