Kairos time all the time; early-stage venture capital in 2025
I’ve always loved that Ancient Greek has two words for time; chronos and kairos. Each carries a different sense.
Chronos is linear and chronological, the time your watch ticks past.
Kairos is thicker and more experiential; when time seems to expand and contract. The first moment you made eye contact with your newborn son. The phase or opening when it felt like anything was possible.
To me right now, in tech + the wider world, it feels like kairos time all the time.
The pace of technological development, product evolution and commercial growth for some companies is nuts. The floor is lava.
And while markets gonna market in the early stage venture capital world, there are some interesting cultural trends happening all at once I wanted to document for myself.
For founders starting a company now, a few things are true at once:
- fundraising has always been a game of have and have not’s. It’s just more explicit in this era. Markets gonna market; certain profiles and certain verticals fit certain funder’s mental models better
- founders are better educated than ever about the basic dynamics of fundraising — how big certain funds need you to get to return their fund and what dilution you’ll take for it. Many of them have friends who raised too much, at too high a price, or from investors they learnt they didn’t like — or had this happen first-hand in their last company
- all the metrics have moved. It seems impossibly quaint to me we used to consider 1M ARR as strong Series A metrics for many kinds of companies (conversely, the valley of death right now feels like companies that have already done their pre-seed, making 100–400K ARR and need more capital to grow. If you have revenue, you’re judged on revenue + its trajectory)
- some of the “teams will be smaller than ever due to vibe coding tools” narrative feels overbaked but it does feel true that it’s now easier to achieve scale with smaller teams / I keep meeting solo founders or tiny teams, many in their teens, making serious revenue who don’t want to hire
In fact, I’m pretty consistently meeting solo founders or tiny teams who fully aspire to build big exciting businesses but feel a lot more mixed than the last generation about venture as a whole.
On Friday I got sent one of those round robin SPVs for a voguish Silicon Valley company doing a Series B secondary who are close to breakeven and already have $176M in the bank.
So what’s going on?
I buy Sam Lessin’s longstanding position that the unicorn factory system (where investors package up their companies to move through seed to A to B to C to….) is over for many and truly only works for a smaller % of companies than we may have believed.
Part of why this matters is that the unicorn factory line worked, as a narrative, based on buy-in from all sides; founders, investors and their LPs.
Narratives matter and this one is wobbling.
With such uncertain metrics attached to rounds (because everyone knows it’s about vibe fit and the story you tell about your company resonating with the story the fund tells themself about what and who they like to back), the choice for founders then becomes; how do they right-size the seed round? do they decide to raise again and again?
On the last point, the boring answer is “it depends” (on how capital intensive your company is, how voguish you/your space is and therefore how much power you have in the market). The golden rule of companies is “don’t die” and, if you’re getting the kind of intense inbound interest from investors that American funds excel at, it’s hard to turn down. Turns out even companies with $176M in the bank think about this.
You just have to understand the deal.
Large amounts of capital can be a moat (outlive competitors, hire certain folks, time to experiment) but also a constraint (raises stakes for next round, illusion of time you have to build).
Beyond the capital, large fundraises from well-known firms sometimes seem to act as a brand moat; companies funded by X always seem to compound in success; customers and hires have heard of them.
But sometimes…. they don’t.
What does this all mean for me and for Common Magic’s world?
It feels clear there will be far more “choose your own adventure” for founders — some choosing profitability, others choosing to raise money.
It feels clear there will be more pressure on first rounds.
As in, if less rounds are raised, more investors will seek to go earlier and founders in fashionable spaces will have more choice of partners and sometimes need to make foundational choices even faster.
Big funds got BIG; small funds like mine will typically need smaller outcomes to outperform so have more flexibility in terms of round sizes, verticals and founder profiles.
Small funds can believe where others can’t.
They can lean into how personal conviction is (do you buy this founder’s version of the future? have you thought deeply enough about it to work out where it fits in your mental models?).
Solo GPs who don’t yet have big brands will benefit from partner churn in huge firms — and focus on both true utility and building deep relationships with their founders.
If capital is a commodity, what you’re selling is trust and belief.
People to help you work out what time it is for you + your company, to make sense of the context but, ultimately, to remind you that you make your own rules.
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