Hiring: Three Great Roles
Founding biz hires in NYC, venture psychology, creator 2025, cyber dinner
Long letter. lots of links. still can’t type. ball up top.
NY CoS/founding biz hires
I’ve got three portfolio companies hiring for founding biz/ops/chief of staff roles in New York right now. Getting the right person to help build each of these businesses is very important to me.
A defense-adjacent manufacturing platform is looking for a chief of staff to be the engine behind their acquisition strategy. This company is led by a repeat founder who’s building AI to acquire and transform specialized electronics manufacturers. You’ll build growth buyout models that blend traditional GBO mechanics with software-driven operational improvements, lead diligence on targets, structure transactions, and serve as analytical thought partner to the CEO. 5-7 years in IB and/or PE required, industrials/manufacturing experience required.
A dev tools company betting that the AI platform shift creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to replace foundational infrastructure is hiring a founding business generalist. The technical founder is building what could become the new standard for how humans and AI collaborate on code. He needs a right hand to run day-to-day operations while he does deep product work and closes F500 deals. Startup background is a must.
A vertical AI company building a self-driving network of agents for healthcare is looking for a gap filler/an extension of the CEO. This repeat founder has a compelling theory: LLMs make it possible to embed agents directly into existing workflows without behavior change or new tooling. The company is already moving tens of thousands of transactions and expanding fast. Prior startup experience required, open to new/recent grads with the right intensity.
Each of these companies is well-funded and led by a very experienced founder. These are opportunities for ambitious grinders to get in early at companies we’re extremely bullish on. They’re all still operating in stealth so if you’re interested, reply directly with your Linkedin and a one sentence blurb.
It goes without saying that each of these companies is also hiring engineers. The dev tools company in particular is looking for Rust engineers.
Nash equilibrium (defection)
Chris Paik wrote one of my favorite recent overviews/takes of the current venture market in psychology.
TLDR: there’s basically no upside in being disciplined, honest, self-critical, etc and disproportionate upside with relatively minimal downside to doing/being the opposite of all of those. I don’t mean to just totally black-pill everyone. I think it’s possible to carve out a lane doing things “the right way” but it requires having an investment culture and a set of very high-trust LPs. It is objectively harder and only works for the love of the game but may not be the EV-maximizing strategy.
The whole thing is worth reading (it’s two pages)but this section in particular is the most striking to me and gets at one of the core anxieties/debates.
From Chris:
The Nash Equilibrium of Defection
-If You Cooperate (Discipline) and They Defect (Chase): Your competitor wins the “hot” logo. They get the press, the markup, and the reputation for “access.” You are left with a “disciplined” portfolio of obscurities. LPs view you as irrelevant. You fail to raise your next fund.
-If You Both Defect (Chase): You both bid up the asset. Valuations skyrocket, pricing out future upside. Returns for the vintage regress to the mean. However, you both survive to play another round because you both have “access” to the category winners.
In this game, Chasing Momentum is the Nash Equilibrium. The penalty for missing the boat (career risk) is immediate and severe, while the penalty for overpaying (return risk) is delayed by 7–10 years. Therefore, no rational GP can afford to be the only disciplined investor in a momentum market.
Chris and I have yet to have a chance to work closely together though I hope that changes. He seems like a really sharp guy.
The roll-ups are still rolling
I spoke to Madeline Renbarger of Newcomer for her piece about VC-funded buyouts and roll-ups. I’ve written about this many many times before. But I think it’s worth reiterating the difference between what we’re doing and what the mega funds are doing:
The big distinction is leading w capital vs leading w product. We want to fund product companies that go to market by buying operating companies and they want to buy businesses.
We fund product 0 to 1 development to ensure that founders can underwrite transformational outcomes from future acquisitions rather than going on a buying spree before understanding where they are differentiated owners. So often that means a typical seed round upfront.
