When we started Homebrew in 2012/2013 the conventional wisdom was that early stage funds hold 20-50% of their total capital for follow-on pro rata. Mostly to ‘double down’ on their winners [offense!] and sometimes to help bridge promising companies to their next financing or maintain ownership in pay-to-plays [defense!]. This ‘best practice’ was based on a few core assumptions/truths about the way the venture industry used to work.

• Picking Insight. Being an insider with 12-24 months of data on company performance the outliers would start to show themselves.
• Pro Rata Advantage. You have contractual pro rata and/or ‘a relationship’ so you’ll get to double down across the board.
• Pricing and Market Discipline. The next financing is most likely being led by a Series A firm who (a) has similar return goals as your firm, and (b) experience reviewing and pricing companies as this stage. It’s as close to an ‘independent’ valuation as you’ll get. Similarly, weak companies won’t be able to raise a Series A and they’ll just shut down/exit.
• Data Proof. Looking backwards across all available historical data, firms that invest in 100% of their pro rata outperform at least marginally if they didn’t do any of those checks. Or something like that.
• Brand and Signaling Risk. If you don’t do your pro rata it looks bad or hurts the bond with the founders and co-investors.

In the year of our lord 2026, and having now lived in the early stage venture world for 13+ years, I’m calling bullshit on basically every piece of this.

• Picking Insight. Follow-on financings are often done weeks or months after an early stage round, with not that many ‘cards turned over.’ The increased velocity means you have less durable information to suggest something is a true outlier vs just quick out of the gate.
• Pro Rata Advantage. Crowded cap tables, sharp elbows, lack of information flow – I’ve seen many firms ignored by founders and new investors in a subsequent round (“you should just be happy to be in this company already”) or pressured to not do all their pro rata in order to minimize company dilution. So this does raise the adverse selection question – are you not able to get additional dollars into the best companies?
• Pricing and Market Discipline. EVERYTHING has changed here. Dozens and dozens of new VCs. Multistage firms with billions and billions of dollars underwriting to a lower target, often with GPs who have minimal experience in the industry who are also trying to grow their personal brand by being in hot deals. The dynamics start to look more like auctions, not valuations.
• Data Proof. The venture market has changed too much in the last 5-10 years to make historical data relevant – and the historical data is always incomplete anyways. Garbage in, garbage out.
• Brand and Signaling Risk. Minimal and overblown. You end up throwing capital into not just the 95% percentile companies but anyone who can raise an institutional round – and there are so many new firms/funds that I consider neutral to negative signal when they lead a round. Why would I want to follow their lead with a second check?

Ok, so am I saying early stage funds of modest size ($100m or less) should *never* follow on? NO, I’m saying you should minimize reserves so that you are not thinking about it as a second pool of dollars to only use for second checks. Instead evaluate any pro rata opportunity vs a net new investment, and assume you will not use a significant amount of your fund capital for follow-on. Get more shots on goal, so to speak, and see if you can catch more true outliers.

But HUNTER,

WHAT ABOUT DILUTION? If exits for winners are truly bigger than ever, your dilution won’t matter as much from a fund model perspective -AND- the wild growth in early stage valuations means you will be taking LESS dilution than has historically been.

WHAT ABOUT COMPANIES I REALLY REALLY BELIEVE IN? Three answers:

a) You believe in them equal to the market. The round is likely fairly priced and you think there’s real growth ahead – not ‘risk adjusted’ stage specific multiple, but another 50x, 100x from here? Do your pro rata from the fund.

b) You believe in them less than the market does. That is, you’re exited but the financing terms are CRAZY. Don’t do your pro rata and/or do a SPV/take money from one of the many firms that now exist to back your winners. And then if the financing trend continues to exceed your confidence, think about some secondary selling from your fund over time. These options are also a new phenomena that historical ‘best practices’ didn’t consider.

c) You believe in them way more than the market does. Great, double down, maybe even ahead of a round. This is where getting a few hundred thousand or couple million more can make a real different in preserving/increasing ownership ahead of an inflection in their valuation curve. You just need to be correct 🙂

WHAT ABOUT WHAT MY LPs EXPECT TO SEE IN MY FUND MODEL? That’s why I’m writing this – show them the post. And make sure you can recycle – one way to ‘solve’ the reserves question is by getting to 100%+ invested. We got to 120%+ in each of the first two Homebrew funds!!

