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.
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.
Example Companies: TaxBit, QuickNode, Chainalysis, Alloy Automation, Work OS, Flexport, Scale AI
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.
$100K Checks
Does the company:
The above is table-stakes. Afterwards, I tend to look at the following:
I move VERY quickly with only total conviction and focus on multiples with mapped out base cases of 25X+.