Watch Us Build a Venture Fund
New? Catch Up Here: the recurring ideas, unresolved questions, and what to read first.
Welcome to Forward This. We’re Joe & Maddi, co-founders and General Partners at Daring Ventures. Every week(ish) we share the process of building from zero to one as first-time fund managers who tend to notice different things first, but always end up building toward the same place.
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. Together, this has become the public record of us writing our way toward clarity while raising the fund that depends on it. Get to know us more here: [link]
Our investment thesis is simple: building software has gotten a lot easier recently, but knowing what to build is still really hard. We back domain experts who know the workflow and own the wedge building vertical AI for regulated/complex industries. Want to know more? Read our investment thesis here: [link]
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 the like that we just can’t unsee.
Get caught up
What Should I Build?: The core Daring thesis: building software has become radically easier, but knowing what deserves to exist still belongs to people who have lived inside the workflow.
28 LP Meetings in 28 Days: Maddi’s candid fundraise log from the early days of raising Fund I, and a record of what actually happens when first-time managers start taking the meetings.
Save As: Joe’s tech-meets-culture essay about the decay of the young-founder archetype, and how venture keeps mistaking familiar signals for substance.
The Trojan Notebook: Maddi’s case study on the buyer-builder pattern, showing how a domain-specific pain point can become the wedge for a generational vertical software company.
Software is a Middle Manager: Joe explains how a small vibecoding prank on Maddi turned into a declaration of war against software popups.
What to do next
The name is not subtle. If something here makes you think of a founder, operator, investor, friend, frenemy, skeptic, or person with oddly specific knowledge of an industry, send it to them.
If someone sent this to you, welcome. That button down there is for you.
We’re always looking to meet more people who make us think. Tell us what you’re building, what we’re missing, what you want us to write about, or what question you can’t get out of your head.
Reach out to say hi to one of us:
joseph[at]daringventures.vc & madeline[at]daringventures.vc
If you don’t… we have your email. You might hear from us.