Since duration is a feature, not a bug; the outcome is more important than the terms. But here's a dictionary of venture terminology — each term as Asher Bond Ventures defines it, with a usage example from the track record.
the Asher Bond Ventures approach — being venture partners and company builders who invest in founders with a chip on the shoulder, fire in the belly, vision to change the world, and a team that can really execute.
In practice: We back founders on what they've done and believe in what they can do next — the whole thesis flows from these four fundamentals.
a founder's grievance turned to power — a real problem tied to a genuine customer pain that the founder is determined to solve.
In practice: We go where the need is greatest, not where the hype is.
the conviction that burns from the core — the drive to actually do something about the chip, validated by testing the market or solving a hard problem, with the founder keeping ownership.
In practice: We believe in founder conviction and ownership, and keep the fire fueled rather than cool it with large stakes.
seeing the largest opportunity and bending the world toward it — going where the need is greatest.
In practice: Fundamental but not rigid — generalist opportunists backing the largest opportunity.
the people, driven by the mission, who build the company through company-building; capability that compounds as it grows.
In practice: We support with introductions, capital, and follow-on — stakeholders aligned toward the outcome.
Care, Ownership, Rationale, Essentials — the lightweight framework Asher Bond Ventures brings to building companies that scale.
In practice: Each investor failure mode rests on a fundamental assumption our CORE Guiding Principles challenge.
a company whose customers are other businesses (also: Enterprise).
Our B2B thesis starts with ROI — a magnitude of improvement for the customer — delivered by a founder whose chip on the shoulder aligns with the customer's pain point. AI is what unlocks that magnitude: an AI-first transformation of the classic Enterprise thesis, and part of our broader thesis on the AI transformation of intelligence and cognition, where we make our most serious contrarian moves.
e.g. Natilus's blended-wing airframe targets orders-of-magnitude better economics per ton-mile — in B2B, the form factor is the ROI.
a company whose customers are individual people.
CORE GP, applied — Care and Ownership: take ownership of the hardest problems in people's daily lives and deliver an order of magnitude of improvement to as many people as possible, in products they love and swear by.
e.g. 1X builds humanoid robots for the home, taking ownership of daily life for as many people as possible.
technology serving both commercial and government customers.
Dual-use over pure defense wherever a commercial market exists: one small step for government, one giant leap for commercialization.
e.g. Biofire's always-locked, instantly accessible smart gun serves households and agencies alike — one small step for government, one giant leap for commercialization.
technology built for government and military customers, with no commercial market.
Pure defense only where the mission need is greatest — and where the founder can out-build the entrenched primes.
e.g. Anduril builds autonomous defense systems to out-build the entrenched primes where the mission need is greatest.
a company serving patients and their caregivers.
Life-changing outcomes — improvement measured in lives and quality of life, by orders of magnitude.
e.g. Neuralink's brain-computer interface aims at life-changing outcomes measured by orders of magnitude.
a company whose core capability is machine intelligence.
A durable data or deployment advantage that generates real-world alpha, built on proprietary data and real deployments. AI is central to our B2B thesis and part of our broader thesis on the AI transformation of intelligence and cognition.
e.g. Wand's AI workforce compounds proprietary data and real deployments into real-world alpha.
a company building machines that act in the physical world.
Real deployments in the field, where hardware and autonomy compound into a moat competitors cannot copy quickly.
e.g. Figure's general-purpose humanoids earn their moat in real deployments, where hardware and autonomy compound.
a company building flight and space systems — atmospheric aircraft through orbital launch.
A shift in the cost or capability curve of flight and launch by an order of magnitude.
e.g. Natilus bends the cost curve of flight with a blended-wing airframe; (Stealth #6) extends the same discipline to launch.
a company engineering biology itself as a technology platform.
We reserve Tech-Bio for companies whose success requires solving an unsolved biological problem — where the science itself is the moat, and we back the founding scientist who owns and drives it. If the biology is known and the challenge is execution, it is Health, not Tech-Bio.
e.g. Conception Bio's in-vitro gametogenesis — eggs from cells — backs a founding scientist solving an unsolved biological problem.