What’s First Round Capital Looking For In Their Investments?

Last year we covered the announcement that early-stage venture capital first First Round Capital (FRC) would be opening an office in NYC. We also covered the Entrepreneurs Roundtable when FRC partner Howard Morgan discussed the overall early-stage capital market.

Today the partners from FRC took a tour of the various startup incubators around Manhattan. For those new to the term, incubators is basically a fancy word for “shared office space”. I attended the first bit of the tour and will have a few more videos and photos over the next day. Mary Kathleen Flynn from The Deal and an editor from VentureBeat (I didn’t catch his name) also participated in the tour. I wore two hats today: first as a writer for this blog and second as an entrepreneur looking for space for my startup.

They also announced that their NYC office will be located at 200 Park Avenue South (23rd Street) and will be opening in March.

First Round Capital partner Josh Kopelman began the discussion with an overview of FRC and what they look for in a deal. The video of Josh’s discussion is available below. Some notes:

• they have invested in 80 companies
• average initial investment in NYC is $600k
• about 15 investments in NYC
• they like to invest very early – they fund Powerpoint and pre-launch companies