Melanie Strong left Nike in June 2019. She was a vice president and had run brands that include global skateboarding, NikeWomen and women’s training. She was there for 17 years. She was also an instrumental player in the company’s cultural reckoning that saw major changes begin in 2018 at the iconic brand and continue today.
Now the Hood River resident has her sights on the world of startups and investing. She is managing partner of Austin-based Next Ventures, a firm she co-launched in 2019 with cyclist Lance Armstrong.
Next Ventures has a $50 million fund that it is investing in tech startups — both hardware and software — working in the areas of sports, health and wellness. The fund has 12 companies in its portfolio including Oura, a smart ring that tracks sleep and activity; Terra, which makes software to help normalize the data coming from different health trackers so they can all be easily viewed; and SteadyMD, a telehealth company.
Next Ventures invests in late seed or Series A rounds. Investments typically have some level of revenue and are gathering customer feedback, she said. Check sizes are between $1 million and $3 million.
The fund doesn’t have any Oregon investments yet, but Strong wants to change that. The best way to get in touch is through the fund website. She works with Oregon Sports Angels and has spoken at events for Technology Association of Oregon and Oregon Entrepreneurs Network. She is also plugged in with the Oregon Venture Fund.
“The thing I learned at Nike is a lot of the best products and tools and coaching that can help you be a better athlete are reserved for the (elite athlete). Lance had a similar story in his life, (for good and bad). We thought if access is our mantra, how can we build a fund that invests in companies building something amazing and innovative — hardware or software — but are creating something that could help a lot of people live a healthier life?” she said.
Strong, like Armstrong, has an unconventional path to investing. Prior to her time at Nike (NYSE: NKE), where she worked her way up through brand management, she was a first grade teacher and a journalist. In fact, it was her stint as a journalist, working at Runner’s World magazine, that she first met Armstrong 20 years ago.
She got her first taste of investing in 2019 when a former Nike colleague asked her to join the board of venture-backed startup VSCO. Her crash course began and she learned from folks at Obvious Ventures and started meeting people at firms like Andreessen Horowitz. Locally, she has learned from Rogue Women’s Fund, OVF and others in town.
She’s taken what she has learned, and in addition to Next Ventures, is developing ways for other former Nike execs to follow her lead and jump into investing. She has angel invested in three local companies and now has an investment syndicate she is helping to organize.
“Nike has been going through major reorganizations and amazing talent is on the free market and a lot is very senior,” she said, adding that she knows the compensation levels these people have and many are asking her how they can be valuable to the local startup ecosystem.
Her answer: “Get on the cap table.”
“I want to get more women over the hurdle to write a check for a startup,” she said. “We write checks all day for nonprofits but the same check size for a founder who can build something amazing and can help get 3-7x return is much harder.”
In addition to the syndicate and angel investing, Strong sees a way to achieve this goal, to bring in more underrepresented investors, through Next Ventures. The fund, which recently added Julian Eison as managing partner, expects to start raising fund No. 2 by the end of the year.
Like any good startup, the Next Venture team is also evaluating how to evolve its investment thesis based on its experience with fund one and feedback from the market. Strong says two investment areas of high interest right now are how to better use all the data coming from health trackers as well as the emerging market for college athletes to sign name, image and likeness deals.
