LA Venture: 137 Ventures’ Justin Fishner-Wolfson on Investing via Secondary Shares

Minnie Ingersoll
Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast. Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of $100M+ Shift.com, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google. Minnie studied Computer Science at Stanford and has an MBA from HBS. She recently moved back to L.A. after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California. In her space time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson

On this week's episode of the L.A. Venture Podcast, hear from Justin Fishner-Wolfson, founder and managing partner at 137 Ventures — a provider of customized liquidity solutions for founders, investors and early private tech companies.


Fishner-Wolfson is so focused investing in young tech companies because he learned a valuable lesson early on as an investor at Founders Fund, the venture firm that invested in SpaceX in 2008. He was also an early investor in Spotify, alongside Sean Parker.

Today, 137 Ventures manages more than $1.5 billion in assets.

Fishner-Wolfson was a pioneer of this model of buying secondary shares to get founders liquidity and he's been very successful at it (with a portfolio that includes SpaceX, Wish, Flexport, Gusto and many others). He says that he aims to invest $10 to $20 million in funds into 10 to 15 companies a year.

Today, he says his original thesis that companies would stay private longer and that that would create more need for earlier liquidity options has very much played out.

"We have some view that over an extended period of time that the business is going to play out and people are going to recognize that there is really great long-term value there," he says.

Fishner-Wolfson also explains the differences of being a broker, as opposed to being a buyer, and how his model has a number of structural advantages, including tax advantages.

"We definitely structure transactions ... as convertible debt, which tends to be much more tax efficient for founders," he says. "It allows them to maintain voting, control the shares — things that tend to matter. You can avoid repricing the foreign aid, I think, if you do things the right way. So the structure matters."

dot.LA Audience Engagement Editor Luis Gomez contributed to this post.

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Starships Were Meant To Fly: Astrolab's New Jeep-Sized Rover Gets a Lift from SpaceX

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
Starships Were Meant To Fly: Astrolab's New Jeep-Sized Rover Gets a Lift from SpaceX
Photo by Samson Amore

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Local Los Angeles-area startup Astrolab Inc. has designed a new lunar vehicle called FLEX, short for Flexible Logistics and Exploration Rover. About the size of a Jeep Wrangler, FLEX is designed to move cargo around the surface of the moon on assignment. It’s a bit larger than NASA’s Mars rovers, like Perseverance, but as it’s designed for transport and mobility rather than precision measurement, it can travel much faster, at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour across the lunar surface.

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Meet the Creator Economy’s Version of LinkedIn

Kristin Snyder

Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

Meet the Creator Economy’s Version of LinkedIn
Creatorland

This is the web version of dot.LA’s daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene.

LinkedIn hasn’t caught on with Gen Z—in fact, 96% rarely use their existing account.

Considering 25% of young people want to be full-time content creators and most influencers aren’t active on LinkedIn, traditional networking sites aren’t likely to meet these needs.

Enter CreatorLand.

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https://twitter.com/ksnyder_db

This Week in ‘Raises’: Total Network Services Gains $9M, Autio Secures $5.9M

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

This Week in ‘Raises’: Total Network Services Gains $9M, Autio Secures $5.9M
This Week in ‘Raises’:

It has been a slow week in funding, but a local decentralized computing network managed to land $9 million to accelerate deployment of its new product called Universal Communication Identifier (UCID™). Another local company that secured capital included Kevin Costner’s location-based audio storytelling platform and the funding will go toward expanding the app’s content library and expanding into additional regions in the United States.

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