Manager Selection In A Bubble
And The Homogenous Signals That Create Conviction
This year we ended up partnering with a small set of managers whose behaviour and instincts aligned with how we think about the early-stage market. Nothing dramatic prompted it, more a gradual recognition that the people who consistently show up early for founders tend to have certain shared characteristics, and that those traits are much easier to feel in conversation than to capture in due-diligence memos. Market conditions aside, these traits repeat themselves.
With bubbles come shiny objects. Everyone claiming access. Everyone claiming a network. What we look for is something quieter: who founders trust before the market pays attention, who is genuinely embedded in the streams where new talent appears, and who has enough clarity about their edge that they don’t need to posture about it.
Here is what conviction looks like for us in 2025. Alphabetical order, because it avoids the inevitable questions.
Bison Ventures: Frontier, Institutional Discipline
Fund: $175M Fund II
Stage: Seed/A
Geo: US
Focus: TechBio, Climate, AI in the Physical World
Tom and Ben spent nearly a decade running venture for Bill Gates’ family office, where the investment committee had one member. I’ll let you guess who. You don’t get to rely on consensus when you’re in an environment alongside one of the best tech entrepreneurs of our time; your thinking either stands on its own or it doesn’t. The environment they have learned their trade in shows up in how they work today - patient, technically rigorous, and unwilling to over-interpret weak signals.
Their centre of gravity is where AI intersects with physical industries, and they approach it with a degree of structure that is increasingly rare. No grandstanding, no constant brand maintenance, just the steady work of getting into the right rooms early and building a portfolio that reflects genuine technical competence.
Baobab Ventures: Inside the AI Builder Flow
Fund: $15M Fund I
Stage: Pre-Seed
Geo: Europe & US
Focus: DeepTech + AI
Carles Reina has lived inside several waves of applied AI: early at Uber, then Tractable, Sonantic, and most recently ElevenLabs, where he was the first employee and runs GTM. Because he is actively involved in one of the busiest technical AI ecosystems today, companies tend to show up on his radar long before they appear with pitch decks.
The bet here is simple, though not in any way casual: Carles sees the right founders early because he is upstream of where they congregate, and he knows what unusually good looks like because he works next to it every day.
Browder Capital: Founder-Led, Price-Disciplined
Fund: $30M Fund IV
Stage: Pre-Seed / Seed
Geo: US
Focus: Generalist
Josh Browder built DoNotPay into a profitable, dividend-paying business. An anomaly in venture, but more importantly a signal of how he thinks about building companies. His investing style reflects this: decisive, ownership-minded, careful on price, and uninterested in taking cues from the crowd.
What stood out most this year was how early he is willing to engage with unusual founders, long before their narratives congeal. In a market that often rushes toward the already-obvious, he’s moving in the opposite direction.
Chapter One: Product Intuition
Fund: $75M Fund III
Stage: Pre-Seed / Seed
Geo: US
Focus: Product-led founders, blockchain infrastructure
Jeff scaled Tinder from $20M to $1.2B ARR, a period when the company figured out product, distribution, and monetisation all at once. The experience gives him a certain feel for product decisions that really can’t be taught.
Jamesin brings a very different lens: technical systems, adversarial environments, probabilistic decision-making. She has spent years working in contexts where the downside of being wrong is high, and that caution shows up in the questions she asks and the way she builds conviction.
Together they create a balance that is rare: one grounded in intuition from building, the other in structured reasoning under uncertainty.
Helloworld: Europe’s Technical Founder Magnet
Fund: $20M Fund II
Stage: Seed
Geo: Europe
Focus: Technical founders
Rodrigo spent six years at Point Nine leading technical diligence for every investment the firm made. It meant hundreds of CTO interviews and an unusually large sample of engineering cultures, technical stacks, and execution patterns.
Europe has an enormous, often under-recognised, depth of STEM talent. The challenge is identifying which teams possess the combination of ambition, competence, and inevitability that leads to meaningful companies. Rodrigo has built a reputation as someone who can distinguish those gradients, quietly, without any theatrics.
Steel Atlas: Modernising the Industrial Economy
Fund: $50M Fund II
Stage: Seed
Geo: US
Focus: Industrial
Cameron and Talal operate in a part of the market that requires a different tempo from traditional software investing. Industrial buyers care about reliability, implementation, and real-world constraints. Cameron leans naturally toward the technical side; Talal brings the commercial and operational grounding. Together they approach industrial tech with the kind of patience and field understanding the category demands.
Their portfolio construction is unusually concentrated for this stage, built on the belief that deep work beats breadth. Their memos reflect this, long, detailed, and written as if they actually expect founders and LPs to read them.
What Ties These Managers Together
Across all of our new partners in 2025, a few patterns kept reappearing, always in quiet ways:
founders trusted them early, long before the wider market noticed
low-ego behaviour, often bordering on invisible
operator instincts rather than theoretical frameworks
clarity on what they don’t do
conviction that shows up in how they spend their time, not in how loudly they talk about it
Venture always comes back to judgement. You can read rankings if you want consensus. You can scroll Twitter if you want opinions. The harder, slower work is noticing the people who spot outliers before the world names them, and understanding why they keep doing it.
The compounding begins there - not in the headlines, but in the quiet parts of the process.
Nothing in this article is investment advice or a solicitation. It’s a view on the frameworks and people shaping our conviction in 2025.
Thanks for sharing! Great to see a couple of European funds in the list you had me worried as I was scrolling down!