[i’m sure there are some typos here and i’ll edit as you point them out or ideas/concepts i should expand on]

My friends have saved $13,000+ since I posted this link!

A friend told me this was jarring to see on a VC blog – what am I shilling for an Junova? Well, I’m not being paid and I’m not an investor in the product. I just think it’s brilliant and effective and I like the idea of using AI to “fight” against big business pricing models. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $3000+ of American and United credits for me. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!

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“Wired, Tired, Expired” was a fun feature of Wired Magazine back in the day. It would take a general concept and give you three variations – one that was ‘of the moment,’ one that was recently popular but long in the tooth, and one which needed to have a stake put through its heart.

Well, I don’t have any of the first two categories for you but here are three EXPIRED concepts

Non-Technical [as in, ‘He’s a non-technical product manager’]. Online resources, code school, and the ‘no code’ movement all started taking chips off this monument, but AI has felled it completely. Non-technical is now merely a choice, and a very bad one. Sure there may still be gaps in proficiency, experience, and training – I’m not making the case that engineering as a discipline is disappearing any time soon – but the idea that anyone is your company is ‘non-technical’ is on them and on you, not part of a job spec. And some of the best startups aren’t just looking for technically inclined hires, they’re helping their entire org chart use AI tooling [like Ambrook – financial tools for farming and the real world – here’s a post describing the effort and the curriculum developed].

Unicorn. A sharp concept when it was originally coined to represent the rarity of startups with a $1b+ valuation, it now poisons our entire way of thinking about success. A paper mark that incentivizes some founders to strive for a near-meaningless financial benchmark given to you by an investor who has equal motivation to be ‘in Unicorns.’ Media that whether it’s the pace of the job, or the will of their editors, or their own lack of experience in the tech world, uses the threshold as proxy for quality and relevancy. And the attempts to assign names to $10b, $100b, etc companies MegaDecaDragons, is just so square. Back to focus on the product and the company and the business model. Not the interim valuation.

Oversubscribed. The tiny hill I continue to die upon until style guides and LLMs begin to advise against the description (of a funding round or VC fund raise). As I’ve written previously, it’s meaningless and manufactured (will let you click through for the full rant).

Ok, what jargon do you hate?

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Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $3000+ of American and United credits for me. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!

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“But what will weigh on you the most is just how bad it will feel until you find product market fit. It feels like pushing a boulder uphill while wondering whether the boulder wants to move at all.” This is how Sam Gerstenzang describes the pain of finding Product Market Fit within a startup. I liked the post and it includes a few tips, from a founder’s POV, on navigating the idea maze. Still, as I read it, the sadist in me wanted to push the bar even higher and talk a bit about false PMF, which can sometimes be an even worse situation than no PMF (because you’re ramping up spend and activity, essentially running, with increasing speed, in a straight line towards a cliff.

False PMF #1: It’ll Get You 0-1 but not 1-10. A smart team in a big enough market can almost always will themselves to Series A metrics if that’s their sole goal. But that doesn’t make a company more valuable – if anything it creates a local maxima that might be mirage. The ‘let’s just raise more capital and then fix everything about our business’ is a trap – for your team, for your investors, and for yourself. So if your judge PMF merely by “numbers go up” but you know you’re not selling a specific product to a similar group of customers, who themselves are representative of a larger opportunity, it’s not PMF.

False PMF #2: You’re Giving It Away For Free. Revenue is often not the important metric early on, and pricing is usually a series of experiments. But my strong opinion is that while it’s a perfectly valid option to DELAY revenue strategically, if you’re merely avoiding the litmus test of “would someone pay for this” because you’re afraid the answer is NO, then you don’t concretely have PMF. I know there are a bunch of exceptions here and my words apply less to some consumer or open source products, but I’m a strong believer in front loading business model testing – to your benefit, not because you’re starting to manage to a revenue curve.