This helps preserve a lot of optionality to either remain a software company, build an operating company, buy operating companies, or some combination thereof. We’ve seen instances where businesses expected to buy companies and instead found that they can succeed by building an operating business themselves without any need for M&A at all. Leading with capital is like building a sales team before you have a product.
from the article:
Slow Ventures has funded several roll-up startups without putting up a lot of upfront capital. Instead, Slow looks to seed companies to build the AI tech needed for these roll-ups, but the founders then raise additional capital to fund these large-scale acquisitions.
Slow invested early in Teamshares, which buys up small businesses using a model that enables employees to gain an equity stake after the owners sell. Teamshares said in November that it plans to go public via SPAC. Slow was also an early investor in Metropolis, which raised a $1.6 billion equity and debt round this fall to roll-up parking lots and automate check-out with AI.
Creator 2025
This deck from Megan and the Creator team goes over the five important themes for creators this year:
People matter, brands don’t
Own the niche, not the category.
Build worlds, not products.
AI culls the undifferentiated
Short the mass market.
From their letter:
In February of this year, we closed and launched Slow Ventures Creator Fund I on the heels of a simple idea: the next great companies would be built by creators. Not celebrities or influencers, these creators are capable builders with real trust, informed insight, big ambition, and an instinctive grasp of community, storytelling, and distribution.
This fund not only represents years of quiet iteration and foundation building, but importantly, is the first institutional fund backing creators directly with seed capital. We are grateful to have LPs like MIT, University of Michigan, TIFF, Rutgers and many others support our pursuit to fund this new path for entrepreneurship.
This deck recaps much of what we’ve observed in our first year: the themes that matter as well as the ones that don’t. The best creator businesses don’t chase views, they expand their niche expertise into new worlds. They turn narrative into community, community into revenue, and revenue into durable companies. Our early investments in Jonathan Katz-Moses, Steven Bartlett, Tayla Cannon (and more!) show that this model unlocks multi-product franchises rooted in trust, mission, and execution.
Technological and cultural shifts have rewritten the means of attention, influence, and consumption, which have fundamentally changed where value is created, captured, and funded. We are in the era of the individual. But in a world of frictionless scale, the winners won’t be the loudest. They’ll be the creators who know exactly why their audience shows up and who leverage their communities to solve real problems.
Cyber Dinner
AI is breaking $1.5T of security market cap.
For 30 years, cybersecurity has worked because attacks have had known limitations. Businesses have also had a concept of control: how to secure within a perimeter, how to vet vendors, and how to remediate gaps or accept known risks. The $1.5T security market cap was built on the assumption of visibility and control. That known landscape is gone with AI.
This winter I’m teaming up with ex/ante and Outtake to host a dinner and discussion about the changing threat landscape and how new and existing security companies will meet that.
Abundance
I’ve spent the last year supporting and working with Abundance New York. This is a great organization working to build a more vibrant and dynamic New York led by people who believe our powers are rooted in growth and change.
In 2025 Abundance New York:
Won high-friction policy fights. Helped get congestion pricing back on track and passed City Charter amendments enabling fast-track rezonings and up to 130% increases in housing capacity.
Unlocked housing supply. Backed City of Yes and key rezonings in Midtown, LIC, and Jamaica, and pushed the Brooklyn Marine Terminal plan through delivering 6,000 homes (40% affordable).
Built reach and leverage. Grew to 4,300 members across 45 Council districts, generated ~$800k for aligned candidates, and launched a voter guide viewed 375k+ times that filled a real civic vacuum.
I wanted to share their annual report highlighting all of the great work they’ve done this year and the big wins they’ve put up along with an appeal to join the organization/join the fight for a brighter New York.
And now Ryder Kessler one of the co-founders of Abundance New York is leaving the organization to run for office! I hope you’ll join me in supporting his campaign for NY State Assembly to make the whole state more abundance-filled.
Hi, great post! I’ve been reading through the entire thesis here.
One question though on this part: “We fund product 0-to-1 development to ensure that founders can underwrite transformational outcomes.”
How do you measure a transformational outcome?
When you don’t own the business, in practice, the owner will rarely let you claim that the increase in margins is due to your stack. You also don’t have control over things like payroll.
It feels like you need to align the incentives from day one. Personally, I don’t see a way around equity and both sides having skin in the game. Do you see any other model?