Going Solo

ตอน

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  From OpenAI Employee to Venture Capitalist | Jenny Xiao, Leonis Capital 04.10.2026 42นาที

  Jenny Xiao came to venture from research. Following a PhD at Columbia, she landed an early seat at OpenAI during the run-up to ChatGPT, and had a front-row view of a venture industry that, in her telling, was still funding NFTs while the actual technological shifts were happening in labs nobody was paying attention to.Jenny is now a Partner at Leonis Capital, a research-driven fund she co-founded straight out of OpenAI to fix the problem she kept running into: most VCs don’t fully understand the technology they’re investing in.In this episode of Going Solo, we discussed:* The best AI products always arrive ahead of the model. Lovable started as GPT-Engineer years before Sonnet 3.5 made vibe coding actually work. Jenny only backs founders who can see 12-18 months down the model capability curve, because the ones building for today’s models are usually building something a bigger lab commoditises within a year.* Leonis’ algorithm is better than they are at picking winners. Leonis backtested its internal founder-scoring system against 20,000 companies, and it beat the partners. Everything the fund knows (CRM data, memos, judgment) lives in a single GitHub repo so an AI agent can query it instead of asking a human where a five-year-old file went.* “Founder first” has become “founder only”. Jenny argues that plenty of investors now use “I just back great people” as cover for not understanding anything else about a market. Her question: how do you even prove you’re a good judge of character?* Most “neo labs” are the wrong shape for venture money entirely. Leonis mapped 119 of them across capital needs and speed to revenue. Only 8% fit the traditional venture model; 60% need OpenAI-sized capital without OpenAI-speed monetisation, which is a much better fit for sovereign wealth than a ten-year VC fund. We also got into why open-source models are closing the gap on closed-source ones faster than anyone expected, why she thinks Anthropic’s current lead is more fragile than the market is pricing in, and her view that the next ten years of AI is less about assistance and more about software making decisions on our behalf.Hope you enjoy it.DG This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  Only 21 in 20,000 funds can repeatedly pick winners | Saul Klein 14.09.2026 45นาที

  This is part two of my conversation with Saul Klein, co-founder of Phoenix Court Group. Saul talked about his investment in Wise and why he’d back founder Taavet Hinrikus to chop lettuce. The story started eight years before Phoenix Court actually signed a term sheet. Saul had worked with Taavet at Skype, so by the time Wise turned up at a Seed Camp demo day, his conviction had nothing to do with the pitch.Phoenix Court is turning founder evaluation from an art into a science. They have spent eleven years building an internal system called Nazare, which collects sentiment across ten dimensions from everyone who meets a founder, and is starting to use that history to flag when a team might be about to repeat a mistake it has made before.There’s more that makes Phoenix Court unique. For Saul, fund size should be treated as a discipline rather than a fundraising target. Local Globe stays at roughly £150 to £170 million, Latitude around £200 million, and Solar around £250 million, sizes Saul says the firm has committed to for its next three fund cycles regardless of what LPs might prefer. Basecamp, the vehicle Phoenix Court uses to back emerging managers off its own balance sheet, charges no fee at all.Saul’s advice to anyone starting out as a solo GP? Get started. For the first couple of funds, he says, the only thing LPs can really diligence is whether you get into good companies and whether founders rate you, and neither requires a large cheque.We finished on where Saul thinks this all goes over the next twenty years, including his hope for a version of the Silicon Valley model that isn’t winner takes all, and what it would take to build many new Palo Altos.Part one covers his path from LoveFilm and Skype into venture, and the recent decision to restructure Phoenix Court as a company with a foundation as its largest shareholder. Worth listening to that part first if you haven’t already.Hope you enjoy it.PR This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  Why we made Phoenix Court a limited company | Saul Klein 07.09.2026 45นาที

