Nine years ago, Todd and Santo decided to start Spark Capital. The idea: to be the very best partner to entrepreneurs as they get their startup going. They asked me, Alex and Paul to join and by the summer of 2005 we were in business with our first fund.
Late last year, we announced our most recent fund, Spark 4 with a total of ~$1.4B under management. And our little company is growing up, from a bunch of guys over a shoe store to an expanded awesome team with offices in New York, Boston and soon in San Francisco.
The best part of all of this has been the founders we get to work with every day. From the early days we have seen them build insanely great products and companies at Tumblr, AdMeld, OMGOP, Adap.tv, Twitter, Oculus VR and others.
While we love early stage investing, we have observed a meaningful long term opportunity to also invest in venture growth companies within our existing areas of focus. Some of these companies will be backed by other venture firms in earlier rounds, some Spark will have invested in previously, and some may not have had any institutional financing.
But the key was finding a partner we could work with to help us with this complementary strategy.
That leads us to Jeremy Philips.
We have known Jeremy for many years. Jeremy has an amazing track record as an entrepreneur, a senior executive at News Corporation and a public CEO. He has also been a successful investor in a number of great companies and serves on the board of publicly held Trip Advisor. And he’s a terrific person and a very good friend.
Jeremy has a passion for the same investment areas we pursue at Spark but with an eye towards growth stage investments. So we decided to join forces.
I’m proud to announce we have raised Spark Growth, a new $375MM fund. Jeremy is now a general partner at Spark, focused exclusively on Spark Growth, and based in New York. Like the rest of us, he will travel anywhere in search of the best teams going after the most compelling opportunities.
Spark Growth will have a dedicated investment team, based in New York and San Francisco. We are in the process of building out that team, starting with hiring two associates based in New York.
Many thanks to our limited partners for your continued support. And a deep, heartfelt gratitude to the entrepreneurs in the Spark family. We would be nothing without you.