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

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

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. “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.

4. 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

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Here’s what stuck with me:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

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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:

1. 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.
   

2. 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.

   1. 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.

   2. Sales: if the champion loves the product but the buyer isn’t there yet, you’re not going to sell anything.

   3. 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.
      

3. 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!

PR

P.S. Subscribe to listen to future Going Solo episodes via Spotify/Apple Podcasts/YouTube.

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