Jim Andelman 🔥

Co-founder Bonfire Ventures & Rincon Venture Partners / decent skier / crappy climber

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@thebenbergman Congrats Ben!

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

Good list. Emerging managers take note. These are also some of the most supportive LPs in the business, will actually help you be better, not just get into business.

[Legion @uselegion]

Raising your first fund?

Most LPs won't touch a Fund I. These 12 do:

1. @CendanaCapital: Cendana. The reference LP for first funds, $2.5B+ across 70+ managers. Now also runs Cendana Nano for funds under $15M.

2. @screendoorvc: Screendoor. Exists for exactly one purpose: anchoring new managers raising their first institutional fund.

3. @IndustryVC: Industry Ventures. Backs first-time funds, often as the only institutional LP on the docs. 90+ emerging managers, and ~40% of their new $900M fund is earmarked for managers running under $250M.

4. @close_first: First Close Partners. The name is the whole thesis: they anchor first-time managers at first close. 100+ fund commitments so far.

5. @RecastCapital: Recast. Fund I through III, US emerging managers, plus an enablement program for women-led funds.

6. @lo_toney: Plexo Capital. 53 LP commitments and a program (GPX) built specifically for brand-new GPs.

7. @Beezer232: Beezer Clarkson. The most public emerging-manager advocate in the LP world, now at LGT Capital Partners.

8. @cdouvos: Chris Douvos. The SuperLP. Backs the managers everyone else passes on, and writes about it honestly.

9. @Samirkaji: Samir Kaji. Allocate talks to 300-400 emerging managers a year. Twenty years of backing first-timers.

10. @isomercapital: Isomer Capital. Europe's Fund I specialist. Backed Seedcamp, Hoxton and Entrepreneur First on day one, new €250M fund in the works.

11. @TrueBridgeCP: TrueBridge. Runs a dedicated vehicle just for managers raising under $200M.

12. @FairviewCapital: Fairview. Three decades of emerging-manager investing, and they just activated $150M of pension money for exactly this.

Save this for the raise.

And if you're an LP who belongs here, say so below.

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

Great post from @auren. To extend his analogy, seems the goal of yesterday was to build the most unassailable castle. The goal now is instead fo constantly be out front in a horserace to infinity. Yes the latter is much more exhausting.

[Auren Hoffman @auren]

there are no more moats anymore. moats are dead.
was talking to a friend of mine who's a CEO of a rapidly growing startup (~$1B revenue). we're small investors. He told me that he has only taken one one-week vacation in the last eight years of his startup.
I was like, "Hey this is crazy. You're gonna burn out. This is pretty serious."

he said, "Auren, I don't know what to do. We don't have no moat."

am like, "What are you talking about? The business is going great!"

he said, "We have incredible competitors. We sell AI products and so we're selling to the smartest people in the world. If we don't have the best product that week, they won't buy us. If we don't have the best product for two weeks, our customers will churn. We don't have a moat."

I started thinking about it: who does have a moat?
There are just no moats anymore. Nobody has a moat. Everyone will switch their software providers in a heartbeat for better product or for cheaper product or for faster product. Anyone will switch.

We looked at our 200 companies at Flex Capital and how they're buying software and AI services today. Almost all of their vendors are on month-to-month contracts or on usage-based contracts. That means they can switch immediately. The reason they have everyone on month-to-month is that they have no idea if they're going to be using those tools two months from now. They may not even be using those tools two weeks from now. Everything is changing so fast all the time.

The only moat you have in software is that you have the best product. There are just no other moats.

It used to be back in the day that you have a mediocre product and you'd be using it for years. we just dealt with all these of mediocre software systems, mediocre cloud providers, mediocre data providers, mediocre APIs. we dealt with it because the switching costs are really hard.

Nowadays it's really easy to change software. It's really easy to change APIs. it's really easy to change AI infrastructure. It's super easy. You can change it in a heartbeat and every other vendor will help you switch. Of course, your AI tools will help you switch as well. All these things that used to give very high customer lock-in just don't exist anymore and so they're just no more moats.

Moats are dead.  you just need to work insane hours all the time because the only thing you have is your product. goodbye moat, goodbye predictable revenues, goodbye 2010s era.

