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Tony Xu reposted thisTony Xu reposted thisDoorDash is launching an emergency relief program to help ease the impact of rising prices at the pump for U.S. Dashers: https://lnkd.in/e-5rJRNk
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Tony Xu shared thisIt can be hard to make sense of the economy these days. National averages can tell one story, but they rarely capture what’s actually happening on Main Street or in your neighborhood. At DoorDash, every order gives us a unique window into local economies across the U.S. We see how people are spending, earning, and showing up for their communities. That’s why we’re publishing DoorDash's first-ever State of Local Commerce report. It offers a street-level view of local commerce in 2025. Across thousands of neighborhoods, here’s what we’re seeing: -The price of a typical basket of breakfast staples is down 14% in the last six months -93% of local restaurants active on DoorDash last September are still open twelve months later -Since 2019, the share of Americans who tried dashing was fewer than 1 in 200 — that number is about 1 in 15 over the years since This isn’t some survey showing months-old data – this is what’s happening in real neighborhoods across the country each and every day. Explore the report here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gvMdbB4i
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Tony Xu reposted thisTony Xu reposted thisNo one should go hungry in America—period. Millions of families are worried about how they'll put food on the table as the federal shutdown threatens SNAP benefits for 40 million Americans. DoorDash and leading grocers are stepping up: delivering 1M free meals through food banks and waiving delivery and service fees for 300K SNAP customer orders. We know this is a stopgap, not a solution. But doing nothing simply isn't an option.https://https://lnkd.in/gGFc9wj7
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Tony Xu shared this
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Tony Xu posted thisOur goal at DoorDash has always been to grow and to empower local economies. We want to connect every local business to every local consumer. This journey started with restaurant delivery in the US and today, we've evolved into to become the delivery service for everything inside your city across 35 countries. At yesterday's Dash Forward event, we showcased several launches that discuss our progress on this evolution. Here's a summary below of what we shipped: Going Out: Use the DoorDash app now to get rewards for dining in and to make reservations. Restaurant owners will get the richest and largest datasets to build the deepest relationships with guests. DashMart Fulfillment Services: Retailers can now use DashMarts to enable same hour delivery. We'll manage the logistics of warehousing, inventory management, and delivery end-to-end for you, custom branded and fit for each retailer's needs. Dot: After 7 years of work, we're excited to introduce you to our first product in Autonomy. Dot is the only vehicle built for roads, sidewalks and all surfaces, purposefully tailored to the needs to master last mile delivery. And it's already live performing real deliveries! We also announced our Autonomous Delivery Platform that showcases our vision for a multimodal future, where we've built the logistics systems to integrate the best fulfillment options by land or air. Smart Scale: Getting orders perfectly accurate is our persistent aspiration. This is a hardware device we're launching to help Merchants get all of their orders perfect for guests across all channels. New Dasher App: We spent years building an internal mapping system, fine tuning parameters around points of entry and exit, parking amongst many other challenges to master the final 100 feet of delivery. We're excited to package this technology into a completely redesigned Dasher app to help enable more accurate and faster delivery, ultimately helping Dashers earn more. Creator Program: Taking inspiration from the foodies in our community, we're excited to launch the DoorDash Creator program. Now consumers can discover local favorites and new gems through awesome short-form videos created by experts in their community. Kroger: We're super excited to announce Kroger as our newest partner on the @DoorDash marketplace! Soon, you'll be able to get delivery from all of their 2700+ stores. Yelp: Now, consumers can order their @DoorDash order directly from Yelp! See the full list here: https://lnkd.in/g-Z4V2tg
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Tony Xu shared thisAwesome to partner with a like minded leader in Mike Sievert and the team at T-Mobile in delivering everything in the neighborhood without delivery fees and many extra perks to millions of customers!Tony Xu shared this📞 Ring ring… big news is calling! Millions of eligible T-Mobile customers can now enjoy a DashPass membership at no extra cost.* That means $0 delivery fees and lower service fees on eligible orders, exclusive DoorDash offers, and even ride-share perks— all at your fingertips. This new multi-year partnership brings even more of the good stuff from your neighborhood straight to your doorstep, whether it’s your morning coffee or last-minute essentials before a summer getaway. Click here for details on how to take advantage of this offer by August 4: https://lnkd.in/emEwCwep *See T-Mobile Perk terms here: https://lnkd.in/e6G7HFCs
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Tony Xu shared this10^10 lifetime orders! My team loves to remind me that I'm terrible at celebrating (true). But it's also true that I never thought a project in school would have reached this milestone. I'm super grateful to every merchant who has entrusted us to help them grow and become digital businesses, every consumer who has seen value in our service as part of their daily lives, every Dasher and courier who turns to us to help achieve their goals, and every advertiser who has partnered with us to invest behind growth. Finally, I'm incredibly proud of the teams DoorDash and Wolt for their hard work in getting to this place. Miki Kuusi and I reflected on the journey during a recent WeDash (where we deliver the orders ourselves, a practice that we started Day 1). We're just getting started, so join us if you want to build the future of local commerce!
