Hunter Walk
Partner & Co-Founder, Homebrew · 2 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
investorfounderexecutiveoperator@hunterwalk ↗LinkedIn ↗hunterwalk.com ↗
Hunter Walk co-founded Homebrew with Satya Patel, backing breakout startups including Chime, Plaid, Gusto, and Cruise before shifting the firm into a self-funded evergreen vehicle. Prior to venture capital, he led consumer product management at YouTube after working on Google AdSense and Linden Lab's Second Life.
27statements → 11claims → 2claims resolved → 3.89/5average certainty → 2.04/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 35said about them ↓
1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 9 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
6 predictions · 5 assertions · 2 opinions · 8 insights · 5 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Hunter argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →
4.5 / 5
directness 4.8 · coherence 4.9 ·
precision 4.3 · compression 4
answered every one of 27 assessed questions directly
This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →
How they sound: speaking style how? →
268 words/min while actually speaking · 14.7 um and uh per 1k words · 12.7 false starts per 1k · 30.1% of pauses land inside a clause
Measured by listening to the audio itself: 14,956 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →
How the interview went all their pushback → series average →
Across 2 rated episodes:
host pushback ▾ 2.5/10
setup questions received 57%
host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 5:38“Were you not concerned that actually you would lose the outliers with the consensus decision making that you both had to love it?” ▶ 28:30“Does that not put you in a little bit of an uncomfortable position because you're not leading rounds and you're not an angel.” ▶ 57:03“Is there a misalignment between GP and LP when it comes to liquidity and selling?” ▶ 12:15“When the milestones aren't hit at seed, and we progress into that murky patch, seed plus, bridge, you know, seed A, whatever we want to call it, what I'd love to know from you is h…” ▶ 21:39“Do you think the advancement of tech and the kind of exponential progression of deep tech that we're seeing will worsen or will help income inequality in the future?” ▶ 16:18“Are you a victim of FOMO?”
when Hunter pushed back ▶ 29:03“Oh, oh Harry, you're thinking like such a fund manager, because I said a hundred to 500 K, and you're immediately thinking that means we go and want to take the 500 K.” ▶ 1:01:17“Wait, no, let me finish. Let me finish, Eric.” ▶ 2:31“I was going to try to hold off until I'd actually returned some money to my investors, uh, so I could legitimately call myself a VC, but I guess if that was the bar for appearing o…” ▶ 5:52“First thing is, I love to piss them off by calling them late stage, even though you're doing A's and B's.”
Everything Hunter Walk said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Walk: VCs refusing founder liquidity risk exploiting entrepreneurs while collecting fees
“Like the very least you're missing opportunities to de-stress founders in a way that will increase the probability of a wonderful outcome. And at the worst, you know, you're exploiting, you know, founders who have all their eggs in one basket, you know, while …”
Hunter Walk: There is no Series A crunch in tech
“I tend to be on the side that there is no Series A crunch in the sense that I have yet to find a company that I thought should be able to raise a Series A fail to do so.”
Walk: Overcapitalized startups face silent disappearance, low-value acquihires, or noisy collapse
“And so I think for most of those companies, layoffs are going to turn into silent disappearance low value acquihires or noisy collapses.”
Walk: Consensus decision-making is foolish for venture funds with 3+ partners
“If there were three or more of us, consensus would be You know, a foolish goal wouldn't serve us or the founders well.”
Walk: Homebrew never missed an outlier investment due to consensus rules
“We look back And we've struggled over 10 years to find an occasion where lack of, you know, if there was lack of consensus, it meant we didn't do the deal. And I don't think we have any, you know, quote unquote outliers that were, you know, false negatives bec…”
Walk: De-risked seed investing does not exist
“I don't think there's such a thing as like, De-risked seed. Like you should be betting on companies that in a success scenario can be wildly, wildly successful and worth a, you know, incredible amount of capital and want, you know, to own a percentage of those…”
Walk: Raising a $200M-$300M fund would have sacrificed team happiness
“Raising 203 hundred million dollars, you know, like some of our peers and going to market in a model where we brought on another GP, we expanded our team, we brought on another platform person. Like, I actually think we could, you know, Hit exceed our benchmar…”
Walk: Venture fund size dictates investment strategy
“People attribute this to Mike Maple's affiliate and it's a hundred percent true. Like your fund size is your strategy, right?”
Hunter Walk: All Homebrew startups hitting milestones raised Series A
“And what I'll say, at least through first fund and, you know, starting to get halfway through our second fund, is when we and our founders agree on those milestones and they hit those milestones, none of them have had problems raising an A round.”
Walk: Homebrew only raised capital from LPs supportive of equal partnerships
“The LPs we ended up with were all LPs who were excited about equal partnerships. The ones who passed on us were ones that wanted a single key mat, like this notion of, well, it's great to have multiple GPs, but at funds under a hundred million dollars, we real…”
Walk: Homebrew launched with explicit commitment to no firm growth or succession
“We also started with the idea of no succession plan, no growth.”
Walk: Success does not solve unaddressed co-founder disagreements
“And I think a lot of those tensions are often what caused conflict either because they weren't discussed early enough or because there's disagreement from the get-go and you figure, you know, success will solve all things. And that's not true.”
Walk: Homebrew took less allocation than offered in 10 of 11 deals
“In 10 of the 11 investments that we made last year, we were offered more allocation than we took, because what we care about is really sort of working with great founders and great co-investors.”
