Keeping Web Focus, Social Leverage Raising $15M for Micro VC Fund
Howard Lindzon, the entrepreneur, hedge fund investor, and CEO of Coronado, CA-based StockTwits, is raising capital for a new and slightly more formalized version of Social Leverage, an investment partnership he runs with Tom Peterson of Phoenix, AZ.
Lindzon told me recently the two have been successful enough in recent years to attract interest from outside investors. As a result, Lindzon and Peterson are now in the process of raising $15 million for a new pooled investment fund called Social Leverage Capital Fund, according to a recent regulatory filing. Social Leverage has occasionally been described as a “micro VC” focused on Web deals, and now that description will fit better. They have raised about half of their goal so far, Lindzon said.
Howard Lindzon
“The idea is to continue to do what we’ve been doing for the past few years,” Lindzon said. Most investments from the fund will continue to fall between $100,000 and $500,000. Instead of investing just their own money, though, the longtime business partners are taking in capital from a small number of other investors. Lindzon and Peterson are serving as general partners of the fund.
Lindzon said he still sees plenty of upside in his preferred areas of investing, especially in Web video and Web publishing. He’s focused mostly on content created for the Web, especially in areas like
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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