Welcome to Forward This.
We’re Joe and Maddi, co-founders and General Partners at Daring Ventures.
We’re building our first venture fund in public, and this is where we write through the process.
Forward This is part fund-building log, part investment thesis, part public notebook, and occasionally part rant. We write about the founders we want to back, the firm we’re trying to build, the things we keep noticing, and the parts of venture that feel more confusing than they need to be.
We notice different things first. Joe tends to write what was in the air that week; Maddi tends to write what was in the room. The overlap is Daring.
Why We Write This
Building a fund forces you to say what you believe before the market gives you permission.
Some of that thinking belongs in decks, memos, and LP updates. A lot of it does not. It belongs here, where the language can be a little less polished and a little more honest.
The writing is part of the work. It helps us sharpen what we believe, find the people we want to know, and keep a public record of how the fund is taking shape.
More on Daring Ventures
Daring Ventures backs domain experts building vertical AI for complex and regulated industries.
Our thesis is simple: building software has gotten a lot easier, but knowing what to build is still really hard. We believe the next generation of category-defining companies will come from people who have lived inside the workflows, felt the pain directly, and know where the wedge is hiding.
What We Write About
Building Daring Ventures: Raising and shaping our first fund in public, from LP meetings to positioning to the work of becoming a firm.
The Buyer-Builder Thesis: Why we back domain experts who know the workflow, own the wedge, and are building vertical AI for complex industries.
Venture in Plain English: Plainspoken pieces for people learning how funds, LPs, private markets, marks, and early-stage investing actually work.
How We Actually Work: The tools, AI workflows, and operating experiments that keep the ship moving.
The Other Stuff: Essays, riffs, and occasional rants on the odd patterns, weird incentives, overused signals, and things we just can’t unsee.
Who This Is For
Forward This is for founders, operators, LPs, emerging managers, industry obsessives, and people who like watching ideas get sharper in public.
It is especially for people who have ever looked at a market, a workflow, a credential, a startup, a fundraise, or a piece of software and thought: something about this feels off.
Start Here
If you’re new, we made a catch-up guide with the pieces worth reading first:
And if something here makes you think of a founder, operator, investor, friend, frenemy, skeptic, or person with oddly specific knowledge of an industry, forward it to them.
That is kind of the whole point.
