DVx Ventures is a company creation platform that builds companies from concept to scale.

DVx Ventures

We're hiring! Check out our portfolio job board, where you can learn about all the opportunities to build with DVx! Copy and paste the following link into your browser. https://lnkd.in/eNwhx279

DVx is on a mission to create a company that creates great companies.

We follow a repeatable process — defining a hypothesis, researching and testing it vigorously, assembling the world class team to build a product, iterating the solution to find product-market and go-to-market fit, and then hatching and scaling breakthrough businesses. We build companies primarily based on our own ideas and with our infrastructure and initial teams.  As such, we can grow businesses faster and have a much higher success rate.

We’ll Get There by… 

Obsessing over our customers — 
We build insanely great products that make our customers’ lives better. We provide a perfect customer experience - every time. We build diverse teams to ensure our products and services reflect the perspectives, experiences, and needs of all our potential customers.

Empowering our team of Experts — 
We attract best-in-class talent across a variety of disciplines, that share our mission, motivation, and sense of purpose, to form great teams. We give each other high trust and high agency. We speak directly to each other and are grateful for feedback. We are dynamic is how we place talent into new challenges and evolving opportunities across the portfolio. We will build a positive, motivating, high-performance culture.

Leading with a bias for Impact — 
We solve challenging problems at unprecedented speed. If we can’t find a way, we make a way and battle through, around and over obstacles. Our immediate reaction is to help and we default to “yes”.

We're #hiring a new Founding Head of Product in New York City Metropolitan Area. Apply today or share this post with your network.

📣 Today, we are thrilled to announce the full nationwide launch of our SaaS-based mobile service technology platform for auto dealers, making it available to all vehicle manufacturers and dealers in the United States. 📣 

The nationwide launch follows a successful limited launch to auto dealers in January. We also announced today that we closed on additional funding, bringing the total Curbee has raised externally to $12 million. The additional funding will fuel our expansion in the U.S. 

"I've been looking for a mobile service software solution to properly support our local customers for 15 years, and have reviewed many options," said @Brendan Harrington, President of Autobahn Fort Worth. “Curbee is the first solution that checks every proverbial box. We are really excited about what Curbee is doing."

Read the press release here: https://lnkd.in/e6nCm2ZS

Tesla’s earnings make one thing pretty clear: what’s bad for Tesla is good for the sector. 

The latest earnings numbers aren’t good for Tesla, but if you look closely, it’s a good sign for the EV market overall. EV demand continues - and now there is more competition in the sector, lower prices and better infrastructure. 

I joined Becky Quick to talk about the latest with EVs and how we should think about these new numbers. 

https://lnkd.in/eJTwPQUN

How much of success is hard work and how much of it is just sheer luck? 

It’s a question people always ask about successful people, and especially entrepreneurs. 

I truly believe it’s a combination of the two. Outsized success comes from working really hard and catching a few breaks. 

I’ve been lucky to have a career filled with many “good luck” moments, from enrolling in Don Frey’s class on entrepreneurship at Northwestern to Sheryl Sandberg introducing me to Elon. 

I chatted with Fortune about my career trajectory and the many people and events that have helped shape it.

An excellent interview on TechCrunch's Equity podcast with our CEO, Jon McNeill, discussing DVx -- our model, how we launch companies, and some of our outstanding portfolio companies, Cognition Controls and Cork 👏

We have a lot of ideas, but not all of them are good. 

One of the essential principles in running a hatch platform like DVx is being willing to admit when you’re wrong. In fact, it’s super necessary to kill early.  

It sounds counterintuitive, but we actually aim for this at DVx Ventures.  The principle is based on objectivity.  Kill early before pouring capital in and chasing something that won’t work.  

Sometimes, no matter how much you love an idea, when it meets the market, it doesn’t work. For example, an idea can be off a bit (which can be cured with iteration, so we keep going) or can be substituted (in which case we don’t keep going). Each of our ideas gets vetted rigorously up front, then we go right into a Product-Market fit test.   

A little while back I had an idea for a Yelp-like platform for professional help - like doctors, lawyers or mental health providers. I thought it would be cool for consumers to be able to find a highly-rated doctor or mental health professional online. 

We explored the idea but ultimately walked away from it. Here’s why: 
- Double-sided marketplace businesses are really hard to build (I know from my Lyft days that it’s really difficult to get a two-sided marketplace off of the ground and both sides need to see big value to be enticed to participate ) 
- The doctors, especially the good ones, don’t need demand. In fact, they don’t want it because they are already maxed out.  
- The TAM was $5B which wasn’t big enough to justify the complexity.

Another one of our early kills was a structured interviewing platform. Most execs admit that they wing it in interviews, and I can relate – I’ve relied on a core set of interview questions for years. But by creating more discipline and structure in the interview process, you can have a more valuable and less redundant process. Our idea was to have a set of questions across topic areas that drive success in the position, then have everyone follow a scorecard that ranks the candidates in the key success factors. This makes it easier to evaluate multiple candidates for the same role and reduces bias. 

Customers told us that was really appealing, so we built a prototype. What we found was unless the senior exec in the interview team followed the process, no one would.  And almost every CEO has their own version of interview hacks and unique questions. CEOs wouldn’t use it, and we couldn’t achieve product-market fit. So we pulled the plug early.  

VCs love to talk about our successes, but I think it’s just as important to talk about our failures. I’ve found that our investors and potential CEOs actually like to hear about the ideas we’ve scrapped because it gives them confidence that when we do launch something, we know it's a winning idea. 

By the way, both of those ideas were mine. Thank goodness for my partners.  Early kills are critical in our business.

Smartphones didn’t just change how we communicate, they changed how we live. E-commerce, the gig economy, and social media were all born from the masses adopting that tech. 

That's what we're looking at with EVs over the next decade. It’s not just about transportation - it's everything that touches our experience of getting from point A to point B. 

I chatted with Bloomberg about the second-order effects of EVs that we are thinking about DVx Ventures, with companies like Curbee and rEVo. 

https://lnkd.in/ee5MUr-k

The number one most important way to prepare for an IPO?

Make your number...repeatedly, predictably, and with quality.  

It's a principle you can start implementing regardless of your stage of business.

Jon McNeill, former President at Tesla, helped take Lyft public in 2019 as COO.

As of June 2024, a total of 76 companies have gone public on the US stock market. This represents an 11.76% increase compared to the same period in 2023, which saw 68 IPOs by this time.

#consumertech #ipo

Hiring is one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship. It’s not just about hiring good people, it’s hiring the right kind of people for the right roles. 

Something that comes up a lot for first-time founders is how to decide between hiring generalists vs. specialists. The reality is, you need both. It just depends on the role.

Here’s what I tell founders: 

For roles where the output will differentiate the company within the market, go the specialist route. These are often roles on your product and engineering teams, where you need people with certain hard skills that can’t be learned on the job. This is also something you want to look for in your sales team. If you’re in B2B SaaS and selling to Fortune 100s, you need someone who has worked on those kind of deals. 

For roles that grow and enhance the capabilities of your business, go the generalist route. Think marketing, operations, HR, etc. These are the roles that will change the most in your early growth years, so having folks who can grow and evolve alongside the company are essential. This is where you hire your utility players.

Curious others’ experience with this. What makes for a good hire?

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