Baseline Ventures is a

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

investment firm that focuses on

seed A seed is an embryonic plant enclosed in a protective outer covering, along with a food reserve. The formation of the seed is a part of the process of reproduction in seed plants, the spermatophytes, including the gymnosperm and angiospe ...

and growth-stage investments in technology companies. The company was the first seed investor in

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

, an early investor of

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

and has been called "one of Silicon Valley's most successful — and smallest — investment firms" by ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

''. It is headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. They also do commercial representation of some athletes. The company's founder and Managing Partner, Steve Anderson, was recognized on '' Fortune's'' 2012 list of "50 Businesspeople of the Year" and included on the ''Forbes''

Midas List The ''Forbes'' Midas list is the annual ranking by ''Forbes'' magazine of the most influential and best-performing venture capital investors. Described by Kara Swisher as the "Oscars for venture capitalists in tech," the Midas List uses parameter ...

from 2012 to 2020.

History

Anderson founded Baseline in 2006. He previously worked for

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

and

Starbucks Starbucks Corporation is an American multinational chain of coffeehouses and roastery reserves headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It is the world's largest coffeehouse chain. As of November 2021, the company had 33,833 stores in 80 c ...

. Anderson has a

Master of Business Administration A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

and has invested in companies founded by Stanford alumni including

Kevin Systrom Kevin Systrom (born December 30, 1983) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Instagram, the world's largest photo sharing website, along with Mike Krieger. Systrom was included on the list of America's Richest Entrep ...

and

Mike Krieger Michel Krieger (born March 4, 1986) is a Brazilian-American entrepreneur and software engineer who co-founded Instagram along with Kevin Systrom, and served as its CTO. Instagram expanded from a few million users to 1 billion monthly active users ...

;

Katrina Lake Katrina Lake (born December 24, 1982) is an American businesswoman who is the Founder and former CEO of Stitch Fix, a fashion-based subscription service. Stitch Fix was established in 2011 in San Francisco and went public in 2017. In 2017, Lake ...

Stitch Fix Stitch Fix is an online personal styling service in the United States and United Kingdom. It uses recommendation algorithms and data science to personalize clothing items based on size, budget and style. The company was founded in 2011 and had a ...

; and

Jeff Seibert Jeff Seibert (born July 27, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known for co-founding Crashlytics, which in a little over a year was acquired by Twitter for over $100 million in 2013 (later valued at $259.5 million at ...

Crashlytics Crashlytics was a Boston, Massachusetts-based software company founded in May 2011 by entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert. Crashlytics helps collecting, analyzing and organizing app crash reports. Its main product is a software develop ...

. Baseline Ventures also represents some athletes such as

Mayank Agarwal Mayank Anurag Agarwal (born 16 February 1991)
ESPN Cricinfo. Retrieved 2012-02-01. is an Indian in ...

Lakshya Sen Lakshya Sen (born 16 August 2001) is an Indian badminton player. Sen is a former world junior no. 1. He has won gold medals at the 2018 Asian Junior Championships in the boys' singles and at the Summer Youth Olympics in the mixed team event. H ...

and Sneh Rana.

Acquisitions and investments

Baseline Ventures has invested in software and web companies that include

Weebly Weebly () is a web hosting service, headquartered in San Francisco. Weebly is a subsidiary of Block, Inc. History Weebly was founded in 2006 by Chief Executive Officer David Rusenko, Chief Technology Officer Chris Fanini, and former Chief Prod ...

, OMGPop,

ExactTarget Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a provider of digital marketing automation and analytics software and services. It was founded in 2000 under the name ExactTarget. The company filed for an IPO in 2007, but withdrew its filing two years later and rais ...

and

Heroku Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. One of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Java, ...

was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. Later that year, Baseline-backed OMGPop was acquired by

Zynga Zynga Inc. () is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its missio ...

for approximately $200 million.

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

acquired

for $212 million in 2010.

References

{{Reflist, 3

External links

Official site
Venture capital firms of the United States Financial services companies established in 2006