D’Arcy Coolican

1/ If you’re a founder you’ve probably heard someone say “oh, I’ve seen this idea before - it didn’t work” or “isn’t this just like that other thing that person/company X tried?”

@jaltma this is cool to see. benchmark is lucky to have you!

I’m really excited to share that I’m joining Benchmark. The past two years as a full time investor have been the most rewarding of my career. I really love venture capital, which is not something I ever imagined I’d say when I was kid, but here we are. I love new ideas and being part of a team with a mission. I love getting to be there for people who are struggling towards goals they really care about. I love learning from people who are better CEOs than I ever was. I love the texture of the work, the competition, and the way the job lets you invest in relationships. I love it so much that I’ve even turned into a little venture nerd with a podcast who goes around harassing great investors and founders, trying to learn as much as I can as fast as possible. I’ve certainly learned what I care most about, and what kind of investor I want to be. What I’ve realized is that I love investing at the Series A, when there’s enough going on that an investor can be useful but not so much that you can’t have an impact. I think there are many amazing ways to practice venture, it’s just the way that most speaks to me. And as I came to realize that, I started to think about how to best set myself up to do that craft as well as possible. It became clear to me there is nowhere better for this than Benchmark; the way they’re structured, their principles, their overall approach to investing, and their track record all create an environment that I believe will let me do my best work as an investor and help founders the most I possibly can. As I’ve gotten to know the team at Benchmark I’ve come to admire so much about each of them. Peter is truly playing his own game. A lot of what he says sounds like poetry at first, but as the ideas roll around in your head for a while you realize how much depth they have. I first heard about Eric many years ago from my friend Saji at Benchling while I was building Lattice, who described him as the most amazing board member and attributed him with a lot of the company’s success. That’s the kind of partner I want to be one day. Chetan is brilliant and truly thinks for himself; I’ve realized over time what a courageous guy he is. And then there’s my friend Ev, whose skills complement mine and who I just love to be around. I can’t wait to have him as a partner in crime. When given the chance to work with this group I just knew I had to go. One of my motivating north stars with Alt Capital was to build a firm and be a partner that I most would have wanted as an entrepreneur. Although I haven’t gotten everywhere I want to be yet, I’m proud of the work so far. And now I’m excited to build on that work at Benchmark, where I hope to increase my rate of learning and get armed with the power of a partnership so I can help founders reach their dreams even more. Thank you to the companies who’ve let me invest with them at Alt Cap. I’m keeping all my board seats and supporting everyone just the same as before. Thank you to the LPs who’ve backed me as well. I am so excited about the portfolio we have and am grateful I can stick with all those companies. And finally thank you to my teammates, Bala, Vivek, and Nate. Bala took a bet on me and started investing with me before it was remotely obvious, and we’ve been able to grow so much figuring it out together as investors. I credit Nate with helping Alt start feeling like a firm. He joined us from First Round over a year ago and made everything run smoothly. And while Vivek joined just a little while ago, even in the short time we’ve worked together he’s had a meaningful impact on how we think and invest. They’re all joining Benchmark with me. So pumped for this chapter.

the value in great companies has always been in the network they build, not the software they build. it's just becoming more clear as cost of software goes to zero.

The annual Contrary Research Tech Trends Report is here. 350+ slides on everything from computational intelligence to lunar bases to breakthroughs in biologics to AVs revolutionizing land use to the loneliness epidemic and so much more. Full report in reply.

any funds or companies I know want to sublet me a desk / office in the presidio?

the most destructive part of this myth is that some founders think a vc is going to save them. a VC isn't going to fix your biz or crown you the winner. you have to do it yourself. the sooner you acknowledge this the better.

VCs as kingmaker is complete BS and always fails. If someone tells you it’s true, they have their own agenda. In the end, founders decide which VCs they will make rich, not the other way around

@ericwdolan most funds taking on pretty blatant conflicts rn, so unclear if conflicts are even a thing these days also this maybe worked when vc was a smaller asset class. even with clear conflict rules it'd be impossible to knock out even 25% of the top funds now.

@DCoolican king making no conflict out, wyt?

@pgosavi7056 I think you’ve lost the plot

@DCoolican well secondary is the gravy, but all funds want quick mark up, so no fund will take a lower valuation termsheet

@kirbyman01 ❤️❤️

Happy birthday in heaven! Mom would have been 68 years old today. She passed away a bit more than 2 months ago, suddenly and without any signs. I don’t know if I really understand the circumstances of her death or that I ever will. I was dreading today. Like any human, mom was imperfect, but I never doubted that she loved my brother and I. Or that she was proud of how we grew up. I remembered reading a tweet about a parent who passed away that helped me. So I wanted to return the favor to those who may have lost someone near and dear to their heart recently. She was born into a humble family in Korea with insanely high achieving three brothers, under loving and stern parents. Married my dad and they soon moved to San Diego. I don’t think it was easy for her to adjust and we ultimately moved back to Korea. My mom was well educated and proud. She worked as an English tutor to make the ends meet, and encouraged us to study hard. She would stand in line from 4am so that I could attend the best after school programs. I never skipped school and when I was very sick one day and thought I should stay home, she asked me to sit up from the bed. Then she told me if I can sit up in bed, I can sit in a classroom. I never skipped school.  I know she was the happiest when she lived with or around her sons. Years in New York and San Francisco with me and years in Seattle with my brother. I know she was the happiest then. And I am so glad that we loved and treated her the best we could. I’m glad that she got to live in a blue house of her own in San Francisco, with a beautiful garden. I’m glad she traveled many parts of the world, and that we were able to be there for her.  Yet I am regretful about my last conversation with mom. I am regretful that maybe I could have, should have done much more. I am regretful that I didn’t tell her how much I loved her and how much her support meant to me. What  my therapist said after my mom passed away continues to hit me like a brick. This is the first time that I am living my life, motherless. Obvious, but hard hitting.  I miss her. Because she lived in Korea during her last fee years of her life, it doesn’t hit me that she’s gone on a daily basis. But I miss her. Persistent. Ever present. At random times - on a plane, walking to work, late at night. I hope she is happy somewhere. I hope that she is finally resting. Away from it all.  All I can do is to carry her memory with me. And make sure that I am a better person for the world because of her. Kinder, softer and gentler. And remind folks to tell their parents that you love them. Often.  Happy birthday, 엄마. 사랑해요.

