---
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.
