Afore Capital

“We spoke with them on Tuesday, got the term sheet on Thursday.”

“When we started Afford 10 years ago, this year will be 10 years for us pre-seed, which has now become a category, was not a category back then. You know, it was actually a negative term, right? It was reserved for founders who could not raise a seed round, and…”

“And then I believe like a year later, they came to us and they said, Hey, we're starting this new company called ramp. Obviously we loved them. We thought very highly of them. And the idea was interesting as well, but given the repeat founders their first roun…”

“The biggest mistake I'd say we probably made is like fell in love with the idea, right? Where, where it's almost like you think, like, if I was building this company, I would, I think it's gonna be really big, but the reality is we're not building the company,…”

“In most cases, it's 10 plus years, right? And I think founders have to really, you have to be, you have to believe that the founders want this to be their last job, right? If this is working well, this, they're just going to keep, keep going with this versus l…”

“I was a seed investor in Firebase back in 2012. They sold out to Google. It was a great outcome for us, but also More importantly, became one of the most used developer tools in the world. And they helped really build that inside of Google. Then they spun out …”

“90% of our capital always comes from existing LPs. And frankly, there's always demand to do the whole fund, but we cut them back because we always think it's good to build a couple of new relationships in each fund cycle.”

“The founders of Solana when it used to be called Loom Protocol, believe it or not, we're actually in this office here that you're sitting in today. I think the first round might have been at I don't know, the high single digit post money, maybe low double digi…”

“One of the questions we ask is just, like, walk us through the, like, the last six months, right? How many customers have you talked to? What have you learned, right? How's the product changed? How's your thinking changed? Because again, I'm trying to extrapol…”

“So now we added what we call a non-core bucket, right? These are investments that we would have loved to make them core, but for whatever reason, it's out of spec. It generally is because of deal terms. It's out of spec, and it's usually repeat founders, right…”

“A company comes to mind called Koala that we invested in repeat founders, I believe, on a segment that was a pretty expensive deal for us to get into. They were doing well, they raised a series A, and then they actually got acquired by Cursor, and we got Curso…”

“I get more deal flow from founders who I have said no to, who I passed on, than founders who I've invested in, right?”

“The moment you become multi-stage, your focus shifts, and you're not able to do justice to that zero to one journey”

“A lot of the deals, we debate them internally a lot, and as long as one person is excited about it gets done. It doesn't have to be a consensus deal. No, only one person on the team has to get really excited, and obviously my co-founder and I you know, can do …”

“They're really deep in the details. You know, they're not top-down thinkers where it's like, well, you know, the McKinsey study said this market will be big, so that's what we're getting.”

“It's a weird like dichotomy, right? Because at some level you want them to go search for the truth and not be happy ears. At the same time, you need to be outrageously optimistic to build a business, you know, because it's going to suck along the way. And for …”

“My co-founder used to be on the board of their previous company called Paribus. So, and then the founders of ramp were actually one of our first LPs in fund one.”

“I want them to be able to convince people who in a rational world would not be joining your company to be able to join your company. Right. Because you're going to pay them less. You're going to make them work more. There's more risk with this company, but the…”

“So with high touch, when we invested in them, believe it or not, it used to be called carry travel.”