Announcing PWV Fund I
New achievement! Preston-Werner Ventures (through which I did my angel investing) has become PWV™ and I’m raising a venture fund targeting $100M to lead pre-seed and seed rounds in today’s most exciting software- and AI-driven companies.
Over the past thirteen years, I’ve invested in over 175 amazing startups, including some of the earliest checks in Stripe, Cursor, Netlify, Snyk, Supabase, PlanetScale, Retool, and so many more. I feel tremendously lucky to count myself as a part of the journey of such talented and driven founders and teams.
But finding and funding the best startups is hard to do alone. So three years ago, I joined forces with my good friends David Price and David Thyresson (DT), and together we took my angel investing practices and leveled them up across every metric. More deal flow, deeper diligence, and purposeful community engagement for our founders.
DT and David are both entrepreneurs at heart, having shipped, scaled, and exited on repeat. We know what it’s like to create something from nothing and envision a better future for the users of our creations. And we know how hard that is and how much the right financial partner can increase the probability of success, and how much the wrong partner can make you wish you’d never tried in the first place.
At PWV we’re building the venture firm we wish we’d had early in our startup journeys:
Founder Focused. We succeed in our mission by helping founders succeed in theirs. We love coming in at the seed stage because it’s where our real-world experience and advice can best accelerate timelines, increase founder confidence, and help avoid costly mistakes. We believe that a company is only as good as its team, and a team is only as good as its founders. That’s why we do everything in our power to keep founders happy and focused.
Community Oriented. Our goal is to be the smartest money a founder ever takes. Part of those smarts is realizing that a community can go farther than an individual, which is why we connect founders with each other through our events, programs, and platforms. With over 150 active companies of various maturities in our extended (13 year) portfolio, the pool of knowledge available to our founders is vast. And when startups learn from each other, every stakeholder wins.
Networked. Seed stage is just the beginning of the journey. When it’s time to raise that Series A and go for growth, founders need connections. Through my past at GitHub and many years of deliberate networking, David, DT, and I have fostered amazing relationships with the world’s very best growth-stage investors. There’s nothing better than a warm intro, and nothing that makes us happier than to make them for our portfolio companies when the time is right.
My goal, with every PWV investment, is to back ideas that truly create a differentiated future. Ideas that change the fundamental rules of what’s possible. Ideas that both embrace technology and celebrate people as the most important factor in the better future we want to build.
Ideas start with founders. Founders start with PWV.
If you’re a visionary technology founder looking to raise your pre-seed or seed, we want to hear from you. Please apply at pwv.com/apply.
If you’d like to learn more about investing in PWV Fund I, please email investors@pwv.com.
Tom Preston-Werner
Cofounder of
GitHub,
Chatterbug
tom@mojombo.com
