"It's just dangerous to have capital from quants at pre-seed or seed. I always say, look, you don't want me underwriting growth. That's not... I don't have an MBA, I'm not an HBS guy, I was an English major, I was gonna write the Great American novel, and then I tripped and stumbled into startups for twenty years... There's a reason I'm not running a long-short hedge fund. I think I'm purpose built, and people like me are purpose built, for that first check. And that's what we see founders resonate with."

"The thing that almost no founders know is if you meet a VC and they're impressed with you, maybe they can't invest for whatever reason, but they're impressed. Your job, in any meeting with any investor, is to have them walk away going, holy shit, that woman is backable, that woman is smart, that woman is gonna make me look like I've got the best deal flow in the world when I share this intro. That's why you just gotta get in front of investors."

"I've just learned, the further it gets towards seed, the less likely I'm going to see an outlier deal. I gotta be betting while you're still at your existing job. I gotta be betting before you've got your deck. Because if you're right, then you're not gonna talk to me six months from now. So that means that if you are talking to me six months from now, it's negative signal. If you've got two hundred K in revenue and you started a year and a half ago, I'm like, well, why are we talking? You'd think more traction, de-risked. Well, I don't care about being de-risked. I care about opportunity for exponential upside. And if you're showing me you don't have it, the longer you've been showing me you don't have it, the less likely it is you're gonna get it."

"One needs to spike. My first fund, I love the founders we backed, but if I look at it on the whole, I backed a lot of teams that were pretty damn good on all of those fronts. It matters much more that you're really, really good at one thing. I'm an example of this as a founder. I was very good at most things, and I was not insanely good at anything... We sold companies and they were fine, but we were never gonna go parabolic, no matter how good my technical team and co-founders were. You just get more comfortable as you go in this job investing in spiky folks."

"I don't think I've ever asked a founder at the pre-seed, when we're committing to invest, who else is investing. I just don't care. But because of that, I'm taking the most risk of anyone on the cap table. So if you want the valuation of your round to be eighteen post or twenty post, get us in at twelve post and close a tranche at eighteen. Take where you want to be, subtract three, that's the first tranche. Add three, that's the second tranche. And you raise half your round overnight. Aside from having a term sheet from a tier one, tranching is probably the single most effective way to get people to sign the docs."