Jason Shuman is a founder-turned-VC at Primary Venture Partners who went from running a failed direct-to-consumer footwear company to driving Uber while sourcing deals for free in Boston before becoming a General Partner. He takes an executive coach approach with founders, emphasizing close relationships where entrepreneurs can text him at all hours, and he evaluates founders through a specific lens focused on urgency, grit, speed of learning, resourcefulness, and ability to sell stock, people, and product.

• Leveraging advanced LLMs for heavy information processing and workflow automation, demonstrated by using Claude to analyze thousands of pages of medical records for a family legal issue or training it on years of internal data to generate fundraising FAQs.
• Investment thesis centered on Physical AI and Vertical AI, specifically looking for founders who treat hardware merely as a hook to secure the more valuable agentic SaaS business rather than pitching the hardware itself as the main value driver.
• Monitoring enterprise AI adoption trends and hurdles, noting that while productivity is the current primary ROI, executives are increasingly demanding direct revenue growth and that autonomous agents are currently scaling faster than corporate guardrails allow.
• Critical view of traditional governance structures, suggesting that quarterly board meetings are now too infrequent for the modern pace of building and warning founders that the high anxiety making some investors great at sourcing can make them difficult board members.
• Focus on operational discipline in sales and marketing, emphasizing that revenue projections must be backed by basic capacity logic like headcount and quotas, and that successful marketing requires a balance of artistic taste and mathematical rigor.