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Long-term thinking in venture capital is dead.
The life’s work of the world’s best founders is often treated as just the next mark-up or shiny object that helps an investor get promoted or their firm raise a new fund. Winning and announcing a “deal” has become more important than rolling up your sleeves to get to work for a decade. Repeatedly investing in the same growth-stage “startups” at public company valuations has become more attractive than taking genuine early-stage risk.
The industrialization of venture capital has driven long-term thinking out of the room, obscuring a simple truth: that no matter how quickly a startup grows its revenue, headcount, or funding, it takes time and real risk to build a generational company. Sometimes, it even takes multiple startup attempts for a founder to discover and achieve their life’s work.
At Caffeinated, we offer founders pursuing their life’s work an alternative to the hype cycle: the luxury of long-term thinking. Our founders do not have to deal with a rotating cast of partners or complex partnership dynamics. We are a small team with no internal politics or promotion ladders. We are not lone wolves. We value personal relationships, not personal brands, and work together on every investment. None of our investments are options; we invest when we genuinely want to work with you for decades. And we pride ourselves on knowing what it takes to build exceptional companies after decades of personal partnerships with some of the world’s best founders.
With the luxury of long-term thinking, founders can put a dent in the universe. They can solve the world’s most important problems. They can reduce the cost of basic goods like capital, payments, insurance, energy, and transportation. They can identify and solve diseases like cancer and diabetes, the greatest drags on human health. They can make life and work more rewarding, productive, and creative. They can make the world safer with better platforms, software, and operations. And they can build valuable things we never could have anticipated.
We support founders building category-defining companies that will last for lifetimes. Nothing inspires us more than a high-integrity founder pursuing a transcendent goal that is the culmination of their life experience. These founders are aggressively optimistic about the future, and so are we. We are proud to have led Airtable’s Series B when no one else wanted to; to have led Saronic’s Series A before defense tech became hot; to have co-led and led Varda’s Series A and Series B, respectively, before its first launch to space; to have become the first and then largest investor in Virta Health before it scaled its care model; and to have become the first and then largest investor in Aven after consumer lending fell out of favor.
Our promise to our founders is personal: we will take genuine early-stage risk alongside you. We will be your partner every step of the way – investing our time, effort, and capital to help you achieve your life’s work.