Capital buys stories first. Unit economics second. Cash flow a distant third. Let’s start with a boat. Most tech legends do. A man wants a bigger one; capital markets oblige. It’s August 1995. Bill Clinton is “fixing” a marriage with sorties over Bosnia. Steve Ballmer is sweating through
I hear / see lots of folks in venture doing things because “they’re playing the game on the field.” I’ve never understood this. Feels like a justification for mediocrity. — Nicholas Chirls (@nchirls) July 14, 2025 Nick is one of the best in the seed game and he makes a
This piece was originally posted on the Project Eleven blog. Project Eleven is a company that I incubated and co-founded alongside Alex Pruden, Conor Deegan & Leeor Mushin. An awesome early team also helped get it off the ground. The company was based on a realisation I had in May
top 3 hot archetypes in vc rn 1/ pre product app / vertical ai at 50m post packaged in a princeton/harvard/stanford shaped box 2/ have not left current roles niche foundational/agent model led by balding 2/3 white guys from deepmind/PhD/Meta/OAI at 500m post 3/
I wrote this post for Sifted back in November 2021 - it was a different time and Klarna despite being valued at $45B (RIP) was touting that it was creating 75 millionaires. This was shockingly low and prompted my writing as the culture around options grants from European founders is
Opener on this post. I've been messing around with OpenAI's Deep Research product and it is very good. With some creative prompting you can get to some very enjoyable outputs. VCs traditionally write 'thesis' on things they are bullish about - frequently it is
Written like 6 years ago. Still extremely relevant. Being the most junior investor in a venture fund puts you on a pretty steep learning curve where you’re given tonnes of varied responsibility early on in the job. One such responsibility, being the gatekeeper of inbound investment proposals, tends to
This was originally posted in Sifted in 2022 - a time when advice to conserve cash was king and a lot of hand wringing was going on in venture. The Nasdaq drops 20% in a month and people are starting to lose it. Are they wrong? The last 24 months
This is going way back in the catalog of stuff I've written. I wrote it the week I was promoted to Principal at Frontline in 2019 – and decided to stay in VC just a bit longer to see if I could be any good at it. Everyone talks
Let me know how I can be helpful? Foregone VCs spoke this so often to founders it became a platitude for the industry that effectively translated to ‘Please f*ck off.’ @prayingforexits don’t miss — and now I can’t do a thread of this post As capital becomes more
‘We’re looking to underwrite a 5x net return from our seed managers in this vintage.’ — Overheard from a large institutional LP last November Amongst this jargon is a simple message that is terrifying for most VCs — ‘I expect you give me back 6.5 dollars for every dollar I
There’s a huge difference between ‘looking right’ and ‘being right’ in venture capital and startups. But because of the duration involved in building these companies, you sometimes have to make sure to be looking, even if it’s at the expense of being. We’re in an industry heavily