I’m drawn to products and technology that are just outside my grasp of understanding. (If I’m the expert on a topic, we are all in trouble.) This draws me to AI across dev tools, infra and applications. These are the picks and shovels that technical founders build first, and the products that bring those capabilities to everyone else. The entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, from Tailscale to Vercel and Factorial, are typically technical founders who are focused on specialized processes that impact a massive amount of people.
In Barcelona with Factorial founder and CEO Jordi Romero; CRV led the Series A.
I grew up on a beautiful dirt road in Maine, raised in a post and beam house my mother built by hand. I was less academically inclined growing up - school just didn’t initially click for me the way sports did. Sports taps into my deeply competitive nature. In college I played basketball at Bates College. Being the basketball team captain for an NCAA Division III team unlocked the importance of cultivating your line up and bringing out the best in each other. Post-grad, I realized it wasn’t my lack of passion for topics in school, it was the format I was forced to learn in. In venture I get to learn from the most passionate, crazed people who are so obsessed with their view of the world that they've got to drop everything to make it a reality. Sitting there, working alongside that unbounded ambition is how I learn, and I absolutely love it.
Every morning I wake up thinking about the founders I’ve backed and the businesses they’re building.
Jacob Thornton is a legendary JS dev. He created bootstrapjs to help engineers build user interfaces before broadening his scope with Pierre Computer Company to serve all of agentic software development. Paul Klein IV at Browserbase spent years at multiple companies as a browser infra specialist, before starting the company he had the strongest founder-market fit for. These founders aren’t just technically talented, they also have a maniacal focus on their domain, combined with an ability to recruit exceptional teams. David Crawshaw built Tailscale from the ground up, bringing “Google scale networks to the massages” (small, composable “tailscale networks”). He’s now doing the same again but for compute, with Exe.dev.
CRV always functions as a team - we win and lose as a team.
The last job I will ever have is being a solo GP, to me winning by yourself in a closed room means nothing - it’s winning as a team that matters. At CRV we operate like the startups we back because there is a compounding edge when you activate a small group of hungry, hardworking and deeply collaborative individuals. Whether my team and I are combining forces with a founder of Guillermo Rauch’s caliber or working with a brand new entrepreneur we just led the seed in, we bring the same intensity and focus.
Open source legend Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel.
I haven’t lost my edge - I’m still competitive, but I channel that almost exclusively into work. (Unfortunately the days of getting upset on the hardwood are long gone.) The only time I can stop thinking about the founders I work with is at home with my wife and son. Chris Gerber at Talon.One once told me, “When you are at home, you're nobody" I twist that to "at home, leave your title at the door.”
No one can humble you quite like a toddler.
Markets shift, customers can behave unpredictably and if you think you’re always right, you can end up missing a lot of signals when you’re under pressure. My family keeps me grounded and reminds me that conviction combined with honesty makes this all worthwhile. And I'm having a genuine blast along the way.