Mike Blank and I co-hosting a recent founder event in LA
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It’s been a busy week for Connect Ventures, with our LinkedIn announcements from Mike and Nicole and our investment thesis on X. It drove significant press from Axios, The Hollywood Reporter, The NY Post / California Post and many others.
Our first guests:
In our next newsletter, we're sitting down with CAA's CEO, Bryan Lourd, and President, Jim Burtson, to talk about building the world’s leading entertainment and sports agency.
What would you like to ask them? Hit reply and let us know.
But for this first edition, let me pull back the curtain on what we've been quietly building this past year.
And the patterns we've learned about spotting and backing 'the greats'…
A new chapter.
After a decade at Lightspeed Venture Partners, co-running the Consumer team, I've spent this past year building something new:
Connect Ventures with Mike Blank.
Connect is a new venture capital firm with origins as a joint venture between Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). By combining CAA’s cultural reach & insights and NEA’s institutional best practices, we believe Connect is uniquely positioned to add significant value to generational change companies.
We're focused on investing in consumer and prosumer businesses across sports, digital health, media, entertainment, e-commerce, and marketplaces.
But we don't just write checks.
We seek to connect and amplify. We work with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to help our companies achieve breakout velocity.
VC’s “value add” has become table stakes. We’ll of course plan to help support our companies with hiring, marketing, and getting the best H100 pricing. But how are we different? What do we do that’s hard to replicate?
We take our founders on a roadshow across the CAA ecosystem. We connect them with agents who can unlock influential partnerships, structure media rights deals, and arrange sponsorships that accelerate growth.
For over 50 years, CAA has helped turn talented artists into cultural icons. Our goal is to do the same for companies. But why now?
We're on the precipice of something massive.
Every decade, an innovation wave creates a window where generation-defining companies are born. Amazon rode the internet wave. Airbnb and Uber rode the mobile wave. Right now, the rails are being laid for the AI application layer. OpenAI, Anthropic, and others have built the infrastructure for applications to explode on top.
Each cycle creates a brief but powerful investment window where most of the value is captured. Historically, ~90% of returns accrue to early investors, with 10–20 new consumer unicorns formed annually. We believe that window is opening now, as consumer and prosumer applications redefine how people live, work, and play.
The number of unicorns created annually in the internet, mobile and AI waves
We’ve already seen AI enabling people to become more efficient at their jobs. Our hot take: Similar disposable income but significantly more disposable time. So how will they spend this extra time? Doing what they love.
Listening to music, going to concerts, watching or playing sports, traveling, investing in longevity, and digital health. Buying things that genuinely matter to them.
We believe we're about to see a step change in consumer spending, unlike any time in history.
Half of our investments will focus on AI-enabled and AI-native consumer companies. The other half invests in traditional consumer companies positioned to benefit from these massive behavioral tailwinds.
This is the moment. And that opportunity demanded a partnership built for it.
Our partnership started with deep respect.
Nicole had spent a decade at Lightspeed, co-running the Consumer team and helping scale the firm from $2 billion to over $40 billion AUM. Mike had 15+ years inside CAA, with a front row seat to culture being built in real time.
We watched each other's work closely. We co-hosted events, co-invested in deals, and incubated Lady Gaga's Haus Labs in 2017. Working side by side, hiring the C-suite, we saw firsthand what each other were like as partners: creative, grounded, relentless.
Our skills are deeply complementary. Nicole brings institutional investing DNA; Mike brings deep domain expertise in entertainment and sports.
So when it came time for Nicole to spin out of Lightspeed, there was no question. We wanted to build together.
Between meetings in Singapore: hawker stand dinners, and trading passes to access every corner of the Grand Prix. (Never leave a partner behind.)
Our first two investments at Connect Ventures:
Music.AI’s platform Moises was recognized by Apple as the 2024 “iPad App of the Year,” a Google Play’s Users’ Choice Award winner, and one of the fastest-growing companies on the Inc. 5000 list. Trusted by 70 million users, Moises offers AI-powered tools for music practice and creation, including vocal/instrument separation, pitch adjustment, and chord detection. Moises has developed 45 proprietary AI models that process over 2.5 million minutes of audio every day.
TMRW Sports was founded by Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and Mike McCarley. In 2025 they launched TGL, a new primetime team golf league in partnership with the PGA. TGL features more than 20 of the world’s greatest players, including Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffele, and Colin Morikawa. TMRW just recently announced the launch of WTGL in partnership with the LPGA, set to debut in winter 2026-27.
Both companies had multiple term sheet offers.
They chose Connect because they knew we could offer more than just investment. Unlocking our networks to drive media rights deals, sponsorship opportunities, strategic partnerships, and more. We believe they are great examples of the Connect thesis in action.
Spotting ‘The Greats’.
Between Mike and I, we’ve spent over a quarter of a century in venture—incubating Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs, backing Calm, Character AI, Dapper Labs, Hungryroot, Lighter, Lightyear, Multiverse, OpenSea, Rothy’s, thatgamecompany, and other unicorns.
This is how we think about investing.
Founder-product fit and founder-market fit are everything.
Founder-product fit is about drive. The kind that keeps founders iterating, pivoting, and navigating regulatory nightmares. Like heat-seeking missiles, these founders find where the market is hot and pursue it relentlessly.
Founder-market fit comes down to credibility. You couldn't get more authentic than Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy building a tech-infused golf league (TGL by TMRW Sports).
True 'greats' combine both.
Product first, brand second, influence third.
When we diligence any company—influential founders included—90% of our work focuses on product.
Customer love, retention, repeat purchases, and referrals. These all signal a true brand built on strong product foundations.
Only after confirming product-market fit do we consider that an influential founder is lending their name.
We only work with founders who embrace this order. Celebrity amplifies a great product; it doesn't create one.
Many small markets make a big market.
Most VCs demand you start in a massive TAM. We're comfortable with founders who start focused and expand deliberately.
Think of it like bowling: you hit one pin, which knocks over another, and eventually you've got a strike.
At Connect Ventures, we aim to invest in 'the greats.' Exceptional founders who have found their ‘founder-product fit’ and are now rewriting how consumers engage with culture and are building the generational companies of tomorrow.
Welcome to Connecting The Greats,
Nicole, Mike, and the Connect Ventures team
Follow us on X and LinkedIn for Nicole and Mike or our website