False PMF #3: Your Bucket is Leaky AF. I’ve seen founders convince themselves (and investors) that they have PMF because user count is going up. But when you dive in the engagement and retention just ain’t there – either you’re counting ‘customers/actives’ too liberally, or good at generating signups/pilots/whatever, but can’t get folks to retain and use. ‘Good faith’ versions of this mistake used to be more common because logging, data analysis, etc were harder to implement in young startups. Less so these days.

As Sam notes, “I’m still not sure I can help find others find product market fit – it remains the single hardest problem in startups.” And I agree. Much of the support we do with startups is helping them prioritize hypotheses/experiments, articulating what positive PMF might look like for their idea, and ultimately trying to find GREAT PMF, not just MAYBE GOOD ENOUGH.

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Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets I’ve taking and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $2500+ of American and United credits for me. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!

Susan Wojcicki, Om Malik – both people I was fortunate enough to call a friend. Both died too early.

Susan almost two years ago. Om just a few days.

See the outpouring of love and respect for them as humans?

See how people can be wildly successful but also kind, giving, approachable?

They were role models in life. And role models ongoing.

Against a backdrop of an industry that feels like its moral compass is spinning right now.

Find the next Susans and Oms in our community and celebrate them when they’re alive too.

“Here’s how we did it” is one of my favorite phrases to hear in a healthy startup ecosystem. Collaborative learning benefits everyone and the startup which initiates the discussion gets the potential benefit of the smartest folks *outside* of the company improving the work.

Ambrook, a startup building financial tools for ground level independent American businesses, starting with farming and agriculture, recently spent six weeks helping everyone on the team get comfortable enough with AI tooling to begin automating some of their individual workflows. Ambrook has been a technology-forward team from its origins so this wasn’t about “how does AI change our company” but rather “we want the company to take this journey together” and see constant learning as a career opportunity, not a career threat.

I’ve written before how Ambrook is ‘legible to talent’ – doing the things which attract colleagues who want to live professionally at the intersection of excellence and meaning (oh yes, they’re hiring) – so it didn’t surprise that this was their approach, but the text from CEO Mackenzie Burnett that said “hey, we’re open sourcing this” was unexpected (and delightful).

Here’s Ambrook’s intro blog post on the work – Momentum Month, or Teach a Man to Fish. Authors Dan and Paige describe the how and why of this effort and link to a Google Drive with all the supporting files. As they note, “Six weeks doesn’t make a team fluent in everything. But it has helped us understand the possibilities, and the investment it takes to make that happen. The compounding is just getting started.”

The effort has already resulted in some good discussion within the Homebrew founder community and I hope it’s useful to you as well. Thank you Ambrook for showing and sharing!

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Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets I’ve taking and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $2500+ of American and United credits for me. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!

Father’s Day! A time for Dad to open and close browser tabs…

People-First Hiring: Implementing AI Without Losing Connection [MCJ Newsletter] – Climate-oriented venture firm MCJ published their readout of how AI has been integrated into their talent workflow, which include everything from sourcing founders to helping portfolio companies with hires. I’m a real fan of folks putting their playbooks out there because we’re in a period of such rapid iteration and learning. The MCJ team also notes that:

Not every part of the hiring process benefits from automation, and in some areas, over-reliance on AI risks undermining efficacy in our work. The candidates we most want to connect with founders are paying close attention. They can tell when outreach is too templated, when a process feels automated, and when a company is performing investment in people rather than actually making it.

Spylandia: How a Stretch of Florida Real Estate Has Become a Covert Corridor for Chinese and Russian Spies [Adam Ciralsky/Vanity Fair] – This is a crazy article about the degree of light espionage going on in Florida around the US space and aviation programs (private and public activities). Fake tourists, honeypot traps, residential homes that turn out to be wired up like data centers!

The activity wasn’t confined to the Chinese. An immaculately groomed Russian family—straight out of The Americans—appeared at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral complex, presenting themselves as tourists. CFIX later learned the same family had surfaced at a SpaceX facility in California under the guise of sightseeing.

Franchise Thinking: On the Sequel Economics of Ideas [Anu Atluru/Working Theorys] – “Your idea gets franchised or it disappears.” Modeling her thinking on current memetics and the way we’re growing more comfortable (culturally, economically) with derivatives of the familiar than radically new. Franchised ideas already have tribal audiences. The opposite of franchise thinking is not contrarianism Anu notes. In fact, ‘contrarian’ has become another type of franchise. I feel like this is not dissimilar from some of Renée DiResta’s work on ‘universe building’ in the world of conspiracy theories, online sub-communities, etc.