@yrechtman theoretically true, but i think i've met 2 founders actually doing this with intentional. maybe some will be (forced to) figure it out in the future.

@DCoolican The bull case is lots of them use vertical ai for customer acquisition before moving to nfx businesses (but only if the can be honest about the low value nature of the v1)

as the cost to produce software gets closer to zero, the value of a true network increases exponentially i guess im a boomer now, but im shocked at how few AI apps companies actually care about / understand network effects

@jmj Once the large funds align to a category the valuations skyrocket as they try to 'own the category'. its like judoeconomics for vc

VC firms (esp large ones) need to figure out how to organize internally. They inevitable come up with lanes that reflect how the world worked previously (consumer, enterprise, fintech, cyber, etc). They know its flawed but it's the best answer they have. The true alpha in VC (esp for smaller funds) is being able to operate in the seams / agnostic of these categories.

I had a conversation with an investor yesterday who claimed there hasn’t been a hit consumer app in over five years. My response: ChatGPT is a consumer app. He pushed back saying “It started as a research lab, not a consumer company.” That convo made me realize how broken our definition of “consumer” has become. Years ago, I invested in Superhuman after watching my friends (and my Twitter feed) rave about it nonstop. At the time, I was working at a consumer company, yet I never questioned whether Superhuman was “consumer” or not. People love Superhuman for both personal and work use & it’s a daily habit with engagement and retention stronger than most social apps. If that’s not consumer behavior, what is? This might sound surprising to some, but I also viewed @supabase from a consumer lens when we invested in the pre-seed, despite it being an open source dev tool. More than the underlying technology, I was most fascinated by the bottoms up nature of how developers were adopting the database and how passionate the early community was about the product. Open source projects arguably have stronger communities than most consumer products, and the behaviors are social by nature. They have some of most interesting network effects as every incremental developer makes the project stronger. This aligns perfectly with the classic definition of network effects. I’ve also always believed that products built by product-first founders, designed for broad, personal use should be considered consumer products. But somewhere along the way, we invented the term prosumer, and it’s confused everyone. It made these products sound like mini-enterprise tools, which undersells that they’re designed for mass-market behaviors wrapped in productivity. By that logic, Superhuman, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a growing list of “non-consumer” tools are absolutely consumer products. ChatGPT alone has over 750 million weekly active users which is mainstream adoption by any definition. And as it evolves into agentic e-commerce and video gen tools like Sora, its use cases are only getting more personal. Why does this matter? Because category definitions drive fundraising. If you’re a founder pitching a “consumer” product, your pool of potential investors shrinks dramatically. If you just look at how venture firms organize internally, they often literally split their teams by enterprise and consumer, which makes no sense to me. The same goes for VCs pitching LPs where consumer is still viewed as a cyclical category. If you send a consumer venture fund deck to a large group of LPs, many categorically wouldn't take your pitch. In reality “consumer” today looks nothing like “social, local, mobile” which is how so many people think of consumer. Work and life are blending, and the products we use every day at home & at work don’t fit cleanly into old boxes. My friend @nbt once wrote about the consumerization of the enterprise saying: “Amazon the largest e-commerce (consumer!) company in the world, offers Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud services (enterprise!) business in the world. NVIDIA, the largest personal computer graphics (consumer!) company in the world, offers graphics processing units (GPUs) for artificial intelligence applications (enterprise!), and has seen its market cap grow 20X in the past decade since this dual focus.” The next generation of breakout apps won’t be defined by where they’re used, but by how deeply they integrate into daily life. We’re in the golden age of consumer products. And yes, ChatGPT counts.

Product design is one of the most misunderstood fields in tech. It’s not about polishing someone else’s idea. It’s about discovering what’s worth building. So we raised $3.2M to create Softlight: AI that discovers what to build. Great designers navigate business complexity to explore ideas, visualize them, and uncover new ones through iteration. The “aha” moment is realizing they don’t just make your idea better. They help you find the idea itself. That’s what today’s vibe-coding tools miss. They start with your idea and assume you should build it. Softlight starts with your business context to discover ideas you might not have thought of. Our design partners range from growth stage startups to Fortune 500s. Our team created products at Meta, Uber, and Citadel and we’re backed by product execs, CEOs, and founders at companies like Stripe, Airbnb, and Plaid. If you're interested in joining our NYC team, we'd love to hear from you. Link below.

@jelena_noble @elonmusk @X @nikitabier

Friend’s corp twitter account got hacked and is posting weird shit. Do I know anyone who can help?

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this looks sick

i have no connection to this company, but i'm very much here for it. i wouldn't wish mold issues on my worst enemy. hoping this is just the start of real and accessible solutions for it