launch day

onto is a frontier venture firm building future abundance, from the atomic to the cosmic.

This morning I woke at 2:25am giddy with the nervous energy of a kid waking to check their Christmas stocking from Santa. It’s a feeling that brings me back to the morning of the biggest match of the season during my rugby playing days.

Equal parts nervous energy and intense anticipation for what is to come:

Today, ReGen Ventures becomes Onto Ventures.

Onto is our quest to build the enabling technology to make abundance our reality. A reality indistinguishable from magic.

Ignition

I burned the boats of a comfortable life in late 2019 to build something that didn’t exist. The world didn’t (and doesn’t) need another incremental venture capital fund. That’s not what I wanted to build. What I wanted to build didn’t exist. Lots of people thought I had a few screws loose and encouraged me to take the safer path. I couldn’t. With the inspiration of my little girl, Frankie, and the unwavering support of my wife Leanne, I knew I would regret not trying more than trying and failing.

The initial spark became a memo. That memo became ReGen Ventures. In the midst of COVID, I worked from our bedroom, local cafes and the front seat of our van parked at the beach. Founders got used to seeing the sun rise from the east coast of Australia. In these fragile early days I was privileged to meet a handful of folks who believed in my vision and were crazy enough to jump on the journey. The first term sheet was agreed in August 2021 during a sunset walk overlooking the Pacific. We’ve been heads down ever since.

Five years on, we are privileged to be building businesses alongside over fifty founders across the globe, enabled by the trust of our UnLimited Partners to steward capital on their behalf. We have only just begun to manifest our ultimate ambition.

Ontogenesis

Last year it became apparent that our name was no longer reflective of the scale of our ambition and the ambition of the founders we partner with. It was too literal and too limiting for the world we are building. A world of abundance from the atomic to the cosmic.

When we started ReGen I honestly didn’t think too hard about the name of the firm. In hindsight, this was a big mistake and I’ve got no one to blame but myself.

First, Leonardo diCaprio came along and called his firm regeneration.vc. Then regenerative agriculture became the hottest thing since sliced bread. Then our friend Paul Hawken called his seminal book Regeneration (great book by the way!). This all created a level of confusion, friction and a need to continually explain the distinction between regenerative technology and regenerative agriculture.

At our team offsite in October we decided it was time for a change. If we were ever going to do it, now was the time. So here we are. Here’s hoping I got it right this time. Our friend Seth Godin gave me some wise advice when I was laboring over making the final decision, “the key to a great name is that it’s a distinctive, valueless container that can hold the magic you put inside of it”.

To our closest partners, friends and collaborators: You are Onto.

I’m ecstatic about what we’re building together and how it’s turning up in the world. The root of the word Onto is concerned with the nature of being, existence and reality. The process of ontogenesis is an individual organism’s development and growth from conception to maturity. We’re early in our ontogenesis.

Onto is the complete expression of who we are, our ambition, and what it feels like when we all win. Our metamorphosis reflects our deep commitment to the founders we serve and the epic mission we are on.

For now, the job’s not done. It may never be done. We are back to work identifying and earning the right to partner with the most consequential companies of all time.

Let’s make magic!

We’re all in.

~ dan & onto.vc

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