You may have heard about Explainable AI. Asher Bond Ventures is here to tell you about Explainable Investments. A thesis is about actions, not the words that describe intent — a de facto investment thesis is nothing more than an explanation of an investor's behavior. So here is ours, explained by what we do.
We invest pre-seed through Series B and beyond, with the conviction and risk appetite of a fundamental early-stage investor — taking real early risk, on conviction, before the outcome is obvious.
Where the need is greatest. We prioritize dual-use and life-changing solutions in the top 0.1% of massive market opportunities — the transformational TAM-shifters that change the world by magnitudes of improvement, instead of guessing what the market may look like after the transformation.
We categorize by who the customer is — go where the need is greatest and back founders going after the largest market opportunities, at any stage, in any vertical. What matters is how founders articulate the opportunity, not how analysts define the market — we expect our founders to shift it a bit.
No revenue, no product, no problem. And if you already have revenue, nobody will ask why you didn't come sooner.
We are FOUNDER and TEAM sensitive — NOT valuation sensitive. We back founders who build companies talented people want to work at, delivering the highest quality products customers love and swear by, and we represent underrepresented founders with a vision to change the world.
More than a startup investor: building, growing, and scaling companies, maximizing product-market fit before and after it's found. Founders do the dreaming and pull their own operational levers — we sometimes care how the sausage is made, but we let the sausage makers do their thing. We look for alpha generated through magnitudes of improvement around the UI, the UX, and the U-ask, building the ideal customer experience for the ideal customer profile rather than reverse-engineering DPI from a historic IPO.
The outcome. We stay outcome-focused and don't get distracted by terms, we focus on the fundamentals in every stage, and we explain what vertical we're in by the investments we've already made.
We are not perfect. Sometimes we get in later than we should — and that won't stop us from backing great Superfounders at later stages when we missed them early. We could be wrong. We've been wrong before. But stubbornness and confirmation bias won't stop us from learning from our mistakes and adapting.