Fund I Update: Pragmatic Realism vs the Moonshot Pitch

Your vision isn’t big enough!

On episode 142 when the founder, Devina Desai, mentioned the possibility of selling in five years to a competitor, two of the VCs were immediately out, Cyan Banister and Ben Taft.

I’m not surprised by this response… it’s pretty common in venture. But the notion of investing exclusively in moonshot founders - with their get big or die trying mentality - is one I reject.

There are so many founder archetypes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, why limit your investment strategy to just one founder archetype?

Cyan said it’s just one of her hard rules. When a founder says they’re willing to sell early, she’s out.

And Ben had a pretty hot take on Devina:

I'm not sure she has the intrinsic drive necessary to build an unreasonably large company for an incredibly long period. Something has to be wrong with you to want to do that.

I agree that it takes an extraordinary person to want to dedicate 10-15 years of their life to build something unreasonably large. I just think some extraordinary people discover their own greatness over time.

And they might not have the most ambitious sounding pitch at the start.

I've just seen so many founders who are, I would say, pragmatic realists. And so if you ask them probably day one, what do you want to do? “Oh, I would sell.” But then once you get going, if you truly have product market fit, and you're also able to take money off the table, not loads, but a little bit, and you're comfortable, like, why would you give up something that's working? And I've just seen that happen so many times. Like, if this really starts working, she can get into the billion dollars. - Elizabeth Yin

Personally, I’d much rather invest in someone solving a big problem, then a founder pitching a big dream.

And hospital falls are a big problem.

The Pitch Fund invested $100k in Kinometrix at a $5M pre-money valuation

And Devina closed out her round at $1.5M.

Until…. last week when Devina decided to extend the round to accept a few more checks from interested investors.

Let me know if you’d like an intro!

The Pitch Fund I will close to new investors on December 15th.

If you’d like to own a piece of Kinometrix, FutureMoney, Christie’s Chips and 40+ other high-potential startups, now is your chance to invest. We only have room for 98 more investors in fund I.

If you’re not already an LP, fill out this form or reply to this email and I’ll follow up with more info.

~Josh