Threshold Ventures

Emily Melton is co-founder and managing partner. She spent more than fifteen years with DFJ, rising from associate to partner, with a stint as a partner at Mayfield Fund before returning to DFJ in 2014, and she co-led the close of Threshold's roughly $300 million third fund.

Josh Stein is the other co-founder and managing partner and also spent over fifteen years at DFJ. Before moving into venture he was co-founder and chief strategy officer of ViaFone, an enterprise mobile software company. The two co-lead the current fund. The partnership is deliberately small, which is what supports a concentrated portfolio and board-level involvement in each company rather than a high-volume seed strategy, and it keeps decision-making with the same two people who carried the DFJ relationships across the rebrand.

Threshold is the continuation of Draper Fisher Jurvetson's early-stage practice under a new name and a two-partner structure. DFJ raised $350 million for its twelfth early-stage fund before the change. Tim Draper and John Fisher had already left in 2013, and DFJ Growth had separated as an independent late-stage firm.

The rebrand to Threshold was completed in January 2019 by Josh Stein and Emily Melton, who retained management of the legacy DFJ portfolio while raising under the new brand. A July 2019 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed a target of up to $250 million for Threshold Ventures III; the firm went on to report $450 million raised across two new vehicles, with Fund III closing near $300 million. The legacy book Threshold still manages includes Tesla, SpaceX, Box and Baidu, positions made under the DFJ banner rather than by the current partnership, a distinction worth holding when reading the firm's track record.