STEVE ANDERSON

Anderson spent four years at Starbucks, rising from store manager to regional general manager, then went to Stanford Business School and interned at eBay. He joined Kleiner Perkins in 1999, where he worked on the firm's Google investment, and later ran marketing at Microsoft.

He founded Baseline Ventures in 2006 as a one-person seed fund. The first fund was only $10 million and was hard to raise.

The Instagram investment came in 2010. Kevin Systrom was building Burbn, a check-in app with a photo feature, and Anderson wrote his first check for $250,000.

The photo feature became Instagram. Facebook bought it for $1 billion in 2012, and Baseline owned about 12%.

He also made early bets on Twitter, Heroku (acquired by Salesforce for $212 million), Stitch Fix (IPO in 2017), and SoFi, where he led an $80 million round in 2012. Forbes reported in 2016 that he had turned $70 million across his first three funds into about $700 million.

He made the Forbes Midas List repeatedly through 2020, ranking as high as No. 2.

Baseline has stayed a one-partner firm the whole time.

Baseline Ventures — founder and sole partner (2006–present). Early investments include Instagram (acquired by Facebook), Twitter (IPO), Heroku (acquired by Salesforce), Stitch Fix (IPO), SoFi (IPO), PagerDuty (IPO), Expensify (IPO), TaskRabbit (acquired by IKEA), Weebly (acquired by Square) and Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter).

Before that: Microsoft (senior marketing director), Kleiner Perkins (1999–2005), eBay and Starbucks.

The funds are deliberately small. His first fund was $10 million and the next was $55 million.

Anderson invests at the earliest possible stage. He wants to be the first check a founder receives.

His checks usually run $250,000 to $1 million for a 5% to 15% stake, and he does only about 10 to 12 deals a year.

He is a solo GP by choice. With no partners to consult, he can say yes to a $500,000 check in 30 minutes.

That speed is a real edge at the seed stage, where founders want answers in days, not weeks.

He likes consumer products and marketplaces, but his winners also include developer and business tools like Heroku and PagerDuty.

Instagram. A $250,000 first check in 2010 grew into roughly a 12% stake when Facebook bought the company for $1 billion in 2012.

It is one of the best seed returns in venture history.

Stitch Fix was the quieter win. He wrote the first $250,000 in 2011, then another $250,000 of emergency money in late 2012 when the company was struggling.

It went public in 2017.

He passed on Dropbox's seed round after the founders raised the price. Worse, he missed Uber twice, even after Travis Kalanick pitched him personally.

He told Forbes he just could not see past the idea of black cars. Uber went on to be worth more than Instagram, Twitter and Heroku combined.

Anderson bets on people before there are any numbers to look at, and he accepts that plenty of those bets will die. Forbes reported he wrote off only about a quarter of his early portfolio, which is low for seed.

He also believes in staying small. A big fund and a big team would push him toward later stages and bigger checks.

He has said Baseline does not need to outlive his own interest in running it.

Anderson grew up near Seattle in Issaquah, Washington. His father left when he was 5, and his mother, a secretary, raised him in a double-wide trailer, with the family sometimes relying on food stamps.

He was mentored through the Big Brothers program. He keeps his own personal life out of the press.

BA in business with an emphasis in physics, University of Washington. MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business (1997).

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