We launched the NextView website last week.  It’s simple and preliminary, but there were two things we thought were really important to include.

The first was that our “team” page really showed a picture of a “team”.  Most VC websites shockingly have a picture of individuals only.  The fact that we are a team is important to us, and even though it’s just symbolic, it was important to us to be pictured together. 

The second was to share our ethos with the world. It’s a little quirky.  Folks probably saw “Golazo” under “how” and thought WTF???

Some firms have something similar and call it “Operating Principles”, “Values”, or something similar.  I’ve blogged before how important I think Culture is to any organization. 

One of the benefits of starting our own firm is that we can be intentional about setting our ethos, rather than inheriting something that already exists.  We talked about this at length when we first decided to work together, and many times after.  We have tried to ingrain our ethos into our everyday vocabulary, as I discussed on my blog about cultural catch phrases.

Our ethos is mostly about how we aspire to behave.  By definition, we will fail to live up to these ideas in many cases.  But just like investors try to figure out what makes an entrepreneur tick, we thought it was important to show the same to entrepreneurs.  And hopefully, entrepreneurs will keep us honest when we don’t live up to our stated ethos. 

In my next few posts, I’m going to talk in a little more detail about our ethos and our five cultural catch-phrases.  I’ll talk about where they came from, what they mean, and in some cases, who we look to as role models.