Human Error is OK! Machine Madness is a No-No! Why? [Om Malik/Om.co] – “Why are we able to absorb big technology failures when they are blamed on people, but respond so differently when the failures come from machines?” This always drives me crazy, with autonomous vehicles being one prime example of being held to a standard much stricter than we ask of humans. Om got some pushback on this post but I think at least in my example it’s both (a) true and (b) confusing for well-intentioned people who do want to ‘make something better’ but won’t be able to make something perfect. Hold aside the less well-intentioned who believe they shouldn’t have to ever listen to regulators, the public, etc etc.

how to ask for advice (without wasting everyone’s time) [Auren Hoffman/summation] – no notes. just read it.

I make good money. Why do I still feel like this? [Hanna Horvath/Your Brain on Money] – Hanna writes about how the Middle Class was a post-war policy project, not a status quo of our economy. And that as it splits (K Shaped Recovery!) the resulting contrails of anxiety extend beyond “just” those previously in the MC segment.

When you’re experiencing material precarity, the resentment tends to flow toward immigrants, toward the generation that came before you, toward the upper-middle-class “elites”. When you’re experiencing positional precarity, the resentment may flow toward people who “didn’t optimize hard enough,” toward the general sense that nobody appreciates how hard you’re working.

In both cases, the anger moves sideways or downward. It less often moves upward — toward the 0.1% whose effective tax rate is lower than yours, toward the policy choices that make wealth concentration a feature, not a bug. And it almost never turns into the question that actually matters: What would it take for me to move from the labor side of this economy to the ownership side?

Good questions Hanna!

Enjoy your Father’s Day

My friends have saved $12,000+ since I posted this link!

Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets I’ve taking and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $2500+ of American and United credits for me. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!

Is it summer yet?

The Last Technical Interview [Steve Yegge] – Super Developer Steve Yegge has always written interesting takes on software development and his current AI project Gas Town is fascinating. Here he recounts his history with engineer interview processes, often well-intended but always full of mistakes. “The reality is that talent evaluation, a corner of our industry that hasn’t changed much in five-ish decades, is embarrassingly busted. It just doesn’t work that well in practice.” Memorably:

One day, the recruiters gave us a special round of packets to review. In these special packets, we were able to read the interviewer notes and candidate responses. All personal details were stripped out, and we were told it was a “calibration exercise.” We had to do our regular voting job with these special packets, and see how it went. I think we may have assumed they were from another site, since cross-site calibration was common.

Our group did our job, and voted not to hire about 2/3 of the packets. This was about par for the course.

But surprise surprise, this time, those were our own packets from when we had all interviewed at Google. The recruiters had tricked us into reviewing our own interview packets, and we had voted not to hire most of our own group.

For that brief moment, we all had a glimpse into how utterly broken our process was. The people-team had rubbed our noses in it.

So what’s changing now?

“I believe that within a few years we will mostly stop conducting technical interviews”

Will let you read the rest to find out what replaces them…

How The Sports Stadium Went Luxe [John Seabrook/The New Yorker] – Take a journey on how sports stadiums became expensive for all fans and basically serving the uber-rich.

But wealthy fans can be lured to stadiums if they’re offered “elevated” experiences that they can’t get from a screen. And, these days, there are nearly twenty-four million millionaires in the U.S. Roughly equivalent to the population of Florida, they constitute their own mass market. There are nine hundred and two billionaires—a number that has doubled in the past twelve years. (Thirty-six million people in the country live in poverty.)

The is the Next Wave of Political Fundraising [Makena Kelly/Wired] – Discords, Creators, and tens of thousands of dollars (even hundreds of thousands) raised quickly for causes and candidates. Some of it is organic, but others are astroturfed by the campaigns, lobbyists, and powerful. Get money out of politics.