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Tony Xu shared thisDoorDash has always been both a marketplace (to grow incremental sales for physical merchants) and a platform (to help merchants become digital powerhouses in their own right.) We're excited to now power delivery directly from the Starbucks app to help them continue to grow their digital business!Tony Xu shared thisWho’s ready for delivery through the Starbucks app? We are! You can now order delivery of your favorite beverages and food right to your door through the Starbucks app, powered by DoorDash. Created using the DoorDash Online Ordering platform, delivery through the Starbucks app is another example of how we’re meeting customers where they are. Online Ordering allows merchants to create their own branded mobile app, making it easier to personalize the digital experience, capture valuable customer insights, and more engaged users. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eSSSy3YE
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Tony Xu shared thisBeing a founder means being 100% in it, all the time, especially through the lows. It was fun to run down memory lane with Sequoia and discuss how DoorDash navigated moments of uncertainty to empower local commerce on a global scale. Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gxmx2nhyDoorDash ft. Tony Xu - The “Wrong” Moves That Built a GiantDoorDash ft. Tony Xu - The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant
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Tony Xu liked thisTony Xu liked thisAlmost 10 years ago , I joined a startup that IPO’d and got early shares. 🙌 I joined Sea (Shopee) in early 2017, months before its NYSE IPO at $15/share. What I remember fondly wasn’t just the equity upside rather it was watching a startup prepare for scale. I saw a company known for speed and scrappiness suddenly layer in operating rigor: controls, audit discipline, process documentation and the things people often call “bureaucracy,” but are actually what support hypergrowth. I remember hearing CEO , Chris Feng say that even as a public company, Shopee should keep operating lean like a startup! Fast forward to 2026, and it’s fascinating to watch Sea lean into AI — including building in-house models for Southeast Asia and launching an AI Centre of Excellence. That feels very Shopee to me, localized, practical and operator-led. Some stats worth appreciating: • $16.8B revenue • 52% Southeast Asia e-commerce share • Building proprietary AI for a region often underserved by global models Getting early shares was nice but getting a front-row seat to how enduring companies scale was even better. Speed gets you started. Rigor (now AI too) helps you compound. Photo credits: https://lnkd.in/e3tByrh9
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Tony Xu liked thisTony Xu liked thisMy time at Wolt and DoorDash is shortly coming to an end, so now feels like a good moment to look back and say thanks. During the past year, I’ve made great friends, partnered with wonderful people, and enjoyed being part of the Talent & Rewards Core team. I got to dive under DoorDash’s Talent Management hood, help build systems that combine (and simplify!) the best from both Wolt and DoorDash, and spend a lot of time tinkering with AI. I want to give a shoutout to the heart of the Talent & Rewards team: Haley King, Murphy Goodwin, Nick Klute, Avinash Rajaraman, Reetta Laukkanen, Lexie S., Nico Tamm, PMP, and Will Hallock. Managing the Talent & Rewards side for 10,000+ people isn’t for the faint of heart, but we always managed to have a good time together. You're truly great people. ❤️ On a personal note, I’m really proud of the two custom GPTs/Gems I built for managers and employees, CAM and NEMO. Since launching in December, the GPTs alone have supported over 8,800 conversations and 80,000 messages, and received some pretty awesome feedback. They’ll be in great hands with Tim Howd, so I’m happy that their legacy will live on in one form or another. 😃 Lastly, I’m really excited about my next adventure that will kick off soon. Before that, though, I’m taking some time off, including spending time with my 69-year-old mom. She has started going to the gym, so I’ve put together a training plan for her and am now building an app to help her feel confident lifting weights and getting stronger. I look forward to sharing updates on how this progresses! A special thank you as well to the oldie but goldie International Talent & Culture team: Shaun Rudden, France Bobet, Mark Hayton, Essi Brink, Julia Khvostova, and Jaana Jorf, plus the many others I had the pleasure to partner with! Tiger, please. 🩵
