Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP · OpenLP from Sapphire Partners

Staying Small Despite Billion-Dollar Backings with Micah Rosenbloom

·45 min·1 clip

Origins opens with Nick Churls and Beezer Clarkson framing Micah Rosenblum as a thoughtful venture investor who likes to think out loud about the ecosystem. Micah comes across as a managing partner at Founder Collective, a seed and pre-seed fund with investments in names such as Uber, SeatGeek, Suno, and Airtable. The conversation also grounds him as a three-time tech founder, including Handshake.com, and as someone who has built a strong investor track record over the last decade. From there, the episode moves into the question of what a firm like Founder Collective is supposed to be when the market changes faster than the old operating playbook. Beezer presses on how LPs think about weighted average cost basis and why a fund may choose to put fewer dollars behind a company it already knows well. That leads into a broader tension: whether craft venture is still differentiated or whether the market has made that style feel out of step. Micah answers by describing a version of continuity that is real but not rigid. He says the firm's core values have stayed the same. He also says the mechanics have changed. The firm has hired more people. It started with $100K checks. It now writes a minimum $500K check. That shift becomes one of the episode's clearest examples of how a manager can keep its identity while still adjusting to market reality. The conversation uses that change to explore how strategy evolves in practice rather than in theory. Micah and the hosts talk about how Founder Collective has broadened its geographic dispersion. They also talk about being in more unusual places given the state of the market. The tone stays candid rather than polished. Micah acknowledges the market is difficult for investors right now. Beezer adds her own concern that venture has become more concentrated, with large funds writing large checks and making many rounds feel less interesting. The discussion also circles around the problem of data quality, especially around safes, which remain hard to analyze cleanly. Even when the hosts do not settle every question, they keep returning to the same practical issue: how fund size, check size, and deal structure shape what kinds of companies can still be backed in a meaningful way. The episode is strongest when it shows how these abstractions land inside actual fund behavior. It does not pretend there is a single right answer. Instead, it treats venture as a set of competing pressures that managers have to balance in real time. That makes the episode feel like a working conversation rather than a finished thesis. By the close, the trio has covered the old and new rules of being a small fund in a bigger market, and they leave room for more discussion in a future minisode.

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A candid look at how a selective seed fund adapts without losing its edge.

Origins takes a close look at how a seed and pre-seed fund tries to stay selective as venture gets tougher and more concentrated. Micah Rosenblum and the hosts revisit Founder Collective's shift from $100K checks to a $500K minimum, and the same question keeps surfacing: can…

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