1. You were a founder before starting investing. How did you decide to switch sides?
I don’t really think of it as switching sides. I loved building companies, but I realized that the part I was most drawn to was the very beginning – when something is still slightly crazy, there are dozens of reasons it shouldn’t work, and you’re trying to figure out whether this person is seeing something everyone else is missing.
When I was founding a company, I got to do that two or three times as I pivoted towards an idea that was sound. Venture lets me live in that moment over and over again. I also think having been a founder makes it very hard to romanticize the job. I know how lonely and messy building a company actually is.
And besides, Tapestry feels like our next start up. It still feels like Day 1. We are a small team and it’s “all hands on deck” always.
2. You recently announced an $80M Fund III at Tapestry VC focused on repeat founders. Why do you focus on repeat founders and what is it like working with people who are serial entrepreneurs?
The simplest answer is that starting a company is an incredibly unnatural thing to do twice.
If someone has already been through the wild pain of building a company (the hiring mistakes, almost running out of money, customers saying no, fundraising, firing people, probably some existential crisis at 2am) and voluntarily decides to do it again, I find that really interesting.
Repeat founder-led startups have created $2.2T in value and employ over 2M people across 23k+ companies… in Europe alone. That’s up 7x from 2018. Across the board, repeat founders raise 45% more capital compared to first-time teams. Today, 75% of startups worth over $50B globally were founded by serial entrepreneurs.
I think venture is all about focus. Some people focus on sectors or geographies. We choose to focus on a founder archetype that we see has higher probabilities of success.
When a founder knows just how hard building a business is, they don’t do it again for ideas that aren’t worth it. They go after hard problems like beating Apple’s iPhone, like Nothing, or manufacturing automation, like Sunrise Robotics, or drone delivery, like Manna Air Delivery.
3. You spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley but chose to move to London to grow Tapestry VC. What excites you about the UK and European VC ecosystem vs US?
I grew up in New York, studied in Silicon Valley, and lived in SF and LA. My family is Uruguayan and American and somehow I ended up in London in 2018 for what was supposed to be just a year. At this point, I don’t know where I consider home!
Over those past 8 years, European has minted 477 unicorns, of which 60% have been started by a repeat founder. In 2018, when Tapestry was founded, this ecosystem was still taking shape. We were among the first to spot and lead the trend backing companies like Nothing before it became a leading consumer hardware manufacturer with $1B in revenue, Hopin, before it rocketed to a $7.75B valuation, and Fin AI, which was recently acquired by Salesforce for $3.6B and is one of Europe’s largest start up acquisitions.
4. Looking back at your investments, what patterns have surprised you?
The best founders and companies have a kind of magic to them, and it’s surprisingly hard to quantify.
You can do all the diligence, but sometimes you meet a founder and there’s just something there. They have an unusual way of seeing the world. And the idea itself has this quality where you can’t stop thinking about it after the meeting.
Ladder was like that for us. Yet another consumer fitness application sounded crazy, but Greg and Tom had this incredible conviction and built a product with die-hard loyalists in a space everyone was calling “done”. 2 years later, that magic turned into nearly $100M ARR. Same with Bobby at Manna Air Delivery. Drone delivery sounded slightly crazy at the time, but Bobby had this incredible conviction and was actually out there flying drones and delivering things while everyone else was debating whether it could work.
I’ve learned not to dismiss that feeling when talking to a founder because it doesn’t fit neatly into an investment framework.
5. Tapestry has been around for nearly 8 years but is only recently becoming louder/more outward facing. What prompted this shift and why now?
I’ve always believed you should earn the right to be loud.
For the first seven or eight years, we were much more focused on doing the work, finding great founders, and building relationships with them often before they were even starting their next company.
We were (and still are) a tiny team, and we never felt a huge need to build a brand around ourselves before we had the body of work to back it up.
Now I think we do. We’ve backed companies like Nothing, Fin, Manna, Ladder, Sunrise Robotics, Maze, Requesty, Seapoint and dozens more and we’ve watched the repeat-founder thesis we started with become much more visible in the data and in the European ecosystem.
Fund III also feels like a natural inflection point. It’s almost three times the size of our previous fund, my partner Patrick has moved from San Francisco to London, we’ve opened our London office, and we’re increasingly leading rounds rather than just participating in them. So part of being louder is simply acknowledging that Tapestry is a different firm today than it was eight years ago.
But the bigger reason is founders. The best founders have choices. We have a strong reputation with the founders we’ve worked with but brand goes beyond reputation. It’s what people who don’t know you think of you. If we believe we have a differentiated way of thinking about repeat founders, and a portfolio and network that can actually be useful to them, then it doesn’t help anyone if nobody knows we exist. We want the next exceptional founder thinking about what to build next to know that we’re here.