[Leo Gorodinski @eulerfx]

How can you tell if an early-stage SaaS is doing well?

Ask the sales reps if they’re hitting their quotas..

[Jay Kapoor @JayKapoor]

Wrapped up my first ever @raiseconference summit in SF this week and it was hands down the most high-signal event I’ve attend as a startup and fund investor.

You’ll hear emerging managers throw out that they are “top-decile” a lot on social media but trust me that this room was tangibly the cream of the crop.

Some highlights for me included:

Cheering friends like @AdrielBercow, @ssahney, Jonathan Ehrlich, and @PeterJ_Walker crush it up on stage.

Making many new friends who I’m excited to co-invest with in our shared passion for AI upleveling humans in dirty, dusty, and dangerous industries.

Hearing really tactical and valuable perspectives from family office and FoF LPs on what stands out in a manager they backed in 2025 and what’s they are looking for in 2026

Catching up over lunch with @jimandelman whose fund I co-invested with in Jeeva AI, my first ever deal I when I got to @LaunchCapital 8 years ago and shaking our heads in amazement at how much the market has changed

Enjoying coffee all day in Gaeastar clay cups (a portfolio company!) and telling every investor to go see the magic happen at their awesome micro factory in Dogpatch!

Thank you to everyone at Akkadian and Magnify for putting on a really fantastic week of events. Look forward to joining you all again in 2026!

[hamza zia @ziahamza]

You are staying up all night fixing AI slop, while @GitStart PRs are getting merged to production!

Here is how🧵

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@nicckopp @sequoia @windsurf_ai Huge congrats Nicholas! I'm not surprised one bit. Rillet will always be one that got away. Thrilled for you.

[Waseem @waseem_s]

Chatbot Arena looks fair. It’s not.

This new paper breaks it down:
– Big labs test tons of private models, only show the best
– OpenAI & Google get most of the data
– Open-source models get removed quietly
– You can double your score just by overfitting to Arena
But that doesn’t help on real-world tasks.
If you’re choosing models off the leaderboard, good luck.
Run your own evals. On your data. For your users.
📄 https://t.co/5DqOjf3k1Q

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@ArupBanerjee07 @WindfallData @DRS85 Congrats Arup and team!

[Arup Banerjee @ArupBanerjee07]

🔥 Beyond excited to announce our $65 million investment from Morgan Stanley! 🔥

I'm so proud of the entire @WindfallData team and the growth that @DRS85 and I have seen over the past several years.

We're thankful to our 1,500+ customers. It's been an amazing journey thus far and we can't wait for the next chapter.

Let's go!!!

https://t.co/qOaJqH8LNq

[Windfall @WindfallData]

We're thrilled to announce our $65 million investment from Morgan Stanley!

Windfall was founded in 2016 to help teams leverage accurate people intelligence and AI solutions. With 1,500+ customers, we're just getting started.

Let's go!! 🚀🚀

https://t.co/kr4k5M4sSx

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@WindfallData Congrats! Excited to be an investor!

[WRITER @Get_Writer]

Our @forrester TEI Study is live and the results are in: Writer delivers serious ROI, and fast:

333% ROI. $12M net benefits. Payback in <6 months.

📥 https://t.co/62KuS8vAie

[WRITER @Get_Writer]

📢 Exciting news! Writer CEO and Co-founder @may_habib has been named to @Inc Magazine’s 2025 Female Founders 500 list! This list recognizes the most inspiring and creative women in business, and May is being honored for the third straight year! 👏

Learn more about the #FemaleFounders500 list and the amazing women making a powerful impact in the business world: https://t.co/2PM76HJPjd

Congrats to May and all the other honorees! 🙌

[Fred Stevens-Smith @fredsters_s]

I cannot emphasize this enough - if you're a startup founder / CEO, stop what you're doing and go and spend a few hours replicating your app from scratch with @Replit. Just do it now. At once

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@aniehenke Thanks Alex!

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@hegranes So kind of you to say Jon!

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@fredsters_s Sounds like someone’s about to ask for more money! 🤪 j/k love you Fred, so kind of you to say!

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@Mazzeo Thanks Matt!

[Jim Andelman 🔥 @jimandelman]

@eulerfx We did it mostly by bragging about @AlvysTeam ! 👊