Meet the Collective

We’re stage-focused (seed and pre-seed), sector agnostic, and proudly anti-thematic. We lead and participate, and we don’t have rigid ownership targets.

Our Collective Wisdom

What we’ve learned and what we’re thinking

Unicorn Lists Are Prediction Markets. This List Is a Scorecard.

What does success actually look like after the deal closes? Unlike paper valuations, DPI doesn’t lie.

What Do Great Founders Have in Common? Less Than Everyone Wants to Believe.

My own colleagues ask me this all the time. So I went through my whole portfolio, more than 75 companies over a dozen-plus years, and looked as hard as I could.

Craft Feels Indulgent Until It Becomes Your Moat

Mass production is faster, cheaper, and often “good enough,” which is why it caps you at average.

Your Hit Rate Is Fixed. Your Number of Shots Isn’t.

The world holds more randomness than we admit. Default Yes to showing up.

What Are Investors Really Looking for at Seed, Series A, and Series B?

You’re a different company at each round, so pitching the same story means pitching the wrong one.

Startup Founders Need Windows More Than Mirrors

The strongest founding teams are like the two wheels of a bicycle. One wheel provides power, the other direction.

Did VCs Overcomplicate a Three-Step Job?

Strategy matters, but it can become a substitute for the unglamorous work of finding the next great company.

Reading the Wind

Token spend is a new line item every company has, and no one can tell you what it’s buying.

This Month I’ve Been a VC Exactly as Long as I Was an Operator

The feedback used to hit immediately and I carried it home every night. As a VC I can be wrong for a decade before I find out.

Regulated Markets Used to Be the Ones to Avoid. Now They’re the Ones to Seek.

The right founder clears regulatory hurdles that take outsiders years to copy, and owns the category while they catch up.

We're Founders First. Investors Second.