Product Hunt
Product discovery community, later acquired by AngelList.
Source: Crunchbase News, 2018 ↗Venture capital · Cowboy Ventures
Aileen Lee
Lee wrote the 2013 TechCrunch post that gave the industry the word "unicorn", which is a strange thing to be best known for when the more interesting fact is that she left Kleiner Perkins to start her own firm the year before. Cowboy Ventures is deliberately small — Fund I was $40 million — and stayed that way for a decade on the argument that a small fund does not need a $10 billion outcome to return well.
Coined "unicorn"
Notable investments
What Aileen Lee has backed
Crunchbase
The startup data platform itself.
Source: Crunchbase News, 2018 ↗Brandless
Direct-to-consumer essentials brand that raised from SoftBank's Vision Fund at a $500M+ valuation in 2018, then shut down in February 2020 — the first Vision Fund company to fail outright.
Source: Crunchbase News, 2020 ↗What the record doesn't say
Read this with the gaps in mind.
Brandless is listed here with its ending attached, because portfolio pages usually stop mentioning a company at exactly the point it stops working. Cowboy does not publish fund-level returns, so the record here is names, not numbers.
Frequently asked questions
What has Aileen Lee invested in?
Aileen Lee has backed Product Hunt, Crunchbase, Brandless. Each one is listed on this page with what the company does and a link to named reporting.
How much has Aileen Lee invested?
Cheque sizes are almost never disclosed, and Aileen Lee's are mostly private. Where a round size, stake or valuation has been reported we cite the source; otherwise we flag it as undisclosed rather than guess.