Thread by @fdestin

1/ Let me distill the Stride investment strategy in fifteen tweets. Yes, fifteen 😘.

2/ To be able to make money, you need some form of edge. The edge does not need to be complex of over-intellectualised, but it needs to be real and drive returns.

3/ Some funds are vertical specialists (say @anthemis ), some leverage network assets (say @ycombinator ) or build large portfolios (say @seedcamp), some funds leverage dominant execution capability (say @sequoia or @IndexVentures ) etc.

4/ We focus on what we know well - "dealing with ambiguity" (TM).

By that, I mean the absence or scarcity of data and the lack of definition around the key elements of a scalable business (could be product, pricing model, GTM, team related etc)

5/ We fit in a zone where teams have gathered customer insights and have developed product, but a lot remains undefined. They are typically at a fragile state where they have started to ramp but don’t tick the boxes that would allow them to raise Series A from mainstream funds.

6/ It’s a time in a company’s life where as an investor you need good people judgement, the ability to assess what projects have unlimited upside ... but also a fair amount of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to imagine what can be. We thrive on that.

7/ In an effort to focus and get to the best founders early enough, we decided to geo-fence ourselves to the UK and France. We offer very clear market exposure to our LPs in this way. This strategy is under constant review, especially in a COVID world.

8/ Whilst we spend time thinking about “The Future” and macro trends, we are anti-thematic as we find founders are so much better at finding white space than we are. Most of our best investments don’t fit an obvious theme. We try to be “mentally plastic”.

9/ We only invest in things we fundamentally like, not just stuff that makes money. Hence we much prefer strong mission-driven companies … but we’re not techno-utopians (look where that got us... ) and try to stay very humble on that front.

10/ Being a slightly larger seed fund (£100M) allows us to write meaningful checks when it matters.

11/ We like this insertion point because (a) valuations are reasonable (b) time to market is typically short (c) if we and our founders do our job well, this is a point of strong valuation inflection in a company’s life.

12/ We work hard on “getting picked”. We engage deeply with our founders on product and strategy in a way that they can relate to, and we leverage the incredible network assets that @harrystebbings has built to construct strong syndicates or connect our founders with the best.

13/ We also work hard with our founders to build relationships of trust, grounded in a pragmatic, jargon-free assessment of reality, whilst removing much of the control / power dynamics you see at play on so many boards.

Earn your seat at the table. Impact vs overhead.

14/ If we do this consistently and take enough risk, we should be able to construct high performance portfolios whilst keeping our founders happy. We’re not a factory but a craft shop for that reason. We don’t want to scale.

15/ It’s all very old school but it seems to work. We look to the likes of @benchmark, @iaventures, @foundrygroup, @fcollective as successful examples of similar approaches.

That's it!