Frontera , Divergent Investments, Healthtech, edtech Co-founder at FBN Former KPCB partner
Denver, Colorado
Joined March 2022
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100 percent correct. Contrarian but accurate and it’s why investments that are not unanimous at vc funds do so well.
the worst time to start a company is when everyone thinks it’s the best time to start a company.
people naively think raising $ is the hard part of building a company when it’s actually (1) hiring world class people + (2) competing for customers
both become harder for early stage startups in frothy markets.
all legendary companies were started at the beginning of market cycles, not after markets became frothy.
It’s a playbook that worked. @mmurph was also ahead of Mobile with the ifund back in the day. See a trend and be bold. #venturecapital #entrepreneur
Amazing stuff coming at CFi… ag is perfect for tokenization. Excellent credit, history and data. @CFiAgFinance is the leader with scale! #agtech #farm
Tokenization presents interesting opportunities beyond just stocks and treasuries.
American farmers are being financed onchain.
There are currently 1,424 farm loans live on @solana.
Here is how it works.
- A farmer needs money for seeds and equipment before planting.
- @CFiAgFinance lends the money through the @alpha_ledger platform.
- Each loan becomes its own token on Solana.
- The farmer pays it back after harvest, in about 10 months.
What onchain data shows.
- 1,424 separate loans so far and each one its own token.
- Loan sizes run from about $2.5K to over $100K.
- This season’s loans were issued in February 2026 and are due January 2027.
- Each loan has only one holder for now.
Where the opportunity is.
- Yield are tied to harvests, not crypto prices.
- Room to open up. Bundle these loans into one pool, and everyday investors could earn from real farm credit with small amounts.
- There is full visibility. Every loan sits onchain, where it can be tracked one by one.
- Could be a model for other countries.
Whoa
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
“Founder led again”… I would be a buyer great note from @apoorva_mehta
Tony and I have explored bringing Instacart and DoorDash together on and off over the years. We kept coming back to it because the industrial logic has always been clear.
Customers have 21 meals a week to figure out. Groceries and restaurant delivery each solve part of that problem. Serving customers well means bringing together the best of both.
As the biggest companies in the world move deeper into this market, retailers and restaurants need the technology and service to compete. They shouldn’t have to become technology companies themselves to stand a chance. Bringing Instacart and DoorDash together can give them a stronger partner in that fight.
For shoppers and Dashers, the opportunity is equally straightforward: less time waiting between orders, more time earning.
I’m incredibly proud of what we built at Instacart and grateful to everyone who helped make it possible. Tony is an extraordinary entrepreneur and leader. I’m excited for Instacart to be part of a founder-led company again, and I can’t wait to see what these two teams build together.
@t_xu @DoorDash @Instacart
Legit
Three @MenloVentures LPs are set to make $1B+ each from the Anthropic IPO.
@mmurph explains how they raised a $500M+ SPV at a $18B valuation without being allowed to show a single financial:
"Out of that LP meeting, a bunch of our LPs said, 'This is fabulous that you're in this company. Can we co-invest with you?'
Before you knew it, there was a couple hundred million of interest.
We'd never done an SPV before. But this was a special company, and we wanted to lead the round.
We couldn't do it out of our $750 million fund. We could do $50 or $100. But we couldn't do the rest.
So we said, 'How about we take capital from our fund and our LPs, put this whole thing together, and make a proposal to lead the round?'
As history would have it, we were definitely a little over our skis.
You get a lot of people interested. But when you shake the trees, some things fall out and some don't.
There was a scary period for about 30, 45 days where I was like, 'Oh my God. I think we've over-committed here, and we may not pull this off.'
What I didn't realize up front: Anthropic was supportive, but they said we couldn't share any financial information.
You're asking people to invest at an $18 billion valuation, and you can't show any financials. We could say what last year's revenue was. But we couldn't do any forward projections.
That's a tall ask for big state pension funds. A bunch of them said, 'Look, we just can't responsibly do that as a state pension fund.'
But I can tell you that three did. And they've all made well over a billion dollars at the last round valuation.
Fortune favors the brave."
This is when I realized New England people are cheesy and uncool:
youtu.be/HEOj-IoIgXo?is=53Np…
A deal is a deal. As a founder don’t renegotiate a deal you made. You would expect the same from your investors.
i invested $5k in a startup 2 months ago for 1% equity.
now they’re raising a $3m seed round, and the lead investor thinks my 1% stake is too much for such a small check.
the founder and i are trying to figure out what to do.
the interesting part? the founder was willing to give 1–2% for $5k–$10k.
if you’re a founder, how would you handle this? would you stand by the deal you made or renegotiate to keep your next round on track?
is this a dealbreaker for you?
i’ll share how this ends later.
