Alvin Ashley

Foundation Capital

Foundation Capital was founded in 1995. As an early-stage venture capital firm, our fintech, enterprise, and consumer investments have reinvented industries and defined new markets. For over a quarter of a century—through boom and bust, prosperity or calamity—Foundation Capital has endured, evolved, and thrived, with over $3B assets under management, 34 IPOs and ICOs, and 80+ acquisitions to our name. Building companies is in our bones. We back individuals who want to nudge the world ahead in some way, using a transformative business as their fulcrum. Great companies, like Apple or Amazon or Netflix, aren't formed from code and corporate charters. They're built on a foundation of dreams and desires; raised up through struggle and sacrifice. For such companies to succeed, the people who start and lead them have to want success badly. It has to come from the deepest part of them—a hunger to create something consequential, something lasting; a need to prove themselves, whether out of a sense of mission, or a yearning for significance, or a heart full for disobedience. We look for people who believe—even if they would never speak it out loud—that the purpose of life is to be briefly extraordinary. We think that since the beginning of invention, humanity has advanced because the remarkable have pushed us forward. Because select women and men of their times have dared to think different, to build it better, to do what's never been done. Across the ages, we've had many names for these people. Today, at Foundation Capital: we call them founders.