Announcing Founders’ Co-op VI

A lot can happen in five years. 

The last time we shared a post like this, it was both peak ZIRP and peak COVID. Seattle’s tech boom was ripping, while the Bay Area’s long-dominant role was being challenged by remote work. The Fed’s printing presses were still going ‘brrr’, blasting liquidity into every corner of the economy as they had for the previous 15 years. Software was busy eating the world.

Today, that world looks pretty different.

We’ve all but forgotten COVID, with escalating return-to-work mandates re-asserting the importance of place. After an eyeblink moment of fiscal probity, the AI bubble roared in to replace ZIRP, equally massive but with a radically narrower footprint. The Fed’s role is now being played by the Magnificent 7, but the current datacenter buildout and AI talent wars are mostly recycling gushers of free cash flow among a handful of global firms, not lifting the economy as a whole. Locally, automation expectations are actually shrinking the payrolls of our flagship tech bellwethers, highlighting just how double-edged the AI sword can be.

So we raised a new fund.

It’s the same size as our last one, $50 million. 

It’s run by the same guys, just me and Aviel. 

And it’s designed to do the same thing we’ve always done: back the most ambitious technical founding teams we can find within our region’s talent network, and help them build companies that go on to dominate their markets and raise capital from the best investors in the world (most of whom happen to be based somewhere else).

It’s not bigger, because as they say in venture, “your fund size is your strategy”. 

Our strategy has always been to be the best first-check investor in our chosen market, not to grow our AUM and wind up competing with the money-center investors our founders need for the next leg of the journey.

It’s not an “AI fund”, because that’s not actually a thing. 

All human progress comes from unreasonable people attempting impossible things. We’re lucky to be alive in the greatest era of compounding technological advancement in human history. And we expect that acceleration to continue. But no moment in the hype cycle – up to and including the current LLM wave – matters more than the people we back and the problems they choose to solve.

But there is one thing that’s different this time.

We’ve always believed in the power of community to help exceptional founders do more than even they thought possible. When we were just getting started, we partnered with Techstars to create a regional gravity well for extraordinary humans. That worked, until it didn’t. We set up shop at the University of Washington to support their innovation ecosystem (and even helped create a new VC fund dedicated to backing UW founders). But in the aftermath of the COVID shutdown we knew Seattle needed something new. 

So Aviel did what any busy VC would do and created Foundations, an invite-only community for the most talented and ambitious founders in the region. He personally built out the clubhouse, installed the network hardware, wired up the security system and wrote the software to manage the comings and goings of the hundreds of founders, investors and experienced leaders who raised their hand to help stitch our fragmented community back together. And it’s working.

So everything has changed, and nothing has. 

We have a fresh $50M to invest, and a new home to do it from. We have a few more battle scars, and some new trophies to hang on the wall. But the work is the same as it’s always been, and that’s just the way we like it. If that sounds like something you want to be a part of, you know where to find us.

With deepest gratitude to the investors who put us in business, and the founders who keep us there.

Chris + Aviel