Hype & PR Fade. Patience Compounds.

Harry Stebbings recently posted this on X:

“Venture investors are going through an existential crisis. If you are not in the OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Mercor etc etc you do not fricking matter.”

While I applaud his ambition, I totally disagree with the conclusion.

Venture capital does itself no favors with an all-or-nothing mindset.

This week I celebrated Olo’s $2B acquisition by Thoma Bravo, two years after its NYSE IPO and 20 years after I first invested. You may not know the name, but if you’ve ordered from Five Guys or P.F. Chang’s, you’ve used the product. Olo transformed an industry, changed the lives of its founder, Noah Glass, its early team, and meaningfully shaped my own career as its first investor.

In an era of mega-rounds, some might dismiss a $2B exit as small. It isn’t.

Across the Founder Collective portfolio are dozens of companies, many not household names, that have made founders, employees, and investors wealthy while also improving the lives of their users.

PillPack, Cruise, and Shield AI have saved countless lives.

Lovevery, Suno, and Smalls have made the world a richer, happier place.

We all want generational outcomes. But founders and investors should feel very proud if they generate wealth for only three generations, not ten! There’s an enormous impact and real upside in building and backing companies that are “merely” great, not historic.

For the first ten years of its existence, Olo didn’t look like a winner. The company was constantly on the edge of failure. Only in its second decade did it gather the momentum to transform its industry for the long haul. Keep your horizons broad, and you’ll be surprised by the opportunities that open up to you.

If you can’t find meaning or fund math in a $1B exit, it might be time to step away from the keyboard and reassess. Single-digit billion, or even a well-timed eight-figure exit, matter!

Hype & PR fade.

Patience compounds.