How Do You Build a Venture Firm Like a Product?

Jeff Morris Jr says you build a venture firm the way a product team works: run a pile of experiments, expect most of them to fail, and follow the few that work.

His product career was a list of 50 experiments. He did not know which would work. He tried them and followed the customer. Chapter One is built the same way. The firm plans about 50 experiments in a fund cycle. Most will not work, and many will be a bad idea. The firm is comfortable with that failure rate and does not overthink the test. A good idea gets tried, the way it would inside a product organization, and the firm stays with whatever is working. Limited partners who have followed the firm understand the pattern. From the outside it can look random.

Product Club was one of those tests, an accelerator Chapter One launched in fund one with three companies in a batch. The lesson was that being an accelerator means being only an accelerator. A smaller firm has limited time, people, and capital, so Chapter One asked whether Product Club was really the whole firm, then moved on.