The future of venture probably belongs to whoever gets closest to company formation. Not just funding companies. Actually helping create them.

We've built 33 companies across 7 studios at Bifrost. That number matters less to me than what company 34 inherits. Data. Playbooks. Infrastructure. Operators. Mistakes we've already paid for. Starting another company shouldn't mean starting over. If it does, we've learned nothing.

Venture capital has spent years making access artificially difficult. Warm intros. Closed networks. Private dinners. “Proprietary deal flow.” Then everyone complains they're seeing the same founders and the same companies.

One of the hardest things for a founder is admitting that something which used to work doesn’t anymore. The product got you here. The sales motion got you here. Maybe even the market got you here. That doesn’t mean any of them get a lifetime contract. Startups have a nasty habit of making yesterday’s good decision tomorrow’s problem.

I think venture capital has an accountability problem. If a company succeeds, the investor saw something everyone else missed. If it fails, the founder couldn’t execute. Convenient arrangement. Building companies at Bifrost makes that excuse much harder. We’re involved early enough that bad hiring, weak validation, poor GTM and wasted capital can also be our mistakes. I actually like that. If investors want more influence over how companies are built, they should probably accept more responsibility for what happens next.

The safest investment in venture usually looks obvious. Unfortunately, by the time it looks obvious, everyone else wants it too. That’s a fairly expensive way to avoid being wrong.

Founders are terrified someone will steal their idea. I’d be more worried if nobody wants to. Once a market starts working, competitors are coming. Your advantage has to survive other smart people figuring out that the opportunity exists. Secrecy has a very short shelf life.

There’s something strange about raising a larger fund and then celebrating that you can write larger checks. Of course you can. The harder question is whether having more capital actually made you a better investor. Fund size and investing skill are two very different numbers.

VCs take references on founders all the time. Founders should ask for references on investors too. And please don’t call their biggest winner. Call the founder who missed plan, struggled to raise the next round and eventually shut the company down. That’s the reference I’d want.

The funniest person in venture is the investor who “knew from the first meeting.” Especially when you find out they passed twice before investing in the Series B. Everyone remembers their winners with incredible clarity.

FOMO might be the most powerful due diligence tool in venture capital. A deal sits around for six weeks. Nobody moves. One respected fund commits. Suddenly everyone has 48 hours to make a decision. Amazing what new information a term sheet contains.

I’d trust a VC more if they could immediately tell me the best company they ever passed on. No excuses. No “it wasn’t right for our thesis.” Just: “We got this one completely wrong.” If you’ve invested long enough and don’t have one of those stories, I have questions.

Founders will spend six months choosing an investor who might own 10% of the company. Then choose a cofounder over three coffees. That person may own half the company and sit next to you during every crisis for the next decade. Maybe diligence that relationship too.

Venture has a wonderful feature where another investor paying more for your shares can make you look smarter overnight. No new customers required. No new revenue required. No exit required. Just a higher price. Probably worth remembering when everyone starts celebrating paper returns.

I don’t want our venture studio to become great at launching companies. Launching is easy. I want company #50 to have advantages company #5 never had. Better data. Better operators. Better processes. Fewer repeated mistakes. Otherwise we’re just starting startups with a nicer logo.

Every VC is founder-friendly when the company is growing 300%. I’m more interested in how they behave when the round fails, the numbers miss and nobody else wants to invest. Bull markets create a lot of very supportive investors.

Some founders are difficult because they’re difficult. Others are difficult because they refuse to do stupid things just because important people suggested them. Learning the difference is a useful skill for investors.

Nothing ages faster than a VC saying a great company is “too expensive.” A $20M valuation looks outrageous. Then the company works. Two years later everyone is fighting to invest at $200M. Price matters. Missing the company matters more.

Building companies at Bifrost has changed how I think about VC portfolios. Investors usually diversify because they know some companies will fail. We get to work on the failure rate itself. Better validation. Better systems. Lessons carried from one company into the next. Portfolio construction gets a lot more interesting when you can influence what happens before the investment memo is written.

One of the strangest VC flexes is bragging about how many companies you’ve invested in. 50 companies. 100 companies. 200 companies. At some point I want to know how many founders you can actually help when five of them call on the same terrible Tuesday.

Pro-rata rights are funny. An investor spends years telling a founder to take enormous risks. Then the company starts working and suddenly the investor’s biggest concern is making sure they don’t get diluted. Conviction gets much easier once everyone else has it too.