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Former Spark Capital senior associate Rob Go and former Point Judith Capital principal Lee Hower are working with Venrock Vice President David Beisel on forming a new venture capital fund to make early-stage investments, other venture capital investors familiar with the trio’s plans have confirmed.
Go announced in a blog post late last month he would leave Boston-based Spark Capital to start a new venture. He didn’t elaborate. A week later, Hower announced he would leave his role as principal at Point Judith to start a “new stealth project” in the Internet industry.
Neither has discussed his plans publicly, but in a May 3 email to venture industry colleagues, Hower described his new project as a “seed stage investing initiative with some co-founders.” He has not identified those co-founders, but two people with knowledge of their project confirmed the two are working together.
“We’re still in the very earliest phases of getting this project off the ground, but I’m deeply excited about collaborating with this team and pursuing what we believe is a compelling market opportunity,” Hower wrote in his email. He is still personally invested in Point Judith’s fund, he said, and will maintain a role as a venture partner, retaining board seats on a few portfolio companies.
Beisel has not announced plans to leave his role at Venrock, but the two sources also confirmed that he is working with Go and Hower. Beisel and Go, reached separately by phone, declined to comment. Hower did not return an email message seeking comment.
Beisel, Go and Hower have all been involved in previous initiatives aimed at seed-stage startups. Beisel is the founder of Web Innovators Group, a quarterly meeting held in Cambridge at which early-stage Internet and mobile startups offer slide presentations and demos to an audience of technologists and investors. In March 2009, Go helped launch Start@Spark, a seed funding initiative at Spark Capital. Since before his change in roles at Point Judith, Hower has been backing early-stage companies independently, as an angel investor, writing checks to Providence, R.I. social payments startup Swipely Inc. and the Cambridge Twitter app store startup Oneforty Inc.
Start@Spark is still accepting applications, according to the firm’s website. Spark invested through the program in Boulder, Colo.-based real-time search software maker OneRiot Inc. in August, but it is not clear how many other startups the program may have funded.
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