I've taken more than 600 founder intro meetings this year. That's about 4.5 times the average investor on Alphaline, which ranks Redbud VC a top-5% sourcer, a top-5% first mover on hot startups, and the #4 most popular investor on the platform.
Being a smaller-sized fund ($35M), the number of founder meetings we have each year is a number we get to choose for ourselves. And because it’s in our control, we obsess over it.
We've looked at more than 5,000 companies so far in 2026. That’s about 500 a month – up 73% on a monthly basis from last year. Annualized, the number of deals we've done is up 174%.
Now, you’re probably thinking, “that’s a lot of volume, how do you keep track of all those meetings?” All of it runs through Roulette.
We also use Specter, The Network, Alphaline, and Deep Checks. We track specific founders and teams over time, and watch for signals that someone is about to start something. A few of these signals would be if they change their LinkedIn to “building” or “stealth startup” or add “Founder” to their bio. We also spend time in places like YC's co-founder matching.
We hosted 20 events this year and have over 400 funds in our network. We have over 65k followers across all platforms and received over 4.6M impressions in 2026.
Volume is how you get to the weird, overlooked company before it looks obvious. There’s no way around it.
Across 43 investments in two funds, here's how we found them. 20 came from referrals, 14 from outbound, 6 from inbound, and 3 from events. Speaking of which, if you haven’t signed up for Roots Weekend, and you’re serious about building - I would do that today.
Referrals are still about half the portfolio, and this is something we work at. We email a network of 400+ funds every six months with what we're looking for, and more than 20,000 founders are in our network now.
Outbound is a bigger share of Fund II than Fund I, even though we send less of it. Our success rate climbed as more founders recognized our name. If you’re wondering how we accomplished this, read this article.
The better known we get, the less outbound it takes to land a great founder.
Sourcing is a function of being known and because we're only three years old - the more we're known, the better deals we get.
Once some funds get more well known, they slow down. They hustle less. May this mentality never find me.
Some VCs only focus on the first half of the equation: finding great founders and companies early. Not us. We hustle just as much after we invest. We've made more than 750 intros for portfolio companies.
Some of those turn into numbers on a P&L. Layer9 closed a large ISP. Pave is contracting with a large fintech. Porter closed multiple customers through our network. RouteSense raised its full round from people we introduced. Atlas brought in a strategic investment from the founder of AMCA and we helped Trestle land a potential seven figure customer.
EquipmentShare (founded by my partners @willyschlacks and Jabbok Schlacks) is part of that too. Our portfolio companies like Safesight and Mirala have contracts with EquipmentShare, and OneImaging is live as an employee benefit with access to ~10,000 employees.
For a pre-seed company, a customer of that size is an incredible signal to downstream investors.
The most useful thing a pre-seed investor can do is make an intro that closes a customer.
That's all I have for now, I need to get back to sourcing. ;) If you're building and haven't pitched us already, click here.
