I’ve sat on both sides of the table – building a company from a blank spreadsheet and writing checks into companies I don’t run. What I’ve noticed over the past several years is that the line between those two chairs is dissolving, and I think that’s a good thing.
The traditional venture model was built on distance. A partner reviews a deck, does diligence, sits on a board, and shows up quarterly. That model worked when capital was the scarce resource. It doesn’t work as well now, because capital isn’t the bottleneck anymore – judgment is.
Capital Is Cheap. Operating Experience Isn’t.
There’s more capital chasing early-stage companies today than at almost any point I can remember. When money is abundant, it stops being the differentiator. What founders actually need from an investor is pattern recognition – someone who has hired the wrong VP of sales, missed a product launch window, or watched a data pipeline fall over during a growth spike, and lived to fix it.
Why I Built Before I Invested
Co-founding and running 1Touch, where machine learning matches vendors and influencers inside a privacy-first commerce layer, taught me things no amount of due diligence memos ever could.
Advising Is a Different Skill Than Founding
James Deller has spent significant time advising companies and institutions on governance, reporting structure, and data-driven decision culture – the discipline of making calls based on what the numbers say rather than what the loudest voice in the room believes.
Culture Is the First Diligence Item, Not the Last
Every operator-turned-investor I respect has converged on the same realization: the spreadsheet tells you what happened, but the culture tells you what will happen next. Teams that develop people – not just extract output from them – are the ones still standing five years later.
Where This Goes Next
Capital without context is a commodity. Capital with scar tissue behind it is an advantage – for the founder and for the person writing the check. The old VC model isn’t dying because it was wrong. It’s evolving because the job changed.
