Bonfire Ventures

“We got about a billion under management. We write three to four million dollar checks at the seed stage, traditional siege stage call companies have half million to million revenue. Think about your big institutional round before you'd go and raise a series. A…”

“We just raised a two hundred fifty million dollar seed fund, which I wish somebody had told me the economics of venture capital before I got into it. But a two hundred fifty million dollar seed fund means the return ten billion net exit value for the LPs to ge…”

“If your product doesn't make people go that can't work, keep trying because that's the bar for winning right now.”

“We have businesses that target one to five plumbers, contractors, et cetera. The team goes outbound with an agentic solution. They're adding a million and a half a month and their magic number is like 1.5 and their cash burns like .5 because the product does t…”

“The reality is that you're not building screens. If you have the metadata and your agent interface understands the context, you can do it in a month.”

“I was sitting with one of our AI native companies that's off to the races, went from zero to twenty million in 18 months, and I'm in their Slack feed, and dev is just releasing shit like every seven days.”

“I think the world of an AE and a separate SE are gone. I mean, unless like you're selling at the infra level and it's super technical, like I can't imagine an account executive who doesn't fundamentally understand the product.”

“In this world where your product's value prop is going to change six to 12 times a year. Onboarding reps and most onboarding programs focus on the first, like, 90 days. Oh, do they understand our product and our playbook and are they ramping? But if your produ…”

“We raised a little bit over five million in May of this year from seven, seven, six and bonfire ventures and a few others.”

“And so I'm thrilled to welcome Mark Mullen, co-founder and managing partner at Bonfire Ventures, one of LA's leading early stage funds, now on their third fund, with a hundred and one million dollars in the latest.”

“We don't do that anymore. It's really hard, right? And especially since I have a team, I can't just walk in and go, yeah, we're going to invest in this company. We need to really talk about it, get through it, understand the pluses and minuses, get people's op…”

“We have done a meeting to term sheet In nine days, which is now apparently a little bit long, I'm hearing things are happening over the weekend, but nine days is a big move for somebody investing in a seed company.”

“We're not going to move out of that. So we have a very clear focus in what we do and we do about Seven to eight, seven to nine deals a year. We'll have a 24 to 28 company portfolio, and we do about 40% of the investments are the primary check and 60% follow-on…”

“We'll maintain our pro rata in the A round. We might do a little bit in the B, and then we're done.”

“Also, we, of course, foster our relationships with the A investors, and we tend to start working and only work with A investors who we know are going to come in and say, hey, we want to put in twenty million. We're going to do 19. Figure out the one that you h…”

“Yeah, and to be honest, like, we're not, in those situations we're talking about, we're not perhaps taking the entire prorata we have, ok? So, we are managing that capital.”

“We do about seven to 10 deals a year. We will take seven board seats of those 10, right?”

“When one of us says no, the deal can happen. When two of us says no, especially two of the partners, I mean, it's not going to happen, right?”

“So any one of the five of us can invest up to 500 grand in a company that we just absolutely believe in, whether it's the founder or the business, just absolutely believe in. And it may be not even a seed round. It's maybe a An angel round, maybe a million buc…”

“Well, you can only do one or two, right? And they are being watched. So in fairness, you have a lot of almost, I wouldn't call it this way, but there is peer pressure to make sure that these Two small checks you make over a three-year period are ones that are …”

“And so we have six Scouts. We have four in LA, one in Boston, and one in San Francisco. Three men, women, three men. Diverse as well. And we've given each one of them 250,000 dollars. They are to spend it in unique opportunities which are B to B only.”

“When we spend a lot of time over time making, you know, trying to almost in reverse justify the decision we're about to make, those companies ended up not being the big winners. The ones where you come in and like, we got to do this deal. That founder is unbel…”