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Tony Xu liked thisTony Xu liked thisApproaching ~4 years at DoorDash and two things are true: 1/ the learning here just keeps accelerating, and 2/ the people around me are operating at a level that genuinely makes me feel behind, in the best way possible. That competitive itch never goes away -- if this sounds good, I've got two open roles on the DD CAN Growth team. ❗ Associate Manager, Growth Operations: You've been an operator before and love building. At DD, you'll launch new markets across Canada and scale them from 0 → 10x. Michael Markevich is an excellent and empathetic leader who will help you make a mark here. ‼️ Associate, Strategy & Operations: You're in the early innings, but love everything consumer experience / design / UI. Front seat at building the in-app merchandising that millions of consumers see everyday. Mahira Arif leads our cx experience team and is one of the best people managers here. Both based in Toronto. SQL / Claude-Code / Cursor skills would be a huge + 😎 DM me or these folks or through the links in the comments. And if it's not you -- tag someone it might be 🙏
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Tony Xu liked thisTony Xu liked thisOpenTable just updated its restaurant terms—and BURIED AT THE VERY BOTTOM of a long list of updates is the part that actually matters. They now require restaurants to use OpenTable as the “primary system of record” for reservations, tables, and guest management. In the same breath, they say restaurants are “free to use multiple systems.” That sounds flexible. But it's not. Here's the problem: OpenTable does not support real two-way integrations with any other major reservation platforms. So, the only way to comply? Make OpenTable the center of gravity and manually reconcile everything else into it. Restaurants trying to do this in practice run into: → Double bookings → Missing reservations → Table conflicts → Manual re-entry of reservations into OpenTable → Manual handling of sensitive diner PII That’s not flexibility. That’s operational lock-in. And when a platform: - Requires itself as the system of record - Controls reservation inventory - Doesn’t enable interoperability …it starts to look like OpenTable asserting even more control over restaurants. Not because restaurants can’t use other systems, but because the switching costs, lack of interoperability, and operational burden make it impractical to do so. The result: → Restaurants are discouraged from trying alternatives → New entrants struggle to access inventory → Innovation slows for the entire industry Restaurants should be able to meet diners wherever they are—not be forced through a single platform to stay operational. The best platforms should compete in the open, not rely on contractual fine print or technical lock-in to maintain their position. This wasn’t highlighted. It was buried. And everyone needs to be paying attention.
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Tony Xu liked thisTony Xu liked thisOne month in at DoorDash and I’m amazed by what this platform and this team make possible. A couple early reflections from the first month. First — gratitude. I’ve been blown away by the generosity of this team. So many people across the company have taken time to share context, expertise, and perspective to help me ramp quickly. Equally impressive is the team’s command of the business and the velocity at which they operate. The team has built an amazing platform where advertising and promotions drive real, measurable, and sustainable growth for merchants and brands. Second — the opportunity. DoorDash connects tens of millions of consumers with the businesses and products they rely on every day. That scale combined with high-intent consumer demand, rich first-party insights, and closed-loop measurement creates a powerful growth engine for our partners. Excited to contribute to scaling our customers success and accelerating their growth on the platform.
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Lakshmi Shankar
Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs
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Matheus Darós Pagani
Many founders and tech professionals are starting to explore the O-1 visa, often assuming that building a strong O-1 profile can be done quickly. However, based on my conversations with Jason Cheung about EB-1A and O-1 profile-building, this is not the case. Even O-1 profile-building can take months or even several years. If you want to start building an O-1 profile, begin by: - Getting involved in activities relevant to the criteria you want to target. - Speaking to reporters if you are already connected to them through your network or company. - Attending conferences to speak, which can help demonstrate your expertise in your field. To be notified first-hand about all our future opportunities like these, subscribe to our calendar of events: https://lu.ma/ventureminer Additionally, if you're interested in learning more about EB-1A and O-1 profile-building, check out Jason's profile-building opportunities database, private group, and other resources through his newsletter (only $12 per month): https://lnkd.in/deqhfpRs #eb1a #o1visa #greencard #swe #tech
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Matt Rappaport
Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation
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Jordan Steiner, CFA
"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?