If You Can’t Get a Job Today, It’s Your Fault [Auren Hoffman/Summation] – So I agree with a lot of this as ‘harsh reality you need to hear’ [ducks]. The advice I give which is most similar basically comes down to “the best way to get a job is to start doing it and then convince someone to pay you for it.” That is, let’s say you want an entry level developer relations job at a startup. There’s a difference between applying for it with just a resume vs figuring out how to, for example, start running free workshops on how to use their product, beginning to attract developers, and then showing the company what you’re doing.

I Hired a Lab to Counterfeit-Test a Dozen Suspicious Beauty Products I Bought Online. Every Single One Had a Problem [Rose Maura Lorre/Wirecutter] – TLDR, NEVER BUY A PRODUCT ONLINE FROM ANYONE BUT A LICENSED RETAILER OR THE COMPANY ITSELF. I knew this was an issue with cosmetics, supplements, etc but wow….

How Barnes & Noble Became Private Equity’s Most Radical Retail Experiment [Adam Chandler/Bloomberg] – At one time big boxes like B&N were a threat to independents. Now while I still try to support my local bookshop, I find B&N to be a great IRL alternative as well. Keeping these spaces alive is more important to me than who owns them (when Amazon is the alternative). Also support your public library!

Enjoy your weekend!

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A current topic among new’ish VCs who invest at early stages of startups – such as wonderful firms we back via Screendoor is rethinking how you communicate portfolio ‘value’ to investors. Historically you would hold your portfolio at the last priced equity round, unless there was a reason to mark it down (concern over its viability/some other negative information) or in rare cases, a reason to mark it up that wasn’t specifically related to a financing (like maybe if they turned down an acquisition offer at $X you could make the case that it’s a credible market signal?). One thing you wouldn’t do is use the cap on a SAFE as a valuation because (a) it’s not equity sale and (b) a cap isn’t a company valuation.

While this might still be ‘proper’ for accounting purposes, a few realities have evolved in recent years which make it a handicap for newer early stage managers to properly demonstrate the strength of their progress to their LPs (existing and prospective). Most notably, seed isn’t a round, it’s a phase, and so you have companies raising multiple tranches of capital over the course of several quarters (or years), and these are often all at notes of different caps. There are typically two versions of this – either the startup needs a little more money to get to the “Series A” (which totally makes sense – it’s hard to forecast exactly what you should raise, especially early on) or the founders are ‘cap maxxing’ where they do rolling closes, raising the note terms to make new investors pay more over a short period of time – sometimes even hours or days (I don’t love this – yes, it’s just the market demand but I think it gets needlessly cute/distracting/bad way to start longterm relationships).

Separately, venture investors have gotten comfortable doing meaningful SAFEs in-between priced rounds post-Series A. LOTS of reasons for this – more competition means being opportunistic to get your first check into a company and/or buying up before the next round (where pro rata might be tight); fund size increases mean the amount you have into a company matters as much as the outcome multiple; big round sizes and high valuations in general make it more possible to get larger sums in-between whereas before those would look like rounds by themselves [eg $15m isn’t a Series B, it’s an A-2 note when you anticipate it’ll help get you to a $50m Series B in a few quarters].

All of this has created an environment where earlier investors don’t always have ‘markups’ to show their LPs because they are waiting longer and longer for a new ‘price’ to be set by an equity sale. The increasingly standard way to communicate this is by adding a column to your financial reporting that’s essentially “SAFE Adjusted TVPI” alongside your more standard TVPI calculations. Note the (a) date of the recent SAFE, (b) the cap/any other terms and (c) the amount of the SAFE. Then use the cap to recalculate the ‘value’ of your ownership stake (or previous note, which technically isn’t yet true ownership), as if the company had completed an equity financing at the valuation cap. This is not accounting/auditor approved and you should not be claiming this as your TVPI in a vacuum without the other information, but it does feel like a fair enough way to chart ‘progress’ in a young portfolio. If you wanted to be really conservative you can also *not* calculate a valuation increase if you feel like a note was ‘strategic’ in purpose or otherwise not representative of the financing market, just be transparent and consistent.

Separate from the SAFE scenario, I’ve had a similar question asked to me by investors who see companies that are likely increasing their enterprise value via fast-growing revenue run rates while using this capital to delay fundraising. That is, why raise more money from investors now if you don’t need it? Just keep building! This is awesome and a very enjoyable trend.