  A few weeks ago, the legendary investor and entrepreneur Saul Klein joined me in the Odin offices. Saul is co-founder of Phoenix Court Group, which runs Local Globe, Latitude and Solar, and has backed the likes of Wise, Monzo, Mistral and Figma. It was a long conversation, which we’re publishing in two parts.In part one, we dive into Saul’s unusual journey into venture: from co-founding DVD-by-post business Video Island, to joining Skype in its early years, before investing at Index Ventures and eventually starting what became Phoenix Court.Knowing the right time to step aside and let others lead. Saul left LoveFilm to join Skype not long after the merger that created it, and has since handed several Local Globe-backed businesses over to operators he considers better suited to running them than he is. His logic each time was the same: if there are people who can do the job better, get out of their way.Phoenix Court recently restructured to become a limited company rather than a partnership, a move only a very small number of the 20,000 active VC firms globally have made. Being a limited company, rather than an LLP, lets the firm keep profits on its balance sheet instead of distributing them to partners every year. Saul argues this enables longer-term decision making. The firm’s largest shareholder is now a foundation that grants most of its funding within a mile of the office.A common theme in our Going Solo episodes is how seed investing is one of the most commoditised businesses there is. With around 20,000 active VCs offering essentially the same product, cash, Saul compares the category to a street of identical hairdressers. The real question for any fund is why a founder should choose to work with you over any other shop on the same road. Saul cites research showing that just 2.4 percent of the stocks traded globally since 1990 accounted for effectively all the value created in public markets. His own numbers for seed are similarly narrow: a 1.3 percent chance that any given investment reaches $100 million in revenue, and a 1.8 percent chance it becomes a unicorn. By his count, only 21 of roughly 20,000 active funds worldwide have picked more than ten of those companies at seed.He borrows a line from Benchmark’s Andy Rachleff: back surfers, not waves. A big enough trend, AI, cloud, whatever comes next, will always attract thousands of investors. The actual job is picking founders who will still be riding waves twenty years later, which is why Phoenix Court’s whole model is built around backing people as early as possible.Part two will come out next Sunday, and covers the origin story behind backing Wise, how Phoenix Court has spent eleven years building an AI system for evaluating founders, and Saul’s advice for anyone starting out as a solo GP. If you can’t wait to watch it, you can check out the whole conversation on YouTube.You can also check out Saul’s Substack, here.Hope you enjoy it.PR This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  From Facebook's Early Days to a Solo $10M Pre-Seed Fund | Helen Min, Articulate Capital 16.08.2026 37นาที

  Our latest episode is with Helen Min, founder of Articulate, the $10 million pre-seed fund she launched this year and runs solo, and venture partner at True Ventures.Helen has spent twenty years in San Francisco, most of it as an operator rather than an investor. She was an early product marketer at Facebook, ran marketing and communications at Plaid through the years it positioned itself as the infrastructure of fintech, and worked at AngelList through the peak of the ZIRP years before starting her own fund in 2021.Some highlights from the conversation:Angel track records don’t count for as much as you’d think. Helen made around thirty angel investments before starting a fund, some of them genuine winners, but LPs told her repeatedly that writing small personal cheques doesn’t equate to managing outside capital. She agrees with them: the skills involved, and the discipline required, are simply different.She invests before founders have a pitch deck. Getting to know a founder can take weeks or months, because what she is underwriting isn’t the pitch. It’s evidence that someone has stuck with a hard problem for a long time. Across fifty-five investments, and a stretch spent studying AngelList’s own data, that is the only pattern she has found that reliably correlates with good outcomes.Nearly two decades as an early employee shaped how she thinks about secondary sales. At Facebook, and later at Dropbox where Mark Zuckerberg was an advisor, the culture was that employees simply didn’t sell before a liquidity event. That background makes her sympathetic to founders who want investors to hold for the long run, at a time when LPs are pushing fund managers for a clearer liquidity strategy.Venture has gone from a cottage industry to one where your neighbour might be a VC without you knowing it. Helen traces the shift to the ZIRP years and the pandemic, when low rates and remote work pulled far more capital and attention into the asset class. She worries that the resulting scrutiny has made tech an easy target, just as its most democratic quality, the fact that outcomes there are far less gated by pedigree than in law, finance or consulting, gets lost in the noise.We also got into her early run co-managing a syndicate where only CMOs were allowed in as LPs, the advice from AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant that she still gives to new angels today, and why she thinks the true measure of a fund manager is committing to the job for twenty years, not eight.Hope you enjoy it.DG This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  How Chaotic Capital Bets on Founders, Pre-Idea | Alex Miller, Chaotic Capital 02.08.2026 43นาที