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Dhruv Arora
This a seductive idea; that organization's context fragments, decision logic gets lost, and an organization is prone to tackle collective amnesia. BUT this comes with a lot of caveats!! - MONOCULTURE: When one system becomes the authoritative interpreter of "why things are the way they are", it will collapse pluralism. An organization actually benefits from various "contested memories". An engineer and sales guy remember different things from a discussion and that helps. Employees can stop arguing with the system not because its correct but its "coherent". - OBSERVER's EFFECT: When people know that the reasoning within systems is being captured, they will change what gets recorded. The negotiations will become "safer" and will contaminate raw signals. - CENTRALIZATION: Interpretation gets centralized upwards. It may appear leadership or executives are gaining synthesis and becoming closer to the ground. But there is no comparison to living through the frictions, not even eclectic summaries. LEADERSHIP MUSCLE NEEDS TO PRACTICE LIVING THROUGH FRICTION OTHERWISE IT WILL TURN SENILE. - BIAS AMPLIFICATION: Model's inbuilt biases can combine with company's cultural quirks resulting in misinterpretations and distortions, worse they get reinforced over time. System will learn how the company thinks and then will optimize for continuity. AMNESIA IS SOMETIME A FEATURE. - SEMANTIC TRUTHS: Unlike objective truths this system will play on subjectivity and will build "causal" relationships that are based on semantics. This over time can form mythical decision norms with no external validity. The real question isn't "CAN IT BE BUILT?". Of course it can be. But "HOW IT SHOULD BE POSITIONSED". #llms #leadership #ai
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Matt Crane
Episode 11 of the Summer Coworking Chronicles takes us to MassRobotics, Part 1.. We caught up with... -The Co-Founder of MassRobotics, Joyce Sidopoulos -Brian Hart, Co-Founder & CEO at Black-I Robotics, Inc. -Xinyu Wang, Co-Founder & CTO at Mito Robotics -Colleen Cronin Anderson from MassRobotics on this segment… Joyce Sidopoulos Sidopoulous, Co-Founder & Chief of Operations at MassRobotics shares.. MassRobotics is building the world’s largest innovation center for robotics. It's THE hub that people from all over the world come to because it’s where innovation in robotics happens Joyce loves the community! It’s filled with innovators, mentors who want to give back, and successful robotics companies & CEOs who return to collaborate. 👀 What should we be watching? 👀 Joyce is seeing startups in the warehouse & logistics space. There's also been a surge in healthtech, agriculture, and construction. Brian Hart, Co-Founder & CEO at Black-I Robotics, Inc. shares.. His team is building a robot worker that can move around a warehouse, pick up heavy boxes, and create a mixed case palette in real time. Their robot can put together a full mixed palette of 100 items and get it to a loading dock in ~18 minutes. Brian has built robotics companies in the Boston area for almost 20 years and leverages its ecosystem. At MassRobotics he’s been able to share information with companies using similar technology (but non-competitive) like vision systems, custom grippers, etc. 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 On the consumer side, look at Nutra Spin. It’s a smoothie in a can without the mess In robotics, check out Luminous Robotics, which is picking up solar voltaic rays and building solar farms with robots. Xinyu Wang, Co-Founder & CTO at Mito Robotics shares.. They're building an AI-powered intelligent robot for lab automation, focusing on cell culture. Cell culture is a manual task that's repetitive and takes up a lot of scientists times, freeing them up to focus on discovery work. Boston is the heart of both robotics and biotech, which the Mito Robotics team loves! What startups should we be watching? ReviMo is building an autonomous wheelchair. Elderly care and human support is a great use case for robotics and Aleksandr's work is worth people’s attention! Colleen Cronin Anderson at MassRobotics shares.. Colleen is responsible for building the community together and putting on events to make more connections. Their biggest event is coming up September 27th…The Robot Block Party in the Seaport. There will be tons of robots, interactive exhibits, and a robot parade! Be there!! 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 1.) Luminous Robotics recently was awarded a huge contract with the Australian government. 2.) Cleo Robotics just announced their new DD1 drone. Two exciting announcements (and startups) to share! The summer tour continues with MGMT Boston. Thanks to Rho and Will Panarello for supporting this series!
