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Good morning everyone…

I am testing out The Beehiiv ad network (we are Beehiiv investors) at the top of my blog/nesletter today and chose Vinovest as an investing product my readers may like to try.

Onward…

Speaking of Beehiiv (Social Leverage Fund 4), I might as well share some of their impressive growth numbers…

When Gary and I met with Tyler for the first time (in person) during Covid, we hit it off immediately on the idea of going to market lean and mean. That meant Tyler’s deep domain edge from being the first engineer at Morning Brew building email products would need to be matched by a complete lean mentality - lean funding, lean cap table etc. Back in late 2020, few founders cared to listen to us. To be fair, in order to raise capital, nobody really needed to listen to us. Today that of course is much different.

In the few short years since we were Beehiiv’s first investor, Tyler and team have built an incredible product. I was a difficult use case early adopter having to bring fifteen plus years of writing archives over from Wordpress and am a very happy customer.

Tyler continues to focus on being capital efficient because that is now an edge. Tyler has incredible optionality in how he grows. Of course it was important Tyler built a great product that customers love. Founder optionality is something that was bastardized/butchered during the ZIRP era of 2012-2022. The optionality offered to the founders that played ‘Venture Capital Money Ball’ during ZIRP was to take money off the table themselves. That was hard for founders to resist, so they often did that. We will continue to see broken cap tables and zombie companies because of it.

In case you did not know, Elad Gil shares a quick history lesson:

The world as a business paying field is VERY different than 2012-2022…most importantly interest rates are higher and we are in a period of de-globalization.

The ‘art’ and creativity of early stage seed/venture investing and company building (including cap table management) is back in fashion.

Game on.