2024 Reflections and review
Building Acadian Ventures Fund II.
The festive season in 2023 was significantly more hectic for Acadian Ventures than this one has been. We were in the final push to get our Fund II fundraising over the line, so the last few days of December were filled with docusign cheer. We got it done, raising 30 million. Jason covered the details here.
I’m now enjoying a bit of “do very little” time. Family time and forest walks with the walking queen.
AI dominated the VC conversation in 2024, and I spent a chunk of my time learning more about how it actually works. I went back to University and read the DipAI at Oxford. Details here, here, here and here. I’ve met some brilliant, lovely people along the way, and I’m more equipped to assess AI investments, its impact on our investment thesis and how our portfolio companies can apply AI effectively. More importantly, I’m clear how little I actually know about AI. It has been a year of learning. I now have a final assignment to write, and I’ll be analysing one of our portfolio companies.
It turns out that December 2024 has been a very active month for capital deployment at Acadian. Announcements to come shortly, once the all the paperwork is over the line.
The year has sped by.
In June we got many of our founders and limited partners together in San Francisco for what will be an annual event. The community that is developing around our firm is rather special. The event was a great vindication of what we are building from our LPs and our founders. A special thanks to our LPs, founders and friends of the firm for attending. We have bigger plans for our 2025 event.
Over the year, we attended several industry events (but fewer than many of VC peers seem to do). Jason went to HR Transform and HR Tech in Vegas. I attended Unleash, spoke at HR Tech Europe, at the German PMK, and at Encota’s event in Istanbul. Jason and I met up at Slush in Helsinki. Jason, David and I met up in Ireland, where we did a bit of world domination planning. I also popped over to New York and New Jersey, meeting up with founders and several LPSs.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get better at event networking and pre-planning meetings for these events.
Jason and Jackson (our summer intern) knocked it out of the park with the Future of Work 100, It is an excellent factual examination of the market, if you haven’t read it, you should.
Jason publishes a quarterly newsletter, and it provides a detailed overview of our investments by quarter. If you don’t subscribe, please do via the Acadian website.
You’ll find mentions of all the investments in the newsletter. The deal that got the most attention was the Techwolf Series B. It was fascinating to see how the round came together, details here. We announced investments in Fora, Squarepeg, Ezra, datascalehr. We have also several unannounced investments, details to follow in the New Year. Compa, Worky, OysterHR, Workpay and Kombo all did significant funding rounds.
My favourite journal article: Felin and Holweg. Theory Is All You Need: AI, Human Cognition, and Decision Making. I blogged about it here.
My favourite podcast episode: Harry Stebbings interviewing Alain De Botton. I think I’ve read everything Alain has written. He makes philosophy accessible and practical. Harry’s interviewing skills are top notch.
My favourite regular online read: Gianni Giacomelli- I learn something from every post he does. I hope he writes a book.
My favourite non-fiction work: Tom Chivers: Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World. Best book on AI I’ve read, and I have read a lot of them.
My favourite album: The Cure: Songs of a Lost World. Robert Smith’s lyrics and melodies were important to me in my early 20s, and he has somehow managed to stay true to his legacy yet create something relevant, fresh and new.
My favourite new (to me) band: English Teacher.
My dumbest move: Crashing my bicycle on the way to the Crash Test Dummies concert. Go figure.
I’ve blogged vaguely consistently through the year. Here are a couple of my favourite posts. I plan to continue this in 2025, hopefully more consistently and a little less vaguely.
I don’t really do prediction posts, but I will write about where we are looking to invest in 2025. I suppose that is a form of prediction, but with skin in the game.
I’ll leave you with a couple of tunes, as I usually do.
English Teacher:
The Cure: Endsong.