Cowboy Ventures was founded in 2012 by Aileen Lee, who left Kleiner Perkins after 13 years to build one of the first venture firms founded by a woman, with Kleiner itself becoming her anchor investor. A year into running the firm, Lee coined the term 'unicorn' in a widely-cited TechCrunch article analyzing billion-dollar startups, a framework that has since become permanent industry vocabulary - though Lee has been candid that the term captures a point-in-time valuation, not durable success. Cowboy invests almost exclusively at seed, deliberately keeping fund sizes small to target top-quartile returns without requiring portfolio companies to reach outsized valuations, with a genuine, structural commitment to backing diverse and 'included' founders - roughly half of Cowboy's investments have included a female founder. The firm's early conviction in Dollar Shave Club, whose founder Lee praised for having 'such a clear brand voice' despite minimal capital, culminated in Unilever's roughly $1 billion acquisition in 2016.
Dollar Shave Club's approximately $1 billion acquisition by Unilever in 2016 - an early Cowboy Ventures investment, and one of the deals that shaped Aileen Lee's broader 'unicorn' framework