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Amber Illig
🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership
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Michael Fanfant
I’ve known David Meister for years and backed him at Sydecar, so I’ve seen his ability to build through complexity. Axiom Trust is taking on one of the most outdated parts of wealth infrastructure, trust administration, by pairing a regulated trust company with AI-native workflows. We're proud to invest again and congrats to the team on the launch!
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Adam Liu
Last week, Derek Xiao (Menlo Ventures) and I hosted a GenAI Infra dinner featuring fireside chats with Adam Wolff (Anthropic) and Lukas Biewald (Weights & Biases) for a room full of technical leaders. The conversation was 🔥💯 and here are my key takeaways: 1.) Code isn’t just a use case of LLMs, it’s a primitive. ➡️ LLMs don’t just generate code—they think in code. 💡 Will the future belong to chatbots or to programmable, composable agents running commands / operating like scripts in your stack? 2. Evals > Vibes. ➡️ Everyone’s building with vibes. Vibes, though, don’t scale. Both Adam and Lukas stressed the importance of rigorous evals as the backbone of production-ready agents. 💡No evals = no real progress. Without them, you’ll get stuck in a loop. 3. Developer workflows are about to change. ➡️If agents write and deploy code autonomously, what happens to PRs, CI/CD pipelines, sprint planning, and other traditional dev processes? 💡 Claude Code shifts the unit of work from “developer time” -> “agent time,” and that breaks down the workflows that our industry has spent decades refining. 4. The biggest moat here is speed. ➡️ In a world of OSS models and shrinking IP moats, velocity is key. 💡 “Everything needs to accelerate. Or you’ll be left behind.” The fastest teams will win, and that’s all that matters. Thanks again to everyone who joined us! CC: Sapphire Ventures Casber Wang Jai Das Anders Ranum David Carter Tim Tully Rama Sekhar Joff Redfern
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Micah Rosenbloom
🤝 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 (𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘁 :) Venturing in Public 12/20/25 I talk to a lot of solo GPs and the solo founders, and I always think about how my experiences are so different. My first company had four founders. My second company had five. That's not to say that solo founding or GP can't work - it does in many cases. For a certain type of investor or founder, collaboration feels like friction - time wasted in meetings when they could be executing or generating IRR. I’ve been reflecting on this because in my career has been the exact opposite. I guess I've always enjoyed teamwork. At FC we have a large, collaborative partnership for a small fund. I don't know if this is just how my risk tolerance is wired, or if I just got lucky with the people, but I’ve always bet that the team beats the individual. I get that teams dilute your ownership. In my startup days, splitting equity four or five ways meant my slice of the pie was significantly smaller from Day 1. That is rare to see these days. In venture, being a Solo GP is the fastest path to personal wealth if you win. You keep the management fees; you keep the carry. At a collaborative firm, those economics get split. But I’ve never viewed that split as a "tax." I view it as the price of admission for building something that can endure. I’ve found that the "Team Dividend" vastly outweighs the dilution, specifically in two ways: Friction Sharpening the Sword: In a solo model, you have a clear point of view and you act. It’s efficient. But in a team, you have to "get to yes." Some see that as wasted energy but I see it as quality control. Whether it's debating a product roadmap or a Series A investment, having partners who challenge your biases forces you to sharpen your thinking. The friction prevents you from believing your own hype. The "Bad Day" Buffer: Startups and venture are rollercoasters. When you are solo, a bad day is an existential crisis. When you have partners, one person can be down while the other is up. I always try divide and conquer. Five founders meant we could swarm problems and a founder could touch all functions. In Venture, I have blind spots. When I miss something, a partner catches it. When I’m burned out, the firm keeps moving. There is immense pride in the solo journey, and for some, the internal dialogue is sharper than any group discussion. Their superpower is singular vision. But for me, the joy of this business isn't just in the winning - it's in the shared experience of the build. I’ve found that while I might own a smaller piece of the pie, the team makes the pie bigger, the probability of success higher, and the journey a hell of a lot more fun. Are you wired for the speed of solo or the resilience of a squad?
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