Lee has a {:badgeType} account
- 5,393 followers
- 500+ connections
About
I'm an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. I invest broadly across software & AI enabled companies spanning fintech, SaaS, consumer, and digital health. On behalf of NextView, I have led investments in more than 30 seed stage companies since 2010 including Grove Collaborative (GROV), Skillz (SKLZ), WHOOP, Upserve (acquired), and GrabCAD (acquired).
I was an early employee at PayPal and a co-founder of LinkedIn before becoming a VC investor at PJC and then co-founding NextView Ventures.
Activity
5,393 followers
Loaded 9 Posts posts
- Lee Hower reposted this
Today Seneca announces a five year contract with Aspen Fire Protection District to bring a Seneca Strike Team of five aircraft plus a Mobile Air Operations Base to Aspen this summer.
This is the first fire department acquisition of an autonomous aerial fire suppression system in the world. It is a testament to the work of the exceptional team at Seneca. And it will protect an irreplaceable natural environment and thousands of Americans, their homes and businesses.
We want to work alongside people who make us better. It is a privilege we do not take lightly to roll this out in with chief Jacob Andersen, MBA, CPM and the whole extraordinary team at Aspen Fire.
Colorado has a long history of wildfire. The famous South Canyon fire in 1994 killed 14 firefighters. 4 of the 5 largest fires in CO history happened since 2020. And now - CO has red flag warnings in February, the middle of winter. The need has never been greater.
Technology is our best chance to hold back the effects of wildfire in a changing world. We are grateful for the responsibility and privilege of doing that this summer in Aspen, CO.
A special thanks to Rick Balentine, Angie Davlyn, Ali Hager Hammond, Raymond Tonsing, and Bill Clerico for the help making this possible!
Link in comments for more details.
Experience
-
-
-
We are high conviction, hands-on seed investors. We champion founders who want to redesign daily living for everyday people. Learn more about NextView's approach here: http://nextviewventures.com/approach/
-
-
-
-
-
NextView co-led the Series Seed. I served as a board director from 2015 through mid 2017 and transitioned to a board observer role after Series B.
-
-
Education
-
-
-
-
Selected as Wharton Commencement Speaker, TA in Management Dept (Mgmt 100, Mgmt 235)
-
-
"Don't you need to check every character against a dictionary?"
I gave her the same answer I'd give about a junior hire: you don't check every line — you evaluate the plan, observe the results, and build systems that catch mistakes before they become damage.
Six months of working with AI this way and I've realized: the progression is identical to how organizations learned to delegate. Watch the work closely, build processes, extend trust as mistakes decrease.
Almost identical.
The piece that doesn't translate: the social contract. A human employee has skin in the game — their reputation, their career. An AI agent doesn't. When it fails, the consequences land on the organization, not the agent. There's no self-correcting feedback loop.
Last week Block cut 40% of its workforce, with Dorsey framing it partly as adapting to AI. That's the infrastructure side — the technical substitution works. But for irreversible decisions, architecture can substitute for accountability (permission tiers, version control, rollback). The question no one has answered: can we accept outcomes from a system that can never be held accountable for them?
That's the leash length problem. We're solving the infrastructure. The accountability psychology is the frontier.
What's the decision you'd trust AI to make for your team — and where would you draw the line? Went deeper in Ground Truth. Link in comments.