I’ve spent the past five years building and growing Confluence into one of the large media companies exclusively covering the private markets.

Now I am onto the next chapter - building an investment vehicle on top of this media business.

Here’s the quick teaser on what I’m building and where I see the most opportunity …

Fund details.png

**Outlaw is a $10m Fund I that takes borrowed concepts I gathered after talking with 500+ first-time funds and learning what gives these smaller funds an edge.**

The funds that I respect the most do three things differently than others:

  1. More than capital: They layered on some sort of service in order to win deals and help portfolio companies after the check. TCP is a great example of this (layering on the ability to hire the initial sales team for any portfolio company they work with).
  2. Access via audience: They have an owned audience of loyal followers / subscribers who can help them manufacture luck in the form of capital connections, crowdsourced diligence, and customer introductions. Julian Capital is the GOAT of this category, and he is probably the biggest influence on my thinking here.
  3. Betting against consensus: They have built a thesis in non-obvious verticals to create domain authority and to spot opportunities ignored by the masses. Founders Fund was right about aerospace before everybody else, and that won them access to SpaceX. Initialized and Ribbit were right about crypto before everybody else, and that won them access to Coinbase. Compound was right about machine learning and AI before everybody else, and that won them access to Wayve.

Here’s how I have designed Outlaw to check each of those boxes:

More than capital We help companies tell their story, get introduced to customers, and attract talent through our media business.
Access via audience Our audience is a mix of investors we can co-invest and trade ideas with, venture-backed founders we can invest directly into, and talented operators we can rely on for high-quality intros.
Betting against consensus We are betting that traditional venture metrics (gross revenue, FTEs, headcount growth, etc.) are dying and revenue-per-employee is the new vanity metric for venture-backed businesses.

I plan on doing this for the rest of my life.