Investment Thesis

What are Picks and Shovels?

Picks and shovels are the infrastructure/tools for other people to make/own verticals.

Very simply, picks and shovels are tools to sell to customers digging for gold.

What Industries Do You Invest In?

Generally: agnostic. However, I am most intrigued by companies building infrastructure for fintech/crypto or who sell infrastructure and tools to legacy industries: the boring, the mundane, the whacky.
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Example Companies: TaxBit, QuickNode, Chainalysis, Alloy Automation, Work OS, Flexport, Scale AI

What Stage?

Idea/Pre-Seed/Seed

The earlier, the better.

When a 1% founder, building a picks and shovels company, obsessed with their customer demographic and a clearly identified market gap emerges, my goal is to be the first fund they think of chatting with.

What Size Check Do You Write?

$100K Checks

What Do You Look For In an Investment?

Does the company:

1. Sell picks and shovels
2. Identify clear market gaps
3. Are obsessed with their customer

The above is table-stakes. Afterwards, I tend to look at the following:

1. How does the founder think/approach problem-market fit?
2. Does the founder have an expert level understanding of the customer demographic?
3. How will the founder get unfair access to their customers?
4. How often is the founder talking to the customer?
5. Does the founder have specific people from their network to hire?

I move VERY quickly with only total conviction and focus on multiples with mapped out base cases of 25X+.