Dan H.

Seth Levine nailed it! The concentration problem isn't just a GP pain point... it's choking innovation. When capital pools around the same 20 funds, emerging managers and founders get shut out. Love that he's using his platform to call this out. Foundry has backed 50+ emerging managers. That's the diversification the ecosystem needs. This is exactly why Carta exists — making capital allocation visible and accessible. Capital Evolution hits at exactly the right moment. Thanks for having us Daniel Dart. Team Carta loves the community of FUTURE TITANS you have built 🚀

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Founders with capital that refuse to hire or add resources to alleviate constraints aren't preserving runway -- they're sabotaging growth velocity. I'm seeing this pattern more frequently: 20+ moths of runway, strong customer demand, a product that's delivering ROI but a founding team clearly spread too thin resulting in self-inflicting issues and paper cuts. I think founders feel that by doing everything you're evoking resiliency and capital discipline. Sometimes that's lauded. However, I think it's founders optimizing for control and comfort rather than scale and delegation. From the investor seat, here's how I'm trying to understand this behavior: (1) Avoiding 'role evolution.' - It's hard to graduate from scrappy founder that has to do everything to scrappy founder with the ability to delegate and deploy resources. Hiring means transitioning from building - - > manager - - > leader (2) Control-minded orientation - We naturally feel more accomplished when we can measure our own output (Ex: sales calls made, lines of code written, support tickets resolved, etc...). When you take time hiring and then ultimately unload these tasks, you have to reinterpret your own productivity and be okay with anchoring towards somebody else's. In reality, runway is not the lens to view your business. If capital is sitting idle on your balance sheet with clear use cases for deployment, all you're doing is suppressing momentum and growth. I care less if you were ultimately wrong where you deployed capital rather than running your business to optimize for more runway. Investors implicitly trust your judgment so just have a more growth-oriented mindset 🫡 🚀 .

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The hardest thing in venture is falling into the pattern matching trap based on prior experience. It’s super challenging to keep an open mind and to preserve first principles thinking while evaluating a new opportunity. This is why I maintain that the best venture deal ever is Mike Moritz’s investment into Instacart. Not just because the exit was amazing ($10b public company!) but because Moritz had invested $50m+ into Webvan, the online grocery delivery service that was one of the biggest casualties of the dot-com boom when it filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Twelve years later, Moritz led the series A of Instacart. To me, the Instacart investment shows the first principles thinking, the intellectual humility, and the emotional resilience that separates great investors. Most people who lost $50 million watching a grocery delivery company implode would have built a mental scar tissue around the category. “We tried this. It doesn’t work. Consumers don’t want it. The unit economics are broken.” Moritz could easily have justified the pass. But first principles thinking requires you to decompose the question “did online grocery delivery fail?” and ask why it failed — and whether anything has changed since. By 2012, the answer was obviously yes. Smartphones meant consumers always had the app in their pocket. GPS made real-time logistics tractable. The gig economy created a flexible labor pool that made asset-light delivery possible. Webvan failed because it tried to own the warehouses, the trucks, and the last mile in an era when the infrastructure didn’t exist to support any of it cheaply. Instacart was a fundamentally different business, though it might have looked superficially similar. In venture, pattern matching is seductive precisely because it’s usually right . The trick is knowing when your pattern is a useful heuristic and when it’s a cognitive trap. The best investors hold their theses loosely enough that new evidence can update them. Moritz’s Instacart investment is the clearest proof of this.

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