Venture studio · San Francisco
Capital and code.
Capital only compounds when it moves. We back builders, ship the product beside them and force an early answer.
Clients and partners
Who we build for, and who we trade with.
What we do
For founders
Capital
We invest in builders found by hand and tested in our own room before any capital moves.
A check here follows a working module, not a deck. The builder ships into our room first, and the audit is over inside fourteen days either way. What we look for is not a market we can describe: it is a founder who ships faster with us than without us.
OpenThe products
Studio
Our own engineers ship the product beside you, so a good founder never dies on the build.
This is the arm that does the most work, and the one most firms do not have. Designers and engineers on our payroll build the thing itself: marketplaces, quoting desks, inventory systems, market data. They are the same people who built and still run five production systems, so nothing is prototyped on a founder for the first time.
OpenThe desk
Infrastructure
We buy, test, grade and ship enterprise hardware ourselves, out of our own warehouse.
Fifteen years of international trade, run from San Francisco. Networking, servers and storage bought, tested, graded, warrantied and shipped by the desk, which is also where the cash flow that funds the other two arms comes from.
Open
How we decide
Waiting is the expensive part.
Most venture losses are not fast failures. They are the slow drift: a company that is not growing, but is not dead enough to close.
01The first two weeks
Audit
The builder ships a working module in our room. No capital moves until the work does.
02One cycle, one milestone
Build
Capital goes to the product and the people building it, against a milestone agreed up front. We do not fund open-ended runway.
03The end of the cycle
Gate
Every project gets a verdict. The answer is stop unless the work proves go.
04The same day
Recycle
A stop ends the spend that day. The money and the people move to something that is working.
Three outcomes, and no option to wait
Keep building
The milestone is met and the work is moving. It earns the next round of capital.
Sell
Demand shows up. The asset was built to pass diligence from the first line, so the hand-off is clean.
Stop
If it isn't moving, it is over. No ego, no second year of hoping.
Why it works
We are not trying to lose less. We are increasing the number of times capital gets a chance to be right.
A stop frees the money and the people inside the same week, for something that is already working. Capital follows proof, and proof arrives sooner than a board meeting does.
Read the thesisContact
Builders, operators, buyers.
Builders: send what you have shipped, and what you would ship next. Early is fine and a memo works. Buyers: a part list is enough.
Hardware desk 415-949-9030j.bell@he-vc.com
San Francisco, office, events and the engineering teamBay Area, hardware desk: inventory, bench and shippingJapantown, San Francisco, partner store














