Last week we closed our first investment out of Indie Fund I. It may come as a surprise to some who’ve followed the early indie journey that the investment was made on a standard SAFE into a pre-product, pre-revenue, pre-company formation, company. I say surprise as many associate indie…

On stage, a few months back, I quipped that indie was “more a24 than a16z”. Although it may have sounded nonchalant, there is a lot more thought, structure, and nuance than that off-handed comment might have suggested. In most creative fields you tend to have BIG (studios, labels, publishers, etc)…

So, there I was causally reading The New York Times about a freaking ice cream shop when I realize the article isn’t about ice cream at all. It’s about risk. I wasn’t that familiar with the story of Ample Hill, its rise and fall, nor its efforts to rise again…

TL;DR- if you’ve recently been laid off, we’d like to hear what you’re thinking about doing next. I remember when I got laid off. It was 2001. I was flying high at a dot com when the market crashed and my world shattered in an afternoon. 2 kids, a mortgage…

Over the weekend I was invited to speak at the Thesis Festival, hosted by the team at Every. The event was filled with provocative ideas and I was grateful to be able to make a small contribution. I based my talk off an essay I collaborated with Evan Armstrong on…

“Raising a seed round would have been a huge mistake for us”. These words stopped me in my tracks. Here was a wildly successful founder at the helm of a business most can only dream to have built panning the path that most are marching. They continued. “If we’d have…

Over the last few months, we’ve been rolling out our new INTRO product. As part of those efforts, we launched a weekly newsletter called INTRO to Finance. The goal of INTRO to Finance is to break down complicated financial topics and financing questions into easily digestible and actionable answers. We’re…

Yesterday at the Sorenson Innovation Summit we had the opportunity to announce a collaboration with the Kauffman and Rockefeller Foundations designed to catalyze a new initiative within our current Scout Program pilot. But first, a little context. At the beginning of November, we announced plans for a Scout program as…

Nearly 5 years ago we set up a sort of sandbox to begin iterating on different models and messages for a new kind of risk capital. One that stood in stark contrast to the growth at all costs blitzscale based model which had become the dominant path for startup founders…