  A few weeks ago I jumped on a call with Alex Miller, co-founder of Chaotic Capital, the early-stage fund he runs with Julie Fredrickson. Their thesis is that the world is too chaotic to predict, so the only thing worth betting on is a founder’s ability to adapt to it.Alex came to venture from outside the industry. Concert producer, conference producer for Jason Calacanis, eight and a half years at StackOverflow building the private Q&A business, and now also runs a Bitcoin-focused developer tools company on the side of Chaotic Capital.Some highlights from the conversation:* They invest before there’s even a company. Chaotic Capital’s best deals have come from meeting a founder while they’re still working on something else, sometimes months before the real idea appears. What they’re underwriting isn’t the pitch. It’s how fast someone updates their beliefs once the world proves them wrong.* Almost all of their sourcing happens in Twitter DMs. Julie finds founders by being visible online, and Alex says that if someone can’t communicate clearly and asynchronously in that format, they won’t manage as a founder either.* “Be smarter, cheat, or be first” — Alex rules out cheating, isn’t confident that being smart is a reliable advantage, so being first is the only remaining edge. That makes early conviction a necessity, not just a virtue, and explains why he’s unmoved by people calling him for access once a company is consensus.* Monitoring is largely dead, so capital formation is now the job. With thirty-plus names on a hot company’s cap table, no single investor is really watching for problems. What an early cheque can still offer is help raising the next round, not oversight.We also got into the origin story behind Valar Atomics (there’s a fascinating great grandfather x Manhattan Project detail in there), why GP-to-GP relationships matter more than LP relationships early on, and why Alex and Julie live off-grid outside Bozeman, Montana.Hope you enjoy it.DG This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  The Anti-Fund: One Investor's Bet on SPVs | Enrico Mellis, Animal 09.07.2026 51นาที

  Enrico Mellis spent a year at the startup that became Foodora, nearly five at Project A, and four and a half more at Lakestar. In November 2025 he launched Animal: no fund, no management fee, just his own check going in first on every deal, with a small group of angels invited in behind him.Here’s what stuck with me:* Venture is really three jobs wearing one trenchcoat: sourcing, selecting and supporting. Enrico believes most angels and family offices are better than VCs at supporting, since they don’t have to manufacture an opinion just because they sit on a board. Where they lose out is sourcing, because founders worry an unfamiliar name on the cap table sends the wrong signal. Wrapping them into one “Animal SPV” line solves that: founders get hand-picked help without the signalling risk of a dozen unknown names.* Venture capital is bottled water, and most of the industry still won’t sell it like one. Enrico’s comparison: Perrier turned tap water into a premium product through positioning alone, and venture should work the same way. Most managers still act as though marketing is beneath them, a habit left over from when there were 10 firms rather than 10,000.* Saying “not for me” is a superpower most VCs lack. Enrico tells founders immediately when he’s out, something he thinks most VCs struggle with. It isn’t that they’re difficult people; partners at bigger firms need to keep the option of saying yes later, in case a colleague talks them into the deal. As a solo GP, there’s no colleague to answer to.* His own check has to actually hurt. He writes it first, before anyone else’s money goes in: comfortably under €50k, yet well above a typical angel ticket. He’s still surprised nobody has ever asked him to prove it. The number matters less than whether writing it cost him something.There’s also a fun detour into the AI setup he’s built to match his network of angels to founder requests (his assistant is literally named Wolfie), and his theory that you don’t need much capital to be a great investor, just patience and enough obsession to keep going.Hope you enjoy it,DG This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  Investing in Products with Community at their Core | Sarah Drinkwater, Common Magic 23.06.2026 48นาที

