Alexis Ohanian on his plan to back more emerging managers

Last week, Ohanian quietly announced a new initiative out of his venture firm, Seven Seven Six. The new fund will focus on emerging managers, each with their own influential distribution channels and unique operational experience in backing start-up ventures.

Three teams have received checks from Ohanian and Co.: brothers and sisters, Wes and Allyson Felix, who are well-known for their tech-focused videos on their YouTube channel.

We contacted Ohanian last week with some questions. He replied via email.

Is the $500 million in capital across two funds that 776 announced last month a separate fund of funds? How much money is there to invest?

AO: It is a carve-out from Fund II and we are investing around $10 million.

What are the criteria for investment?

We are looking for people who want to make room for their cap tables. Why? The combination of unique distribution and reputation. We are looking for things that traditional VCs don't have. Everything else is just capital for the best founders.

How does Cerebro help 776 scale its operations?

Cerebro is the operating system that we use for all the work. Our team, founders,LPs, and soon, the TITANS have their own logins.

I ranked all the tasks I do as a VC and then sorted the most valuable ones that were most productizable and started building. It's not very efficient to ask a human for an introduction to a network that has a lot of value. Our network search and intro tool was the first product we shipped, and it lets founders search over 44,000 contacts anytime they want, and have them routed to the person on the team with them.

The fund managers will be able to use their own access to Cerbero, which will help them be more efficient and effective at deployment of capital, and it should open up some very interesting benefits to have this federation of funds plugged into our global brain.

How many managers will the firm seed?

The Ancient Greeks had a pantheon of gods, but with the excitement and opportunity we have seen, it will be more like 20.

Would 776 invest in a fund that already exists rather than help someone get into investing?

New managers are our main focus. We are not ruling out backing a Fund II for many of them.

I'm wondering if you intend for the managers to have very different areas of focus or if you just want them to see deals that they might miss otherwise. Do you plan to use scouts at some point?

The goal here is always excellence, and many of them are going to have overlap with a firm like ours, though we do a lot of web3.

We've backed themes such as consumer, policy, hard tech, and construction so far. Cerebro will give us insights into the companies our managers are funding, but there is no expectation or request for them to be scouts for us. They run their own funds that we are fortunate to be in.