VC Spotlight: New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
In 1977, while the rest of the world was busy gawking at Star Wars and lining up for gas, three men, Dick Kramlich, Charles W. (Chuck) Newhall, and Frank Bonsal, locked arms on a different kind of moonshot. They weren’t out to chase returns, they were building a legacy. New Enterprise Associates (NEA) was engineered to be an institution that sketches a hundred-year timeline across a map of risk and reinvention. The blueprint that doesn’t whisper “end game,” it roars “infinite game.”
From $16M in their first fund to $25B in committed capital today, NEA has scaled more than balance sheets. They’ve scaled belief. Across nearly 5 decades, they’ve been the scaffolding behind over 280 IPOs and more than 99B-dollar breakout stories, Uber, Robinhood Coursera, Cloudflare, Plaid, Synthesia. They built ecosystems.
Their superpower? Stage-agnostic by design, NEA moves like a sniper with a telescope, seed to scale, biotech to B2BSaaS, AIlabs in London to life-saving therapeutics in Boston. They see the inflection points before the market does, and back the people who bend curves with conviction.
NEA operates on a founder-first OS where operational depth isn’t lip service, it’s embedded muscle. Think GTM strategies, board guidance, recruiting, design playbooks, cross-portfolio matchmaking. They don’t “support founders.” They co-architect futures. Their “Amazing Founder” framework reads like a manual for asymmetric upside, storytelling as a weapon, moonshot ambitions, master-level thoughtfulness, ruthless self-awareness, and the connective tissue to scale trust like traction.
Under Scott Sandell and Tony Florence, the firm’s been sprinting into the next chapter, opening shop in London, lighting up Europe’s AI scene, and making clear that the next 50 years won’t look like the last. In just the first month of 2025, NEA matched their entire European deal count from 2024. Not pivoting, expanding. Their crawl-walk-run playbook now stretches across continents.
Through their Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging initiative, NEA’s challenging the echo chamber of VC and pushing for representation that reflects the future they claim to fund. Panels on the Black experience in tech, DEI-infused investment principles, this isn’t PR. It’s part of the play.
The real flex? Their portfolio companies are hiring, aggressively. Coursera has 182 open roles. Uber’s got more than 417K listings worldwide. These aren’t just jobs. These are on-ramps into the NEA universe, where innovation is table stake.
Want in? Link below. Or better yet, start tracking every move NEA makes. Their tempo is your signal. Their portfolio is your portal. And their partners? They’re not done shaping the future. They’re just getting warmed up.
https://careers.nea.com/jobs
https://www.uber.com/us/en/careers/
https://careers.coursera.com/jobs/search
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