Walk: Homebrew now prioritizes lead investor quality for seed participation
“We used to not care who the other investors were. We're like, we're going to help you and we'll get other people great around us. Now we actually care about quality, you know, of the lead investor.”
Walk: Downturn will worsen for Series A-D startups lacking investability
“I think it'll get worse for series A through D companies that can't remain, you know, sort of like default investable.”
Walk: Several Homebrew portfolio companies delayed IPOs despite being ready
“You know, we have a few that I think could have been public, you know, already, but have decided, you know, for various reasons to hold off, and I think when they become public, they'll be even stronger companies.”
Walk: Venture slowdown will benefit early product-market fit startups
“And so in some ways, I think part of our portfolio that's really going to benefit from the slowdown Are the early product market fit, you know, companies that now have some capital in the bank, but don't have to, aren't getting the crossover investors, pitchin…”
Walk: Investor-founder relationships do not improve after writing a check
“If it doesn't feel right before you write the check, it definitely doesn't get better after.”
Hunter Walk: Early-stage investors must back misunderstood companies
“So I'd say Lemkin is totally correct when you're playing in a space where the goalposts are well documented. But I think as an early stage investor, you also need to be willing to back companies that are going to be misunderstood for a long period of time and …”
Hunter Walk: Founder-market fit is Homebrew's primary investment evaluation criterion
“I think if Satya and I had to make a decision about any one quality that was present or not present in terms of impacting a investment decision, it would probably be something around founder market Or the why, why are they building this company?”
Hunter Walk: Most seed deal flow is dark and limited to few funds
“Because most of the, you know, at the seed stage, deal flow is more, I think, about what I'd call sort of dark deal flow. Deals that don't get seen outside of a handful of funds than necessarily 50 funds all fighting over and tracking the same company.”
Walk: Homebrew will cap at five or six funds, avoiding intergenerational scale
“We want to stay focused on early stage companies that we can put not just capital, but time behind. So it means a relatively concentrated investment philosophy. And, you know, we want our legacy to be the companies that we worked with over five or six funds, n…”
Walk: Homebrew uses external 360-degree feedback interviews with founders every two years
“We do three, six used to do every other year, like an externally led, 360 degree feedback real process with our founders and some of our co-investors. Not, you know, like a survey, you know, or an NPS score, but like, Talking 30 minutes to each of our founders…”
Walk: Homebrew co-founders had millions saved before starting the fund
“I think, like, not that this is, you know, sort of unspoken, because I think we've both talked about this, but, like, we also started this later in our careers, right? Like, we were both in our, you know, mid-late thirties, and I think it's, like, we both We w…”
The other half of the tape: Hunter Walk's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 33 times in 20 episodes on 20VC. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 16Joe Fernandez 4Ethan Kurzweil 4John Fein 2Sean Brecker 1Mac the VC 1Jonathan Abrams 1Jason Lemkin 1
Statements about Hunter Walk, by other people (2)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Semil Shah: Lessons Learned Scaling from a $1M to a $50M Fund | 20VC #951 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Cold Email Tips; Why Only 15% of Founders Listen to their VCs | 20VC #954 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mac the VC on the Journey from Homeless To Becoming A VC | Full Interview with Harry Stebbings · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: The Ultimate Episode For Emerging Managers: How To Determine How Big A Fund To Raise, What Is The Right Closing Strategy With LPs & Why We Will Not See The Eradication of Pre-Seed with John Fein, Founder & Managing Partner @ Firebrand Ventures
- 20VC: Scott Belsky on Why We Must Challenge Our Faith In The Strength of Resources, Why We Must Rethink The Product Creation and Design Process & How To Determine Between The Good and The Truly Great When Assessing Individuals
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode
- 20VC: The Biggest Lessons From Working Alongside John Doerr, How To Optimize The Speed of Investment Decision-Making & Why Saying No Graciously Is The Most Important Thing with Shabih Rizvi, Founding Partner @ Gradient Ventures
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Bessemer's Ethan Kurzweil on How To View Pattern Recognition and Deal With The Anti-Portfolio, The Next Frontier In Developer Focussed Businesses & Why eSports Is Interesting Again
- 20VC: Why Cheque Size & Follow On Decision-Making Does Not Matter, Why Intelligence Is Overrated & Why You Should Do Everything You Can To Make Other People Successful with Anthony Pompliano, Founding Partner @ Full Tilt Capital
- 20VC: Explosion of First Time Funds, Only 1 Mega Fund Raised: What The Heck Happened in Q1 Venture Markets with Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures
- 20VC: Why Every Founder Should Bootstrap Their Startup, How To Solve Information Asymmetry Between Founders and VCs & Living In A Cupboard For Two Years To Fund StyleSeat with Melody McCloskey, Founder & CEO @ StyleSeat
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing
- 20VC: Maximising Engagement and Retention on Mobile & Why There Should Always Be Availability To A Free Product with Sean Brecker, CEO @ Headspace
- 20VC: Raising A Solo GP Fund & Why They Are So Prominent Today with Charles Hudson, Managing Partner @ Precursor Ventures
- 20VC: From Netscape To Friendster To Nuzzel: Jonathan Abrams on A Silicon Valley Adventure
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Homebrew’s Hunter Walk & Satya Patel: Why $100M is Not Enough to Execute a Seed Strategy | | Jan 31, 2023 | 47m |
| 20VC: Homebrew's Hunter Walk on Why There Is No Series A Crunch, How To Package Portfolio | Apr 3, 2017 | 20m |