Outside VC

The firm targets pre-seed and seed-stage companies building software for regulated industries — specifically housing, transportation, and financial services. It looks for founders who are operating outside the immediate regulatory boundary, proving their models in less constrained markets before entering the core.

Outside VC typically leads or co-leads seed rounds and reserves capital for follow-on investments. The firm prefers concentrated positions in a small number of companies per fund rather than a high-volume, spray-and-pray approach.

The firm explicitly avoids sectors without a regulatory barrier to entry — commoditized consumer apps, ad-supported marketplaces, and industries where incumbent advantage is purely brand-driven rather than policy-driven. It also avoids deeptech and biotech, where the capital intensity does not match its fund size.

San Francisco anchors the firm in the traditional seed ecosystem; Scottsdale gives it proximity to Sun Belt startups operating in state-level regulatory regimes — Arizona's sandbox for fintech and autonomous vehicles, for example — that differ meaningfully from California's. This dual footprint is a sourcing advantage, not a cost-saving measure.

The firm will co-invest alongside a small number of like-minded seed funds, but it does not participate in broader syndicates where ownership is diluted across a dozen investors. It prefers bilateral or trilateral cap tables at the seed stage.