I’m starting a developer-focused venture capital fund with Ashley Smith. We’re pretty sure that Valid Capital might be a valid source of capital for you.

I started talking with Sid — GitLab’s CEO — in 2015. I had been chatting with him for awhile about joining the team. The second person I met with was Ashley, who was the CMO at the time. Ashley ended up being one of the reasons I ended up joining GitLab as an advisor in 2016- I came away super impressed whenever I talked with her about the company and developer tools.

Ashley and I are like some Star Trek weird mirror universe inversions of each other: I was early at GitHub and then went to GitLab, and she was early at GitLab and then went to GitHub. There really aren’t any others who did this, and it’s been great having someone with those shared experiences to bounce ideas off of. And one of those ideas was to raise a developer-focused venture fund together.

The short of it is that we all know what’s happening: software is eating the world, the developer is the new kingmaker, JavaScript still can’t do simple math… these are all phrases that have been thrown around a lot the last decade.

And yet… god, software is shit. Everything is. Everywhere you look it’s still too slow, or too confusing, or not powerful enough, or you end up using a product that looks like it somehow survived the last twenty years without learning what the box model is. Developer tools, enterprise SaaS, data and machine learning… it’s just still so lacking. This is the state of the world that I’ve always loved, as a product person. And I still like it as a newly-minted venture capitalist, too. We’ve got a long way to go, and there’s a lot yet to build.

So yeah, that’s why we’re starting Valid Capital today. It’s just the two of us, investing in companies that focus on developers, whether those developers are their customers, their employees, or otherwise. We’ve spent decades working in developer tools and really just love the space. If you’re thinking of raising a round for your company, give us a shout. Or if you’re thinking of starting a company. Or even if you’re working full-time now and want to think through making a change. We’ve both been in that position, and these decisions matter a lot to us. Never too early to get some external advice.

On the other side of things: we’re fundraising for Valid’s Fund I right now, so if you fancy yourself a Valid LP, feel free to reach out and we can grab some time to talk about it.

Quick last sidebar I want to talk about on a personal level: I’m pretty optimistic about software again.

I don’t think I fully caught how negative I’ve been about the industry the last decade or so. And don’t get me wrong — the tech industry has deep, fundamental problems, and there’s an awful lot to get angry about. I’m no different; I have a ton of experiences that still make me see red.

But I’ve been in the industry for nearly fifteen years now, and making a career online for over twenty. If you do this long enough, you end up close with others who have been doing it for awhile, and it’s easy to get sucked into everything-is-horrible conversations. I can’t tell you the number of Slacks I’m in where everyone is a tech-made millionaire and they rail on tech constantly.

Getting into angel investing over the last five years has been pretty eye-opening, if only because it opened me up to so many people outside of my little hole I’ve been in. And founders inherently tend to be optimistic, at least about their target market. It’s hard not to get excited after talking with someone who sees things a little differently than you.

Might be getting too overly sentimental about all this just because I’m making a big switch in my career from the engineering side to the investment side today. But I think it’s just been making me reflect how insular one’s world can get just from standing in one place for too long.

It’s not the first time I write too much about a simple thing. I mean, I’m the dude who wrote 8,000 words when “hey programming dates and times is hard” would have done just as well. So I’ll just finish up with:

Hi. I’m starting a developer-focused venture fund with my friend Ashley Smith. We’re real excited about it.