Website - about me
Slow Ventures - our fund
The Information - my wife's publication
More or Less - my podcast with friends
1638 Forum - for Harvard
Twitter - for screenshot essays
Threads - also for screenshot essays
Instagram - for pictures
Linkedin - apparently no longer a joke?
Call List - to get in touch with me
LONG POSITIONS
Capital-Light Startups :: I am very interested in founders pursuing a ‘one and done’ approach to VC … raising the seed round they need to get to a successful product, and then being prepared to scale on their profit. It is OK to take financing later, but it should be at your choice from a place of self propelled scaling and profitability vs. being forced to rely on the industrial VC-factory financing line that existed from 2010-2023.
Creator Financing :: There is a new pattern of great entrepreneurship emerging where you build a community, brand, and trust - and then layer products on top of that. Creators can be serious entrepreneurs…. And this community is super under-funded in the early days especially.
Crypto :: Over the years, I have got crypto more right than most. Seeding Solana is a 2000x win for our firm, being very early to Bitcoin personally (2013), Seeding Ripple, early to Algorand, and many more (some to launch soon) — as much as anyone, we think we understand the ecosystem and its fundamental importance and our interest in crypto has not wavered (though the right opportunities to seed have changed over time).
Sub-10-Post Deals :: I don’t believe in paying up for seed deals, pretty much full stop. Why? Well several reasons (including a healthy appetite for being paid properly for real risk as a good capitalist) … but the most important is that high-priced seed deals usually are too consensus for my take / it means lots of people are willing to invest with little differentiation. I want my efforts (and our capital) to go to the places it is most needed, most in demand, and most expensive. Things I have seeded from zero I am most prod of that fit in this category include things like Venmo (first investor), Birchbox (first investor), Teamshares (first investor)
American Entrepreneurship :: Periods of technological change come and go… but what makes America great is the insanely strong culture of entrepreneurship everywhere in the country — last decade may have been the one where everyone wanted to be the next ‘Mark’ or ‘Elon’ or ‘Sergey’, but there is a new generation coming up with different ambitions to build powerful profitable, important, businesses that have real meaning in their local communities vs. just playing hail-mary for global ‘monopoly’ platforms.
SHORT POSITIONS
Seed for ‘Industrial-VC’ Pipeline :: Per above, that game is just over. Please don’t pitch me how your seed financing will allow you to achieve some metrics which you believe some ‘Series A’ investor will then value for the next money losing round.
AI Startups :: This view has become more mainstream than it was 18-24 months ago, but I have been consistent throughout — AI is cool and valuable tech… but it is not a startup opportunity… It is a great narrative tho if you are an asset manager getting paid like a VC and looking for places to shove lots and lots of dollars you are earning 2% a year on with a dream.
Double Bottom Lines :: Bad idea… because if you can’t reduce to a bottom line you don’t know how to trade your goals against each other. Capitalism is awesome because it forces that full reduction to ‘profit’ — the second you have to get into debates about how much A you are willing to trade by how much B you are screwed.
Expensive Rounds :: I like to sell money (which is a commodity) for high prices, because that means it is going to places where it is scarce and valuable. If rounds are ‘expensive’ and money is cheap, then there are other better sources of capital in the world. The capitalism I have done I am proud of in life is all putting money into people and things I believe in where the money is very very expensive because few to no one else ‘gets it’ yet and the money can matter.
Even Co-Founders :: Even when they are best friends to start, this basically never works… for many reasons — but the biggest one is that great startups / work require someone to be ultimately fully responsible and in-charge… and when you have multiple people splitting that decision you likely are going to end up with sub-optimal outcomes. Having great folks you recruited as ‘junior’ co-founders, fine. But 50/50 split founding teams (or 33/33/33) is no no.