Neale Java

I’ve spoken to over 2 dozen MDs at PE firms I can confidently say that the arb of figuring out how to implement Vertical AI at portfolio companies is very real right now It will fundamentally change underwriting for those who can do it predictably and unlock generational returns. Most are aware they need to act. Very few have.

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At £1M revenue, the founder's biggest concern is raising capital. At £10M+, the best founders realize they should have spent more time making capital unnecessary. A founder I spoke with recently had all the right signals: ✅ Revenue was climbing. ✅ Growth was accelerating. ✅ Investors were taking meetings. During a pitch, a VC asked: 👉 "What’s your distribution model?" The founder responded: "We have the best product in the space." The VC leaned back. 👉 "Then why are you in this room asking for capital?" Silence. That’s when it clicked—this wasn’t a funding problem. It was a leadership problem. The CEO Growth Paradox At £1M, founders win by perfecting their product. At £10M, CEOs win by perfecting their growth engine. 🚀 The shift that separates $1M founders from $100M CEOs: ↳ Product-led growth isn't enough—distribution wins at scale. The best CEOs move from selling to engineering repeatable acquisition. ↳ Capital isn’t fuel, it’s an accelerant. Weak companies burn it to survive. Strong ones use it to multiply existing momentum. ↳ The bottleneck shifts from product to leadership. At £1M, you run the business. At £10M, you build the team that runs the business. What Founders Get Wrong About Scaling Most assume that more capital = faster growth. The reality? More capital only works if you already have a predictable system for turning £1 into £3. 💡 Fundraising isn’t the goal. Building a company that makes fundraising optional is. For founders scaling past £10M—what was the hardest shift for you? If you’re in this phase and need to engineer a growth engine, let’s talk. I help founders move from early traction to repeatable, scalable growth. 👉 Follow Ben Botes for more insights on Leadership, Scale-ups and Impact Investment.

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Friday rant time. Investors don't take risks. Everyone wants Tier-1 background.  Nobody is out there for the little guy. Sharing a brief breakdown of VC economics (deep dive link in comments). VC is NOT charity, it's pure financial services. The NUMBER ONE metric we're measured by (for older funds) is DPI, fancy term for how much money you've given back. 1x, shut shop and go home. 2x, better, but still bad. 3x, now you have a reason to live. (for folks wondering how young funds are measured, it's typically MOIC + IRR, basically, how are companies you've invested in performing at present). Assume a ₹200 crore seed stage fund. Needs to give back ₹600 crore at least. Ignoring fees and expenses, you can invest ₹10 crore in 20 companies, for 10% each. Since it's quite clear (Fractal, Zomato, BlueStone, Nykaa) that it takes 12-14 years to IPO a startup in India, you can't wait that long (fund life is 10 years). So you have to exit to Series C/D investors who WILL want a discount. Assume 3 rounds of dilution, leaves you with ~5%, 20% discount, so 4% held. Seed has ~75% mortality rate, so 5 companies left. These 5 have to get you ₹600 crore. At 4% held: 1 company needs to raise at ₹15000 - Just NOT happening 2 companies raise at ₹7500 - Still VERY unlikely 3 companies raise at ₹5000 - Closer 4 companies raise at ₹3750 - Possible 5 companies raise at ₹3000 - More possible ^This is also the price Minimalist was acquired by HUL, which was an OUTLIER outcome and first of it's kind for consumer startups. The above should illustrate how hard the business is. Hence when funds insist on backing folks with successful exits, strong corporate careers, or absent both, just a great educational background, is maximizing luck. At Seed, there are two things that swing it for you. I call it Numbers & Story. If you have a GREAT story (I sold my last company for ₹500 crores), you can have ~no numbers. If you have a good story (I was VP Google India), once again, numbers are lower priority. If you're 22, from a small town college, breaking it down harshly, you NEED numbers. As an investor, we just DON'T ignore amazing growth. That being said, since this is a (very hard) financial business, we're looking at any and every indicator of possible success. Experience here helps in two ways: - Have already made dumb mistakes on OTHER peoples money - Have a network who will pick up the phone and help you/become first customer #venturecapital #startups #funding

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🔥 A DeFi protocol with ~11 employees is now doing more volume than Robinhood, and you have never heard of it. It's called HyperLiquid and its the most important platform in finance right now. In traditional finance, scale and infrastructure usually come with headcount, compliance layers, and media attention. Hyperliquid flips that model on its head. Running a decentralized trading platform that completely changes how markets function. Built on its own purpose built Ethereum like blockchain, it facilitates high frequency derivatives trading with the efficiency of Nasdaq, but no custodial risk, corporate bottlenecks, or 'trading hours". The numbers are hard to ignore: 💰 $400 billion in montly trading. 💰 $106 million in monthly revenue (August 2025) 💰 More volume than Robinhood in July, with 90% fewer employees But what’s even more interesting is the governance. Hyperliquid runs with no venture capital and minimal marketing. It aligns directly with its users and validators through onchain incentives and decentralized governance. It's token went primarily to traders and early participants, not insiders. It’s lean. It’s efficient. and run on a new kind of exchange infrastructure which is global, real-time, and fully programmable. Why it matters: - For allocators, it represents a working model of what next gen financial rails will look like, lower cost, higher throughput, 24/7, and with full transparency. - For infrastructure investors, it’s a signal that Crypto is maturing to take over TradFi. The core question is what happens when markets no longer have gatekeepers? All of this builds up to something bigger. In my next post, I’ll unpack how Hyperliquid is the future of growth and power distribution through incentive alignment, and how WallStreet might actually be rekt.

