Obvious Ventures, the firm co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has raised a fifth fund, and this one, just like its predecessors, comes with a “fun” number: $360,360,360.
“We invest in the frontiers of math and science and physics, and we like to celebrate math in our fund numbers as well,” James Joaquin (pictured far right), the firm’s co-founder and managing director, told TechCrunch.
The firm’s first fund was $123,456,789, and the second was $191,919,191 (a palindromic number that reads the same forward and backwards). The third was $271,828,182 (which mathematicians and engineers instantly recognize as e, or Euler’s number), while the fourth fund, announced in mid-2022, continued the tradition as another palindrome at $355,111,553.
If you haven’t guessed it by now, the meaning of Obvious Ventures newest fund size is a little less about geeky math and more about the firm’s investing philosophy. Twelve years into its journey, Obvious says the figure represents a full-circle perspective on its three broad focus areas: planetary health, human health, and economic health.
“We love the metaphor of taking a 360-degree view in each of those areas,” Joaquin said. “You have to be a student of the past to understand what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.”
What’s working for the firm, according to Joaquin, is keeping its fund sizes small enough so that a single investment, if it becomes a durable public company, has the opportunity to return the entire fund. Joaquin likely placed an emphasis on durability in part because Obvious Venture’s initial winners, Beyond Meat, reached a market capitalization of over $14 billion shortly after its 2019 IPO, but had fallen to below a billion by late 2022.
Still, Joaquin says the firm has seen meaningful cash distributions to limited partners from all of its core funds, and it boasts several companies with successful public-market exits. In 2015, Obvious Ventures invested in the satellite imagery company Planet Labs, which went public via a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued …