Jeff Morris Jr

Jeff Morris Jr says Sequoia, USV, and the other best venture firms have historically turned only 4 to 7 percent of their companies into investments that return the whole fund, and he does not know if that is still their rate.

A picking rate is the share of companies that become fund-returning investments, meaning they return the entire pool of capital, one times the fund. At 4 percent, a top fund needs 25 companies to expect a single one that returns the fund. He thinks those historical rates have already fallen, so the old range is only a direction. A newer manager has to ask whether the companies they see are as good as the best firms in the world. He says the honest answer for most peopl

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 out

Jeff Morris Jr says Chapter One's biggest moment was refusing to become a crypto-only firm, right after the crypto book in fund two was marked at 22x.

In 2021 the world was shifting toward crypto companies, and the firm asked whether it should focus only on that. The market turned in 2022, and the answer was no. The decision was not to brand Chapter One as any one kind of firm. He does not want a deep-tech-only fund or a single-theme fund. The franchises he thinks last are generalists. USV is thesis-driven and still a generalist. A firm has to change with each vintage if it wants to stay relevant. He has watched many firms overrate an AI-firm brand over the past three or four years. The lab

Jeff Morris Jr sourced startup deals with software he wrote while he still worked full time at Tinder, because he could not spend the day calling founders.

Chapter One still builds internal tools for data-driven sourcing. That habit started at the firm's launch. He scraped the internet and woke up to the results each morning. It was how he competed without being a venture investor all day, and it stayed in the firm's work.

Geography became the other edge about two years ago. Six of the last eight investments he led were in Los Angeles. He grew up in the Bay Area and started his career in San Francisco, and he tries not to brand himself in public as only an LA investor, or only deep tech, o

Jeff Morris Jr says investors started preferring deep tech because AI software bets from 2022 to 2025 went badly, not because hardware suddenly got easier.

Turner Novak describes the shift from the other side of the table: three years earlier, deep-tech hardware was an instant pass no matter the founder or the market, and some investors now want a physical product instead of software. Jeff's account is that someone who backed ten vertical AI companies watched nine of them get destroyed by Claude or OpenAI. Hard tech and deep tech did not get easier. They are the place where the big labs seem less likely to arrive and break the company two months after the seed investment.

He also ties the

Jeff Morris Jr says Chapter One publishes its weekly investment-committee notes because those partner meetings are the firm's best conversations, and sharing them beats running a separate content strategy.

The firm records what the partners talk about and posts it. He treats that as building in public, the habit operators already have, applied to venture. Firms have historically stayed private. Opening up the thinking is what readers find interesting. Turner Novak describes it as automating building in public, taking the conversations and synthesizing them, and Jeff agrees.

The posts that draw other investors and limited partners are firm-building topics, especially portfolio construction

Jeff Morris Jr names his grandfather, Mervin Morris, as his favorite businessman. Mervin Morris was a retailer who started Mervin's and built it into a public company.

Mervin Morris grew up in Delano, California, where his family owned the town's one general store. He served in the Army and was never deployed. In Arkansas they put him in charge of the base store because he was good at retailing. After that posting he expected people coming home from the war to need clothes for themselves and their families. His family was dirt poor, and he took out loans to open a single store. The idea was an affordable, family-first retailer in California, a place where kids and adults in one family could

Jeff Morris Jr says founders sometimes get things wrong by assuming people want to automate everything in their lives. A lot of people like the humanity of shopping, and a lot of founders building agentic e-commerce products are, for the most part, missing that piece of psychology.

Life tools aim to create as much context as possible, as quickly as possible. With access to email, someone can see where a person travels, which airline they use, who they talk to all day long, the types of things they are thinking about, and what they subscribe to. Different parts of life can then be automated pretty quickly. Shopping stays personal. Some people like scrolling. Some people like walking around t

Jeff Morris Jr delivered every Valentine's Day flower order in Kansas City himself because he did not have enough people there. The growth campaign subsidized the cost so a customer could buy flowers and get them hand delivered to the door for $30. It was basically marketing with a nominal charge. The launch covered San Francisco, New York, and Kansas City. He found people to deliver the flowers in San Francisco and New York, then realized Kansas City was short, so he flew there.

He drove through Kansas and Missouri and delivered all the flowers himself. The people who received them were happy, and he listened to music while he drove. He treats the drive as the moment he learned to do unsex

Jeff Morris Jr left San Francisco for Kansas City the day after a team call because other people wanted the growth marketer job.