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Turns Out… My Fund LP Portfolio Beat My Direct Portfolio 😅 Maybe I’m not a bad investor — maybe FoFs aren’t the fallacy we think they are. I’ve been reading several great pieces lately and reflecting on a touchy subject: venture funds of funds (FoFs). Hamilton Lane has hammered this home for years: venture isn’t really an “asset class” — it’s an access class 🚪. • 📊 VC has the widest dispersion in private markets. • ⏳ That dispersion hasn’t narrowed, even as VC scaled — the power law still rules. • 📉 Drawdowns cut deeper here than anywhere else. Translation: pick the right managers and you look like a genius; miss them and you look… well, like me on some of my direct deals 🙃. That’s why the Pattern Ventures benchmarking caught my eye: across 2005–2019 vintages, FoFs (yes, even with “double fees”) actually: ✨ Beat direct VC in the median quartile in 14/15 vintages (+0.68x TVPI). ✨ Outperformed the bottom quartile every single time (+0.89x) — and never fell below 1x. ✨ Smoothed returns, with dispersion nearly halved (0.58x vs. 1.21x). Confession time: even in my own portfolio, my LP fund investments have outperformed my direct ones. Not sure if that makes me a bad direct investor 😅 … or just a better FoF LP. Either way, it taught me something about where my real portfolio chops lie. In hedge funds, double fees kill. In venture, access math beats fee math. So the real question for LPs isn’t: “Do we avoid FoFs?” It’s: Do we build selection capability — or buy it? Because in venture, average is the most dangerous place to hide.🚫 🔖 David Dug Skylar Anurag John Samir #VentureCapital #PrivateMarkets #FundofFunds #LPInsights #VCInvesting #PowerLaw #Dispersion #InstitutionalInvesting Asilica | Redshift Capital | Allocate

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News Update 🔔 Venture Capital is Redrawing Its Map quietly in 2025. Fresh Q1 data just confirmed it: - Saudi Arabia is now the most venture-funded emerging market globally. - UAE tripled its inflow, with +149% YoY growth. - Vietnam surged +219%, largely due to regional spillovers. - Singapore? Down -61%, marking the sharpest drop since 2016. But this isn’t just a numbers story. It’s a momentum story, and momentum doesn’t lie. The Gulf isn’t trying to become a venture hub, it’s already operating like one. Sovereign alignment, capital deployment, and strategic clarity are setting a new global benchmark. What we’re seeing now is not a fluke. It’s the delayed recognition of what many of us in-region have already known. The gravity has shifted. Some markets follow the capital. Others design the conditions for capital to flow. - Startups that used to fly to San Francisco are now setting up in Riyadh and Dubai. - Funds that once scouted SEA and LATAM are opening offices here. - LPs are no longer curious. They’re committed. We’re building from the ground up, policy, infrastructure, exits, even talent migration. The ones still watching from afar will arrive in 2026, ask where the deals went, and realize: They were already done. #investinsaudi #vision2030 #venturecapital #investment #economy #growth #investinUAE #investinDubai #investinAD #AbuDhabi #Dubai #Riyadh

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𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗖𝗔𝗥𝗘𝗘𝗥𝗦 𝗗𝗘𝗠𝗬𝗦𝗧𝗜𝗙𝗜𝗘𝗗 𝟱: 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗗 𝗖𝗔𝗥𝗘𝗘𝗥 𝗩𝗖 Continuing my series on routes into VC Investment Teams (see previous posts in the comments), it’s time for a final group: Second Career VCs (SCVCs). 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗩𝗖? SCVCs are people who have had a substantial career in another field before turning to Venture. This doesn't include a product manager with five years experience or even a founder of a company that made it to Series B (great backgrounds, but more relevant to my previous post on Operator VCs). Instead, SCVCs typically spent 15-20+ years in another field, even reaching retirement stage, before starting afresh in VC. I’ve seen a variety of SCVCs – some are founders (myself included), others financiers (such as my previous partners Mark Evans and Tim Bunting) and others have had careers in medicine, law or even sports (e.g. Serena Williams’ primary focus is now Serena Ventures). Historically, this was almost the *only* way into venture. Key founders of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, for example, were successful, effectively retired operators before they got into venture, first investing their own capital and then adding other people’s money – much like successful Angel-turned-VCs do today. 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘀 & 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗕𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗦𝗖𝗩𝗖 ✅Credibility: A successful first career brings instant credibility with founders.  ✅Financial: Some firms require partners to buy into the firm/funds. A previously successful career likely provides the capital to do this. ❌Starting Again: You go directly from respected expert to total noob! It’s a humbling transition. ❌Structure: Many folks in this boat could just choose to invest directly themselves. Being a VC brings more capital and support, but it also brings more structure and bureaucracy. 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗩𝗖𝘀 1️⃣ Unless their previous career was in finance, there will be gaps in a SCVC’s toolkit. SCVCs are unlikely to go back to business school so they need to find a firm where others can balance out their skills. 2️⃣ As with Operator VCs, working in an investment firm is different to most careers and a transition in mentality and work-style is required - more on this in my previous post. 𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗩𝗖 𝘃𝗶𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗲 1️⃣ The world is competitive and it is rare to be sufficiently successful (in a relevant enough field) to be able to get into VC this way. 2️⃣ And, of the few who can do it, many have other attractive options in life: retirement, a portfolio career, becoming an elder statesperson in their existing career, philanthropy, etc. 3️⃣ Once upon a time, VC could be pursued as an ‘active retirement’, alongside long vacations and other pursuits. Today the market is simply too professional, competitive and demanding for this – you’re either in or not, making it a less attractive path for those with the privilege of this option. 

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