  A few weeks ago I sat down with Sarah Drinkwater, founder of Common Magic.Sarah came to venture from the outside. Journalist, club night runner, vintage clothing shop owner, operator, angel. Her journey looks nothing like a straight line. As you often find, that’s kind of the point.Her fund, Common Magic, backs products with community at their core, building on her experience creating products with community at their core, from music nights to Google Maps.There are a few things she said that resonated strongly for me:* Companies don’t usually die because they run out of money. They die because emotional capital runs out first. Co-founder misalignment, a loss of belief, or something else that’s a drain on vibes. Across 68 investments, Sarah said the pattern is consistent. What I took away from this is something you hear frequently, which is that true passion and a deep “why” behind what you are building are vitally important. I think this is especially valuable to bear in mind if you are investing in the “current thing” during the peak of a hype cycle. The “current thing” attracts tourists, who aren’t always building for the right reasons. When the going gets tough, the energy reserves necessary to keep pushing deplete rapidly unless the belief and core values in the founding team are strong and consistent.* Somewhat related to (1): the hardest problems in building a company are social, not technical / rational. Organisations are just groups of people. They make decisions emotionally, they are subject to politics. This touches every aspect of entrepreneurship.* Product: especially when you can vibe-code things rapidly, building a deep understanding of the human behaviours and needs for whatever you have in mind is vital. It’s about understanding how people think, and what they want - even if that’s different to what they’re telling you.* Sales: if the champion loves the product but the buyer isn’t there yet, you’re not going to sell anything.* People: if the team are running on fumes, underpaid and overworked (as is always the case in startups), but absolutely aligned on where they’re going, you can achieve a remarkable amount. If they’re well paid, not stretched, but misaligned, you can achieve remarkably little. As Elon puts it, the outcome of any given company is the vector sum of the people within it.* Every investment is a vote for the world you want to see. This is something we really believe strongly at Odin, and is the reason we decided to build this company. More people should be voting with their money on the world they want. For Sarah, this shapes everything from how she sources to how she runs LP coffees and how she thinks about her portfolio’s go-to-market.We also got into the state of the European venture ecosystem and what she’d tell someone thinking about raising their first fund right now.Hope you enjoy it!PRP.S. Subscribe to listen to future Going Solo episodes via Spotify/Apple Podcasts/YouTube. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  From Banking Analyst to Three-Fund Solo GP | Adam Besvinick, Looking Glass Capital 11.06.2026 44นาที

  Adam Besvinick of Looking Glass Capital has been investing at pre-seed for over a decade — solo, and on his own terms. In this episode, he joins Dan to talk about cold-emailing his way into a role at Lowercase Capital, what he learned from Chris Sacca that still guides him today, and what marks don't tell you about the companies that matter most. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  The Myths Distorting Venture Capital Today | Arian Ghashghai, Earthling VC 19.05.2026 43นาที

  Odin’s research lead Dan Gray takes the conversation online to meet emerging managers and solo GPs from around the world, unpacking their investing journey and thesis. In this episode, Dan sits down with Arian Ghashghai, who founded Earthling VC in 2023 to back weird, fringe, early-stage companies across future computing, robotics, AR/VR, AI, bio, and more. They discuss the challenges of raising in one of the hardest LP markets in memory and why a wonky strategy can be an asset, and debunk some of the myths and incentive structures distorting venture capital today. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com
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  Europe's First Semiconductor-Only VC | Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, Cloudberry VC 22.04.2026 48นาที

  Lawrence Lundy-Bryan is the General Partner & Head of Research at Cloudberry VC, Europe’s first dedicated semiconductor VC, launched in 2025. In this episode, he joins Paddy Ryan to discuss chip investing, photonics, and why the next decade may be built in the physical world. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.joinodin.com