Yeah Denver
This is a fun story, I will be following...
A developer bought a Denver office building for $24.5M and planned to convert it into 116 apartments... They emptied the building of its commercial tenants, but then interest rates rose and financing fell apart, and so the bank foreclosed.
Selling a 100,000 sqft office building with 100% vacancy is generally tough, so it sold for only $2.7M ($27/sq ft, with no debt being assumed!) to a young developer.
He is forgetting about the apartment conversion (you can't afford it with the debt prices now anyway) and plans to get office tenants in by charging ridiculously low rents... he plans to charge tenants only $5/sq ft/year in base rent... imagine getting a 10k sqft office for $4k/mo (+operating expenses)!
I hope it works out for him, what a price!
there are good People in vc as well. You only hear from chest thumping douchebags.
I was partners with @mmurph at @kleinerperkins for years and what @venkyganesan says in #2 is true….
World is seeing #1 now but we all knew #entrepreneur #vc
There are two things you need to know about @mmurph
1. He has an incredible nose for the next big thing and the midas touch. Everything he touches turns into gold.
2. He's the most committed, loyal person I know. Once he commits to you, he is with you thick and thin. He's the ultimate ride-or-die guy.
Menlo Ventures is on a tear
They led an investment in Anthropic at an ~$4B valuation
At the time, most thought OpenAI would be the singular AI winner
Maybe we’ll see something similar with @FactoryAI? 👀
Welcome to the Factory team @mmurph!
Amol Deshpande retweeted
Great summary and amazing interview @HarryStebbings! i'm surprised @venkyganesan only quoted ~5 people across several centuries. He does that in a single partners meeting and makes us all smarter, more entertained. A great investor, visionary, culture keeper, and scholar!
What Menlo has done over the last 24 months is exceptional.
Yes, they did Anthropic’s round at $4BN that will make them $50BN+ as a firm. NICE!
But they then took that and went f****** hard. They do Lovable, Higgsfield, Legora.
They compounded the brand win of Anthropic to cement their position from respectfully a slightly ageing firm to being a dominant venture leader at the forefront with Thrive, a16z, Benchmark etc.
It is incredible to see and I sat down with @venkyganesan to shoot the s*** on this.
1. Every Seed Investment Is an Option Bet
Seed-stage deals function as financial options to discover true outlier potential before committing major capital. VCs must construct a broad enough portfolio to secure sufficient at-bats, only sizing up their position when quantifiable, revenue-based metrics prove an outlier has emerged.
2. What Is the First Sign of the AI Wave Cracking?
Market cycles rarely collapse due to equity write-downs. They fracture when levered debt defaults occur. When market participants take on heavy leverage during an AI boom, precise timing becomes as critical as being directionally correct, making debt obligations the primary failure vector when cycles turn.
3. Why Every VC Must Now Prioritize IRR
Every startup in the current landscape writes a structural tax to the Mag 7 and hyperscalers for compute and foundation models. Because LPs can buy index exposure to those same public tech giants without fees or carry, private VCs must generate outsized IRR performance, beating public markets by at least 1,000 basis points, to justify private capital allocation.
4. Why LPs Wanting Smaller Funds and Slower Deployment Is BS
LPs cannot demand both smaller fund sizes and multi-year deployment paces in the middle of a generational platform shift. Because AI startups face immense capital requirements to scale compute, VC firms that refuse to deploy capital rapidly will watch competitors step in and capture the category winners.
5. The Theory of Reflexivity and How It's Causing Markups
Reflexivity creates self-reinforcing loops where fast revenue growth triggers rapid valuation markups, attracting elite human and financial capital that further accelerates growth. However, when copycat investors chase markups for momentum rather than underlying fundamentals, reflexive valuation bubbles inflate until market realities force an inevitable correction.
6. Sometimes You Pay Up Because You Have Unique Insight
Premium entry prices are not always the result of irrational bidding. They often stem from an investor's ability to recognize a fundamentally larger total addressable market than the consensus. When a VC possesses unique conviction around an expanding market opportunity, paying above current rates reflects calculated foresight rather than price-taking behavior.
7. There's No Limit to What a Person Can Do as Long as They Don't Care Who Gets the Credit
Personal ego remains one of the most expensive liabilities in venture capital and company building. True long-term success requires setting aside individual notoriety, focusing ruthlessly on generating LP returns, and empowering teammates and founders without worrying about who receives the public credit.
(links in comments)
I sadly agree with @rpethe on this.
Being in ai myself I will say Fbn “had”the data infrastructure to do it.
When all elite engineers and tech and leadership leaves this is the announcement you get… #agtech
lnkd.in/p/gSePDwKm
