Las Olas Venture Capital is a VC firm that focuses on early-stage B2B companies. Founded in 2015, their small team of former founders and entrepreneurs has experience running and growing successful B2B companies like HigherOne and Yclip.
We spoke with Nate Vasel, Principal at Las Olas to dig into how they use Carta for fund administration and a capital call line of credit.
Tell us about how Las Olas got started in 2015
At the time, there weren’t a lot of institutional-level, Series A type funds in South Florida. There aren’t really too many of them here today. We saw these really interesting companies being formed, raising a few hundred thousand dollars, then being forced to move to more established areas like San Francisco or Silicon Valley. We believed that Las Olas could represent that first million-dollar institutional check into companies looking to raise that million to $3 million dollar round.
How does Las Olas position itself to help your portfolio companies?
Our team is made of all former tech operators. They’ve been through it all—from a dorm room startup to a billion dollar IPO, and everything in between. We’re willing to lead and be active, and provide founders the support they need and answer their questions.
Tell us what you think makes a good fund admin provider.
A good fund admin helps you with the day-to-day tasks that don’t need to involve the principals on the fund to make decisions. We try to be transparent with our LPs, and try to maintain a very open and positive relationship so they can trust us and our investment decisions. We like them to feel like we’re in this together. We’re a capable steward of their capital.
When it comes to capital calls, what issues were you running into before Carta?
We used a traditional bank to call capital prior to Carta. We found that the banking industry wasn’t as flexible as we would have liked, in particular, around paperwork and ease of use. There were a lot of very antiquated processes that added a lot of administrative burden on our end.
How does Carta make calling capital more convenient?
A great provider is supposed to make our jobs easier, and with Carta, we were really excited about just getting things done. Having Carta as our fund admin puts everything in one place. We don’t have to worry about specific compliance requirements, certain reporting, sending forms, or getting all the paperwork from the bank. We’re now able to focus on the things that LPs want us to care about and what we prefer to spend our time on.
How does Carta help you communicate with your LPs?
Carta is very easy to use. A lot of our LPs are angel investors as well, so they have companies already on the Carta platform. For them, it was a pretty seamless transition and it’s just one less login for them to remember. Also, Carta’s reporting and formatting is very streamlined and detailed, and they’re able to get everything they need to know about our fund performance. As Carta has made it easier to view capital-call notices, it makes their life easy.
