title: 2025 Q3 portfolio decisions type: decisions date: 2025-09-30
Q3 2025 portfolio decisions
acme-example seed
Led the seed round at $X cap (placeholder amount). Decision drivers:
- Strong technical founder (alice-example)
- Defensible distribution thesis
- Pivot evidence shows customer instinct
The bet is that the team will out-execute the category for the next 18-24 months. If general-purpose models close the gap before then, the defensibility argument breaks. ~0.7 conviction.
widget-co Series A pass
Passed on widget-co's Series A. The team is strong but the market is crowded and the existing players have meaningful distribution moats. Even at the current valuation the upside doesn't justify the risk.
I notice I'm passing on a lot of marketplace-adjacent plays this quarter. Worth checking whether that's a real pattern in the data or pattern-matching on a recent loss. The marketplaces-always-win take I wrote earlier may be under-calibrating my recent losses.
fund-b LP commitment
Committed to fund-b at the existing allocation. Their thesis has held up; their last vintage will probably hit 3x net within 4 years if their top three names exit at the trajectories they're on. Solid but not exceptional.
Notes
The thread I keep coming back to is whether my late-on-macro pattern is showing up in these decisions. The acme-example bet implicitly says vertical-AI compounds for another 18-24 months before commoditization. That's the same shape as several past calls I was 18 months early on.