The Extra Crunch Live series continues today with two venture capitalists: Alexia and Niko Bonatsos.
The two investors don’t work for the same firm, but they each have an interesting perspective on the world of investing. Alexia is a former journalist — and a former co-editor of TechCrunch — who now runs Dream Machine, her own venture capital fund. In contrast, Niko has worked for General Catalyst for nearly ten years.
So Alexia will bring the small-fund perspective, and Niko will let us know more about what larger, older firms are thinking.
As I wrote last week, however, my goals for this talk aren’t merely another run-through of VC check sizes and other investing fundamentals. Sure, we’ll go over those questions to kick things off, but I’m more curious to learn what the pair are excited about when it comes to the future.
It’s been a depressing year so far, and, at least in theory, startups are supposed to accelerate the future. Bring it on, I say. Bring on that new, good shit.
Alexia’s fund claims that it helps “make science fiction nonfiction.” We’re going to press on that.
The chat comes in the shadow of one of the pair’s peers advocating for “building” lots of new stuff. Big things! Flying factories! But after a16z dropped its manifesto that “IT’S TIME TO BUILD,” the massive venture capital firm wound up stuffing another digital VC status-signaling playground with a bunch of money so that venture capitalists could hang out with rappers and partially ameliorate their youth-derived insecurities.
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Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025
Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444.
Building, indeed.
What are Alexia and Niko hoping to see built? Sure, they’re capital sources, but their selection process — the companies they choose to support — could impact what we use in the future.
I’m hoping to leave this particular chat a bit up on the coming few years, which should upgrade how down we all feel about the present.
Details are below for Extra Crunch subscribers; if you need a pass, you can get an inexpensive trial here.
See you all in a few hours.
Details
Here’s the information you’ll need:
- May 19, 11:00 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/5:00 p.m. GMT
- Click here to add the event to your calendar
- Zoom link
- YouTube