He was mostly meeting people on Twitter when a growth marketer posting went up. He sent the founder a direct message, and the team got on a call the next day. They told him to move to Kansas City tomorrow. He went with one bag of clothes and no place to live, without knowing whether Kansas City was in Missouri or Kansas. To him it was just one place. Friends thought he was crazy for leaving the tech ecosystem to work in the Midwest.

The founder already lived in Kansas City, and the plan was to focus on the Midwest, so the team lived there. Funding came together s

Jeff Morris Jr says a founder should consider pivoting the company as soon as the thought is in the back of their mind. In the last five years, calls about whether to pivot have picked up, and 100% of the time the founder says they did not know they were allowed to have the conversation with investors. Changing direction had looked like a sign of weakness, or like a risk that investors would lose faith and the next round would not happen.

The call usually starts because the same investor update has arrived for two quarters in a row. None of the metrics are moving, the work is small iterations, and nothing on the table will profoundly change the business. More investors should open the conve

Jeff Morris Jr says one single pivot is a greater predictor of success for a startup than no pivots or a bunch of pivots. An academic research paper is the source of the comparison. A team starts working on one problem, comes across a bigger problem while working on a different problem, and adjusts the product and company strategy around the new discovery.

Slack is the example he uses to show how the pattern can be true. The team was working on a game and had built an internal chat platform to run the company while building the game. The game failed. They already had the other product, so they left gaming and built the chat platform. Facebook is a separate case he does not expect to appear

Jeff Morris Jr says one adjustment at Chapter One was being more thematic, so the firm can presumably get to a founder and a company before the rest of the market. Reaching a founder ahead of the wider market has been a big thing. Chapter One is also insanely aggressive about creating its own sourcing strategies, so the firm sees parts of the market that other firms maybe don't, and it is saying yes a lot more quickly.

The older pattern was to meet a founder, call, and compare notes. Now, when Chapter One meets a founder and loves them, the firm has to say yes within a couple of days, or else the deal gets away in most cases. He does not want the pace to sound like Chapter One is moving too

Jeff Morris Jr says his seed fund backed Erebor's $2 billion round, a deal that was not a classic pre-seed, because refusing it would have cut the fund off from a big part of the market. In five months Erebor became one of the fastest growing banks of all time.

The firm put a large percentage of one fund into the round after getting to know the chief executive. The team was pounding the table to do the deal. A hard no from an investment committee, on the grounds that a seed fund cannot do the deal, would have wiped out that part of the market. Putting 5 or 10% of the fund into Erebor makes more sense than using the fund only for very early stage investing.

Jeff Morris Jr says a $60 million seed round would be below average now, and the old venture-round buckets no longer mean anything.

He started the way most new managers do, with a smaller fund pitched as a seed fund. Seed was the simple package: companies raise the smallest amounts of capital, many limited partners want seed exposure, and a fund to fund in particular has wanted a concentrated seed strategy with managers who fit the buckets. Sequoia did a seed round the morning of the conversation, a first round of capital, and he thinks the amount pinned to the company was $60 million, not the valuation. Rounds of that size show up every single day, and $60 million sounds small. Seed labels

Jeff Morris Jr. grew up as one of eight children. He says the siblings are very different, including different politics and different personalities, and that they still respect and love each other. For him, family is the reason he goes to work. They are the people who know the whole arc of his life and who respect his decisions the most. He ties that to an essay he wrote while he was in Japan, Headline versus Reality, which Kyle Tibbitts says was largely about family. He also calls this period a chance to reconnect with family, and he talks about having been born into a different generation from some of the people around him.

Jeff tells a story from an interview he did with Ron Johnson who Steve Jobs hired to create their retail experience that culminates in a lesson about the importance of remembering everyone's name.

Jeff talks about the importance of mental health in his own life and how every one, especially founders, should see a therapist or a coach on a regular basis because building a company is one of the hardest challenges in the world.

Jeff Morris Jr. tells the Paradox Podcast that doing two things well is impossible. Before he invested full time he was VP of product at Tinder, and he was also writing angel-syndicate checks. He says that combination was a useful way to start learning investing, and that it could not last. He had to choose between operating and being an investor. Staying on the product track would have cost him the years it takes to get good at investing, which he treats as the work he actually wants. He made the leap knowing he would miss parts of building product.

Jeff talks about the importance of choose a category that is important enough to consumers they will pay for it. He also talks about the importance of having a role within a company that is close to revenue so you have a scoreboard to track.