So thrilled to welcome new partner Maria (Brewer) Palma to the Freestyle team!!
Delighted to announce I’ve joined Freestyle Capital! After advising founders on choosing the right VC, it was a unique & fun experience to turn the tables and choose a VC for myself in a new geo. I wanted a place where: (1) I respected/liked the people & was excited to learn from them (2) The firm had a strong track record & stellar reputation with the best founders (3) The platform would enable me to excel at early stage investing After meeting some phenomenal people in venture these past few months, Freestyle was the clear home for me: (1) Jenny and Dave have both been founders themselves and each bring a unique perspective to this craft, but I’m not the only one who thinks they are special. What I appreciated about them was echoed back to me from their founders, whether it was “Jenny’s candor” making someone better or “Dave’s wisdom and experience” helping a founder through a difficult time. One founder put it succinctly, “great investors and great people.” (2) The firm has an incredible track record and has invested in some category-defining companies such as Airtable, Patreon, BetterUp & Intercom. Their DPI (cash returns) is top quartile & decile–increasingly rare these days. A founder’s time is a scarce resource. I was blown away both by what founders said about Freestyle, but also the sheer volume of high profile founders who were ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice to tell me how fantastic Freestyle was. As an early-stage only fund, every investment we do really matters to the fund, and you feel that as a founder. Much of the time great founders do their thing and we get out of their way, but when it gets messy and really hard, as it so often does, it’s helpful to have someone there who really cares and didn’t invest in you as an option ticket for future rounds. As someone who was recently called a “pitbull in their corner” by one of my founders, I like to be at a firm where you can build this type of relationship and work incredibly hard for your companies when they need it. As a generalist investor, I’ll meet founders from any sector & geo (US/Europe), but I’m diving deeper currently here: -AI Payments – next Paypal for agents -Code Gen - directly, but also 2nd/3rd order implications for engineers -Models Outside Language – anything requiring its own dataset (hard sciences - atoms not bits) -AI-First Tech Stack – the new tech stack AI first companies get built on -Physical Meets AI – robotics or offline applications of AI -Future of Compute – from photonic interconnects to quantum, anything that step changes how we compute -Enterprise Urgent - against this backdrop, anything an enterprise will actually rush through procurement instead of POC &I then drop Excited to work with Joshua Gilbert, Maria Ramona Hannigan & David Bill! THANKS to Sonali De Rycker Luca Bocchio Joanna Rupp,CFA Matt Auxier, CFA Enrique Sarap Semil Shah Taylor Greene Ed Zimmerman David York & Chad Byers who made my transition smooth & enjoyable!