Accel: The Quiet Firm Behind Facebook, Cursor, Nebius, Lovable, Vercel

**Arun Mathew** (0:05)
We initially invested in Facebook in 2005 We led the Series A out of our early stage fund. Microsoft had just invested into Facebook at $15 billion, and we had the chance to invest around, like, a little bit south of $20 billion.

**Miles Clements** (0:16)
Across companies like Cursor, Anthropic, and Nebius, 16 months ago, $150 million investment that I think is up 13x today, and the world has now awakened to this company and how special it could potentially be.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:29)
You are the growth team here at Accel. We're about to apparently get $3 trillion IPOs. How do you expect the market to handle that?
All right, so we have a very special group here today. We have the Growth Team at Accel.

**Matt Weigand** (0:54)
We do. We do.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:56)
Thanks for being here.
How many of you are there? Accel is actually very large. I mean, I was really surprised when we walked in.

**Matt Weigand** (1:03)
Yeah, I mean, we're seemingly large by strategy and places we dive into, but the reality is, as a team, it's quite small. So on the late stage, in terms of investors, we've got about six investors that deploy most of that capital, and we obviously do it in concert with the whole crew around the table.
That crew has been together for a very long time. I mean, the three of us have worked together for 15 years, and a lot of it has grown from within. So a lot of the people you see running around are people that we hope add to that list of six over time.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:32)
I was surprised, too. I already made this joke in the last interview because we did one with the early stage team. But walking around South Park, the building is very, it's very unassuming. And then you walk in and it's like restoration hardware got hit with some peptides.

**Miles Clements** (1:46)
It's gorgeous.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:47)
And, but I think like to go back to like the firm history, Accel is a very legendary name in Silicon Valley. I'd love to like get back to the root there and then we can go through all the crazy shit that's happening. Oh, can't swear. Actually, I can swear, it's my show.

**Miles Clements** (2:02)
It's your show, you knew I read it?

**Molly O'Shea** (2:03)
Yeah, I know. The crazy stuff that's happening in Silicon Valley right now because things are happening really, really fast. You're probably seeing companies comment you at a faster clip than ever like before. We did this interview at COCHU and the CIO over there on public markets and we were talking about the size of which companies went public. The largest one was Meta, it was Facebook.
You guys were a very large part of Facebook. I think you held 10%. So let's go back to the lore and history of Accel. So maybe talk through that Facebook deal. You guys weren't here at the time, but would love to learn more about that.

**Miles Clements** (2:38)
Yeah, I think Arun and I like to joke that neither of us is, we're not really old, but I think we're just old enough to have seen a couple of distinct technology cycles and a couple of eras of Accel.
And we joined at the time when Facebook was a private company in the portfolio, and it was just reflective of where the technology ecosystem was at the time. The thing that still kind of inspires us through the Facebook parallel was, it was like the first platform company that we saw. So all the companies as associates that we were building relationships with were figuring out how they could build their business atop Facebook as a distribution platform. And that parallel has actually repeated itself multiple times. I think today there's a pretty clear parallel in terms of Anthropic and Open AI and the labs themselves. But that was sort of the ecosystem that we grew up in. And I think we feel today very thankful.
We're so lucky to work at a place like Accel, on a multi-stage, multi-strategy, multi-geo platform, largely because of all the work that went into sourcing investments like Facebook. Not only Facebook, but a number of other great ones from that generation. And we were lucky to have seen the very beginning of it.

**Arun Mathew** (3:48)
I remember our early days in our first growth fund. We had an opportunity. So we initially invested in Facebook in 2005 We led the Series A out of our early stage fund. And we created this growth vehicle in 2008 Miles and I joined in 2008 and 2009 And one of the first opportunities was to buy some Facebook Secondary that came up.