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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.

  • Townsend Networks
  • Rack N Stack
  • Global IT Distributors
  • Golden Gate Games
  • rsorders.com
  • AWS
  • Equator Coffees
  • BitBasel

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.

    Open
  • The 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.

    Open
  • The 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.

  1. 01The first two weeks

    Audit

    The builder ships a working module in our room. No capital moves until the work does.

  2. 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.

  3. 03The end of the cycle

    Gate

    Every project gets a verdict. The answer is stop unless the work proves go.

  4. 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 thesis

Contact

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.

hello@he-vc.com

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

An evening with guests at the office