Our own money, on our own terms.

What we look for

The same shape of problem we like to build into ourselves: work that is unglamorous, structurally awkward, and currently being done by hand. We are drawn to companies whose economics work at a modest size, because a business that only makes sense at enormous scale has borrowed its optimism from somewhere.

Beyond that we are looking at the founders more than the deck. Do they operate the thing they built? Do they know, specifically and without flinching, where it is currently bad? Can they explain what they will delete next, rather than only what they will add? Those three questions have told us more than any market-size slide.

How we behave once we are in

• We do not ask for control. No board seat as a condition, no veto over ordinary decisions. We bought a share of what you are building, not a share of your judgement.
• No manufactured urgency. There is no fund life to accommodate, so we will never push a company toward a raise or a sale to suit our own timetable.
• Help is offered, not invoiced. We are operators. Architecture reviews, hiring, pricing, the awful parts of running production — ask and it is yours. We do not charge advisory fees to companies we have invested in.
• Quiet by default. We do not publish a portfolio, announce cheques, or use a founder’s name in our own marketing without being asked to. What a company tells the world about its cap table is the company’s decision.

What we are not

We are not a fund. We have no limited partners, we do not manage outside money, and we are not raising any. That places a real ceiling on what we can write, and we would rather be straightforward about the ceiling than imply a balance sheet we do not have. If the round you need is larger than that, we will say so in the first conversation rather than the fourth.

Nothing on this page is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or an invitation to invest.

If you are raising

Use the contact form and pick I am raising. A few paragraphs beat a deck: what the thing does, who is paying for it today, what is currently broken about it, and what you would do with the money. We read everything and reply either way — a slow no is worse than a fast one, and we have been on the other side of enough of them.