Seed Fund NFX Adds Fourth General Partner Morgan Beller

NFX, the firm that self-describes as investing in companies with network effects, has added Morgan Beller as its fourth general partner. Beller was most recently leading strategy at Novi, Facebook’s wallet due to launch later this year.

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Beller is credited with being one of the co-creators of Libra along with David Marcus, an ambitious project originally from Facebook which aimed to provide a global currency and financial infrastructure.

While on the corporate development team at Facebook, Beller’s focus became, “How should Facebook be thinking about crypto blockchain–if at all–and that exercise is what birthed Libra.”

Libra is now independently run.

About her time at Libra Beller said, “I kind of have to close my eyes and the past three years feel like they’ve just flown by in three days.”

‘People, place and position’

Beller previously spent time at Andreessen Horowitz on the deal team, and scouted for Spark Capital. She joined Andreessen Horowitz in 2013, when the firm was at 50 people and experienced them scaling to 150 people by 2016 when she left.

When assessing new opportunities, Beller credits her father with giving her a “people, place and position” mindset.

He told her to rank those in order of importance “I put people first,” said Beller. “And I’ve continued to put people first over the course of the past 10 years.”

NFX was founded in 2015 and prior to this announcement had three general partners, all operators–James Currier, Pete Flint co-founder of Trulia, and Gigi Levy Weiss based in Israel. It has raised two institutional funds, its first in 2017 of $150 million and second in 2019 at $275 million–perhaps one of the largest seed-focused funds according to Currier.

The firm has notably invested in software with Signal to help founders find their next investor, launched a novel 9-day seed funding process earlier this year, and has been tracking founder and investor sentiment through the pandemic.

We spoke with Currier back in 2019 on network effects and investing at Seed. For Currier, NFX scales up its software which helps build content and teaching to bring the whole ecosystem to a better place, and helps them find interesting companies. Sectors the firm has invested in include computational biology, marketplaces, supply chain, prop tech and gaming, said Flint.

The three partners have been on a search for a fourth partner for almost two years according to Flint and Currier.

“It’s rare to have an investor on your board as connected as Morgan is,” said Weiss who first met Beller five years ago when she came to Israel to explore the startup ecosystem.

Said Beller about her decision to join the firm, “They want to be the first check into a company and do that zero-to-one phase. Unlike other seed firms I’ve worked with or spoken to, NFX feels a lot like a startup.”

In her new role with NFX, Beller has already made her first investment which has yet to be announced.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.