Jamie Gull

Stoked to get to finally announce Wave Function Ventures $15M Fund 1! Wave Function was created to partner with deep tech founders building hardware solutions to the world’s most important problems. I'm 9 investments in, with 15-20 left to go.

@H2Colby Sick

yo whats up

@LD103006 @pavelprata @RingsApp 👋

@pavelprata @RingsApp Endorsing as a LP who backs solo GPs.👌

Do solo and emerging GPs actually have a network edge? I've been speaking with a lot of emerging VCs lately, and every second one leads with the same narrative: "we have a broad, defensible network." So I looked at the @RingsApp dataset (74 funds, 275 user accounts) to check whether that's actually true. And a few numbers stood out to me: - Solo and duo GPs carry 2.9x more relationships per person than funds with 5+ people - The peak is at 2 people – 4,110 relationships per person. Solo GPs sit at 3,618 - Cross into 3-4 people and you're already at 2,529 - At 5-10 people the median drops to 1,296. That's a 68% decline from peak - Mid and large funds are essentially identical – 1,296 vs 1,311. Adding headcount at that point changes nothing And yeah, it seems that the edge is real, but based on my experience talking to GPs across fund sizes, I don't think it's because solo GPs are unusually well-connected people. I think it's structural and a few things explain it: 1/ Survival pressure. At a larger firm you can be an average networker and still get deal flow through the brand, through partners, through inbound. Solo GPs don't have that buffer. You build relationships or you don't see deals. That's an existential pressure, and it produces genuinely different behavior. 2/ Time allocation. Every growing firm pays "a scale tax" – internal meetings, team management, etc. Solo GPs don't pay it. Every hour a partner at a larger firm spends on internal alignment is an hour a solo GP spends on a call with a founder or LP. 3/ Relationship quality. When you're one person, you can't delegate relationships, so you do the intro yourself, the follow-up yourself, you remember the details. At larger firms relationships often become institutional (like "we know that founder!"), but nobody specifically knows them well. Solo GPs build connections that are personally held, which makes them informationally richer and harder to replicate. 4/ Signal clarity. At a big firm people come to you because of where you work. The brand amplifies deal flow – but it also distorts it. When someone calls a solo GP, it's because they know that specific person. I think this makes a real difference in the quality of the relationship, not just the quantity. And the part I find most interesting (and maybe a bit uncomfortable for EMs to sit with) is that this advantage is time-limited by design. Based on the data, it starts compressing not when you raise Fund III, but when you make your 3rd hire. The cliff happens between 2 and 5 people, not between 10 and 50. I think the funds that preserve the edge are the ones that build infrastructure early enough to turn individual relationships into something the firm actually owns (automated CRM enrichment, shared context, real visibility into who knows whom), because without it the network doesn't belong to the firm, it belongs to a person. For LPs this reframes the DD question, because team size is commonly used as a proxy for network breadth, but the data says it's almost the opposite — the right question isn't how big the network is, it's where it lives, who owns it, and what happens to it if the key person walks out the door.

@pronounced_kyle I’ve got one for you.

I want to fund a space warfighting prime. Space is a unique domain. It's huge, hostile, and fragile — so we need tech that can help America secure outer space *while preserving the domain itself.* If you're thinking about the future of space and defense, please get in touch.

@zebulgar Boom!

@AndyLapsa Epic!

Hey that's a neat truck

@MollySOShea @adcock_brett @Figure_robot 🫠

If your humanoid robot company's CEO isn't a major sci-fi junkie then.. you're ngmi Can you guess Brett Adcock’s favorite sci-fi movie? PS — what’s the greatest sci-fi movie of all time? @adcock_brett @Figure_robot

@E_Bruxxx Well said

Have seen a lot of debate lately around “traditional VCs” vs “operator/untraditional VCs” and honestly think both sides massively oversimplify it. Very real differences in how they think, underwrite risk, and work with founders. Traditional path VCs (MBA → banking → consulting → growth equity → VC) are often extremely polished. Typically very good at process, fundraising strategy, market sizing, financial storytelling, LP communication, pricing rounds, understanding how institutional capital behaves, etc. They know how the machine works. And contrary to Twitter discourse, that absolutely matters. A lot of founders underestimate how valuable these skillsets can become later in a company’s life. But from what I’ve personally seen, that path can also sometimes create investors who over-index on consensus and “what a venture-backable company is supposed to look like.” Now compare that to operator/untraditional VCs. These are people who built companies, worked in industry, military, engineering, manufacturing, sales, blue collar environments, startups, or just took weird nonlinear paths before entering venture. Typically, they have a much higher tolerance for ambiguity, chaos, and imperfect businesses because they’ve actually lived through operational pain. A lot of them evaluate founders less like spreadsheets and more like people. BUT… Operator VCs have weaknesses too, and people rarely talk about them honestly. Some operator VCs massively over-project their own experience onto founders. “I built a company before, therefore this founder should operate exactly how I did.” That becomes dangerous fast. Some also underestimate how important capital markets, positioning, narrative, downstream financing strategy, and institutional relationships actually are. Building a company and investing in one are not the same skillset. Truthfully, some of the worst investors I’ve ever met came from BOTH camps. The traditional guys who’ve never actually built anything but think every business can be modeled neatly in Excel… AND the ex-operators who think one successful operating experience suddenly makes them experts in every category forever. The best VCs I’ve personally met usually sit somewhere in the middle combining adaptability and realism with the strategic discipline and market understanding of traditional finance. Most importantly: strong opinions loosely held. They don’t walk into founder meetings trying to “win” intellectually. They listen. Because at the end of the day, founders are the ones spending years in the arena.

@H2Colby @blitzpanel I don’t know shit about panels but I don’t think you need help.

@jamiegull @blitzpanel its better now!!

two pics for the timeline to enjoy this evening a - most beautiful ceiling ever seen in a shipping container b - my electrical panel so yall can tell me how to make it better

@IanRountree 🚀🚀!

You can just IPO

@elidourado 😂

Bold move to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on fusion development and then adopt a new "core strategy" of fission.

Epic! Nice work @maddiehalla

@hthieblot And picking up steam

@jamiegull Slowly but it’s happening

On venture moving into atoms, not just bits. thenextweb.com/news/venture-c…

@FrankPepper12 Thanks Frank!

@jamiegull This is dope

@E_Bruxxx Thanks!

“The next wave of innovation will not be defined by how quickly we can write code. It will be defined by how effectively we can build, deploy, and scale physical solutions in the real world.” Great read, Jamie!

@billythalheimer So cool!

Dual use ✅

@tbpn @blackstone Welcome to the party bro

President of @blackstone Jon Gray says his firm's biggest theme after data centers is electricity: "Data centers, robots, autonomous vehicles, reindustrialization. It all needs power. It's everything from LNG, to renewables, to pipelines, to electrical equipment, to utility services."

@elidourado Email inbound

@jamiegull Do I know about this?

Go to Proto-Town if you want to see robotically constructed adobe houses, high-recovery desal centrifuges, autonomous construction equipment, solar-chemical air conditioning, a radioisotope reactor, and more. It's delightful. wsj.com/business/entre…

@beffjezos You could easily switch progressives and conservatives with many examples.

Welcome to 2026 "Progressives" are Maoist in their hate of free speech and are against AI (techno-regressive) "Conservatives" are for freedom of speech and pro-AI (techno-progressive)