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As a founder, time is your scarcest resource. We promise not to waste it. Here's how to know if asking us for money is a good use of your time:

Team

We don't just invest in companies, we back founding teams. Technical product execution is at the heart of the companies we back. A software company without technical founders isn't really a software company.

Building companies that scale requires world-class execution on a wide range of disparate skills. Even the most exceptional individuals can't cover all these bases, so solo founders are a red flag for us.

Teams that can spot valuable problems and build products to solve them are always interesting, but we lean in most strongly with founders who are on fire to prove themselves.

Opportunity

We're on the hook for producing returns: if we don't believe an investment has a chance of returning the entire fund, we can't make it, no matter how much we like you.

Returns are driven by a small number of extraordinary companies — those that come to dominate the opportunity they choose to attack. We're drawn to founders that understand this — both in the opportunities they pursue, and in the way they pursue them.

We like entrepreneurs who combine deep domain expertise, imagination, and listening skills to uncover big opportunities in places most people wouldn't think to look.

We're drawn to opportunities where real customer problems are solved and real money changes hands for value created.

We're no good at ad-supported or other indirect business models where the customer and the user aren't the same person.

Stage

We like to be the first institutional check into a company, and to own enough that it matters to our returns, usually at least 10%. We typically invest $1-1.5M in a company's first fundraise of $1M-$3M. We reserve for follow-on, and will support our successful investments up to 10% of total fund capital.

Sometimes we invest by ourselves, but we like to work with other professional seed-stage investors who have complementary skills and networks, especially out-of-region funds who share our conviction about the Pacific Northwest.

Our job is to help exceptional entrepreneurs navigate the winding road from founding to Series A. We don't disappear after the A, but if we've done our job right the new investors will be much better at helping you through that next stage of growth than we are.

Geography

We're based in Seattle and have a strong preference for companies located from Portland, OR up to Vancouver, BC. We know that globally significant public tech companies will continue to be built here and we want to help make that happen over and over again.

When we invest outside the region (which we do rarely), it's usually because we had a prior relationship with the founders that allowed us to get to conviction about the team despite their location.

We believe that world-class companies can be built anywhere, but we also believe that most successful companies will ultimately raise from money centers like the Bay Area or New York City. Helping our portfolio companies succeed with high-quality follow-on investors is core to our work.

Investment funds are partnerships, and the partners are just ordinary human beings, with all the quirks and peculiarities that come with that. Our work is highly personal — we do it because we love it — and the values that guide our decisions reflect who we are as humans, warts and all.

We hope this post makes it easier to understand how we approach that work— and we invite you to challenge our thinking so we can keep getting smarter and better at what we do.