Lee Hower

Co-founder & Partner NextView Ventures, previously LinkedIn co-founder and foot soldier in PayPal Mafia. Obsessed with the big picture.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

I keep seeing various share counts for SpaceX (~13.08B sh), which at the $135/sh IPO price yields something like $1.77T mkt cap.

Somebody tell @elonmusk or the CFO to issue a couple more shares and make it a round $1.776T mkt cap for the US bicentennial... 🚀🇺🇸💵

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Robots are cool. Robots actually delivered to customers + generating revenue is cooler 🤖 💵

[Jon Miller Schwartz @JonMSchwartz]

4 new OP1s coming online at a customer site. Pretty rad

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Bravo. Exciting new opportunity for @navierboat

[Sampriti Bhattacharyya @sampritibh]

So THIS happened.

Super excited to work with Dubai based JIH and its Maldives affiliate HARIM on our most ambitious project yet!

[Lee Hower @leehower]

The number of companies closing seed financing is down nearly 40% from the peak in 2021 and 2022.

[Mike Annunziata @nunzi46]

There’s one metric I watch to predict what will happen in venture markets

It’s not dollars deployed.

It’s not average valuation.

It’s the NUMBER and YoY GROWTH RATE of startups funded in a given year

Case in point…from ‘95-‘99, number of startups funded nearly 3x’d

We know how that ended…

Great numbers of startups create an unsustainable dispersion of talent and growth capital that bottlenecks companies getting to large outcomes

So where are we today? Round count is actually DOWN from ‘24-25. Below even 2019 levels.

Makes you think…🤔

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Super cool to see an F4 car with WHOOP livery at Silverstone UK
@willahmed @WHOOP

[Lee Hower @leehower]

I look forward to this every year, and our gathering a couple weeks back with founders was wonderful. Thanks to all who were present

[NextView @NextViewVC]

Earlier this month we wrapped up NextView's 3rd annual Founder Retreat in Sonoma County's Russian River Valley 🌲⛺️🛶

Same format as always. Same goal as always.

Founders getting real and connecting with each other.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@zebulgar I was about to say, pretty sure there was an Apple series which answered this question…

[Danny Deraney @DannyDeraney]

Every year, I share this video of French caretakers who take sand from Omaha Beach in Normandy, and scrub them into the letters to give them the gold coloring.

They do this for all 9,386 US soldiers who died.

France also gave us this land as American soil. #MemorialDayWeekend

[Lee Hower @leehower]

This is very good.

The individual points may be reasonably well understood by those who have been building or investing in hard tech for awhile. But taken as a whole, it is particularly thoughtful (as usual for Leo).

[Leo Polovets @lpolovets]

Deep tech startups aren't just harder versions of software startups. After 10 years investing in sw & 5 in deep tech, I wrote a post about their key differences.

Core theme: what makes deep tech harder upfront also makes the winners much harder to copy.

https://t.co/XeDUOVAe5Y

[Lee Hower @leehower]

NVIDIA just reported >$82B in revenue for Q1 2026.

To put that in historical context for other megacap tech, it's only within the last 10-15yrs that companies first exceeded that on a *full year* basis.

Microsoft (2014 - $87B)
Alphabet (2016 - $90B)
Apple (2011 - $108B)

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Anthropic exp $10.9B Q2 revenue, up from $4.8B in Q1, and $559M of operating profit for the Q.

Compute is 56 cents per dollar of revenue, lower than I expected.

Q2 projection:

$10.9B revenue
-$6.1B compute
-$2.7B sales & marketing
-$1.5B other costs
=$559M operating income

[NextView @NextViewVC]

Congrats to NextView Partner @stephpalmeri, named to @BusinessInsider's Seed 40 — a list recognizing "the women whose early bets have helped shape the startup ecosystem."

"Lists like this are fun, but the real story is always the founders." - @stephpalmeri

More below 👇

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@litcapital Must be the jeans

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@navierboat @sampritibh I remember that day! Navier had indeed come a very long way since then

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@gRamblings I always taxi from SFO to city and sometimes in the city

[Ho Nam @honam]

This IPO illustrates the power of an individual partner over the brand name firm in VC. Pierre Lamond was a partner of both Sequoia and Khosla. But instead of those firms backing Cerebras, it was Eclipse (the firm he joined at the age of 84) that backed this little known chip company, multiple times, in the early years. What a way to wrap up a career (he was born in 1930, same year as Buffett).

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Love this

[Will Ahmed @willahmed]

engraved on every circuit board

[Lee Hower @leehower]

That time of year

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Happy Cinco de LinkedIn!

23 years ago today (5/5/03) we launched the LinkedIn website publicly. We hit 500K users and took this team photo <12mo later.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@bznotes Indeed. There's a whole layer of fleet management, w/ physical assets + at least some humans, that will be required to enable the AV future 😉