Unfortunately, my advice to VCs here is that while you can certainly emphasize this data in your updates, it’s difficult to ‘price’ the company and you should avoid trying to do so: I see people try to apply ‘market comps’ to suggest where the startup would be valued related to peers – again, this is an interesting exercise to do and perfectly find to share this logic but I wouldn’t build TVPI around it because it’s just too dynamic and approximate an estimation. The exception might be if this is literally your fund strategy – back founders who raise investment capital early and then eschew it for years to come. In those cases, showing your investors that (a) it’s working! and (b) having some agreed upon way to calculate ‘price’ ahead of an exit/financing is a good LPAC/back office/accountants discussion.

Good luck!

Let their VC funding buy your a cocktail or coffee 😉 $20 free for signing up to use at coffee shops, bars, restaurants – mostly SF NYC LA right now. Download Blackbird and earn 2,000 $FLY when you check in for the first time. That’s $20.00 toward any meal!

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“The game on the field is changing, my competitors are raising bigger funds and so I need to as well.” I hear this from legacy and new VCs all the time. It’s true but insufficient as an operating principle and the fact almost everyone is reacting the same way speaks to the commoditization of capital (as well as the people writing those checks).

Yes startup funding is a marketplace where you need the resources necessary to deliver an attractive product to founders (capital, conviction, support), but for many, thinking about this as just a byproduct of AUM is slow motion regression towards mediocrity (albeit while collecting larger and larger paychecks from fees).

If you’re a VC and feeling pressure from the evolving landscape please start with first principles. Why do you even exist? What’s the playbook you are best suited for and what does it take to execute that strategy with excellence? How much of those resources do you already have? What do you need to acquire? What do you need to shed?

These are questions we ask Screendoor managers as they grow their own firms, and is generally part of our underwriting decision in the first place. Fund size is your strategy but not your reason for existing.

Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets I’ve taking and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $2000+ of American and United credits for me [update: WHICH I’VE SUCCESSFULLY APPLIED TO FUTURE TICKETS!!!]. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!

There’s an old saying that ‘illiquidity in startups’ is a feature, not a bug, because it keeps everyone [founders, team, investors] focused on the longterm outcome. They have a shared incentive and ‘skin in the game’ – whether it be sweat equity or capital equity.

In the year of our lord 2026 this idea seems quaint and outdated. VCs are getting rich off of fees whether they’re any good at their job. Everyone on the cap table can figure out how to monetize private company stock, whether it be via secondaries, SPVs, or forward sales. Your best team members – whether they are fearing the permanent underclass or just out to get theirs – can jump from your startup at any time if there’s a higher NPV option. Basically if they’re any good they have offers.

Some of this is positive for our community, some is not. But doesn’t matter, it’s reality.

Skin in the game is no longer sufficient. Now I look for heart in the game.

The founders who want their companies on their tombstones not just bank accounts and speaker bios. Who won’t ditch their startups for job offers that screw their angels and remaining team members. Who gives a shit?

The team that wants to show up each day (actually, symbolically, metaphorically) because the problem they’re solving is something they care about, and the people alongside them are folks who are committed to them. Not to the sacrifice of economics, but with a double bottom line.

And the investors who actually have courage. Who are willing to put something at risk for a startup. Who are about the outcome not the markup, not the content marketing. F those folks who run towards a success and away from a failure.

In my world Ambrook is a Heart in the Game startup. Bunch of super sharp people building financial tools for farmers – for the real world economy. Everyone there could likely earn more in a different job, join one of the frontier labs or Magnificent Seven. But they’re not. Because they want that double bottom line outcome – satisfaction and dollars. Read their blog – you’ll see how they’re ‘legible to talent’ not just capital. Oh and trust me, the capital is there (more news tk) but today they care more about touching grass and whether their customers can keep growing their own businesses. And it makes me so happy to support them because Heart is in the Game there.

Is your Heart in the Game? Is your CEOs Heart in the Game? Your VCs? If not….

Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets I’ve taking and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $2000+ of American and United credits for me [update: WHICH I’VE SUCCESSFULLY APPLIED TO FUTURE TICKETS!!!]. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!