Steve Anderson

Founder of Baseline Ventures, Baseline Ventures

Search every verified Steve Anderson interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Steve Anderson, founder of Baseline Ventures, has been active as a seed-stage investor and commentator on startup financing. In a series of interviews from 2011 to 2012, Anderson discussed his investment philosophy, which he described as focusing on companies that could achieve exits around $100 million, a size he argued was often overlooked by traditional venture capital firms. He stated that he started Baseline Ventures after struggling to raise seed funding for his own company, and that his model aimed to allow entrepreneurs to sell smaller stakes in their companies. Anderson noted that he had invested in over 70 companies, with 18 having exited and only three having closed down, and that he had raised a $100 million fund, which he said took four weeks to raise compared to nine months for his initial $10 million fund. Anderson discussed several of his notable investments, including Instagram, Weebly, and Heroku. Regarding Instagram, he said he invested in Kevin Systrom when the product was a location-based blogging platform called Bourbon, and that he helped recruit co-founder Mike Krieger. He described the eventual Instagram product as a "pruning" of features rather than a pivot)Skip. Anderson also discussed the concept of "signaling risk," where large venture capital firms write small seed checks and then decline to follow on, which he said can make it harder for entrepreneurs to raise subsequent funding. He expressed confidence in Twitter's ability to monetize, stating he had not sold any shares since investing in 2007, and said he was looking at both consumer and enterprise technology opportunities.