building & investing in tech stuff @enzoventures | Industry Labs
Europe
Joined December 2009
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Today were announcing Enzo II, our new €20M ($22M) fund to be the first cheque into the best Southern European founders, wherever they build.
A few years ago, we started @EnzoVentures with a simple conviction. Some of the worlds most extraordinary founders come from Southern Europe, but too often, the world discovers them too late. We wanted to find them first.
With Enzo I, we backed almost 30 companies across 9+ geographies, often writing their very first cheque. Orbio AI, Murphy AI, Complaion and many others have since grown into multimillion-revenue businesses, attracted top-tier international investors and proved something we've believed since day one.
Southern European talent is world-class. And it doesn't have borders.
Our first fund validated our thesis and helped establish @EnzoVentures as a go-to first investor for the regions most ambitious founders.
Now were doubling down. With Enzo II, well keep backing exceptional teams from Southern Europe and its diaspora, whether they're building in Barcelona, Milan, London, San Francisco or anywhere else.
We've already made our first 3 investments. And trust me, were just getting started.
there’s a massive difference between an early-stage fund writing 80-100+ checks and one making 20-30 highly selective bets. and i don’t think enough LPs realize what they’re actually paying for.
both models can generate exceptional returns. that’s not really the point.
the interesting part is what LPs are actually paying fees for.
in the first model, you’re basically paying someone to index an ecosystem, geography or sector. deploy capital across enough startups, capture the upside of the asset class and hope the power law does its job.
nothing wrong with that. but let’s be real, you’re mostly paying for someone to do the work you could theoretically do yourself. it’s outsourced diversification.
in the second model, you’re paying for something completely different.
you’re betting on a GP’s ability to see what others don’t. their access, their judgment, their obsession with finding exceptional founders before anyone else believes in them. their ability to say no to 99% of opportunities and be right about the few they pick.
you’re not buying exposure to an ecosystem. you’re buying exposure to someone’s brain.
and that’s a HUGE difference.
one model sells you execution and diversification. the other sells you conviction and judgment.
both might end up with the same returns, but as an LP, i’d be very clear about what i’m actually paying for.
personally, i find the second game infinitely more interesting.
remember when prompt engineering was supposed to be the next big thing, a whole new class of highly paid technical professionals with some magical edge.
where did they all go? lmao
models got so good they can almost read your mind now.
the shortest-lived competitive advantage in tech history.
pre-seed has become more personal than ever. and i actually disagree that VCs are becoming irrelevant.
but i do think the era of big, faceless early-stage funds is coming to an end.
the GP needs to be the edge. the access, the judgment, the competitive advantage. not the brand, not the army of associates rotating every 2 years.
founders have more capital options than ever. especially in their first round, they want great people with skin in the game, aligned incentives and a real ability to help them go from 0 to 1.
i genuinely struggle to see where heavily structured VC firms fit into that equation anymore.
at pre-seed, people are the product. not the fund.
long live solo GPs and 2-3 person pre-seed funds.
most people in tech take days to reply just to look busy lol
first time i ever DM’d Oren, he had absolutely no idea who i was. replied in literally 1 minute.
now every single time i text him, 5 minutes max.
absolute GOAT.
I asked @orenzeev what his calendar looks like:
"Many VCs, once you start measuring it, optimize for whatever you measure. You want to show LPs broad deal flow. We saw 8,000 deals this year. And you did one of them. I try to see as few as possible.
Let me check my week. Monday, 7:30 yoga, 9am a board meeting. That's it. Tuesday, a couple calls and a board, and in between I went to the ocean and surfed.
So my days are really empty. Which is exactly what lets me be responsive. Every day five or six founders message me, and I reply within minutes, sometimes seconds.
People say it sounds like I'm not doing any real work. They're right. Two meetings a day, of course it's not work. It's a hobby. Work is something you do because you have to provide for your family. I don't have to do it. So of course it's not work. It's just what I love to do."
the only real edge in VC is returns and the track record to prove it. everything else is mostly bs.
it all comes down to how hungry GPs are, how hard they hustle, fight and make things happen.
every new fund you start from zero again.
Edgar Vicente retweeted
Agreed. We fell into the same pattern during the dotcom bubble. We were a feeder fund that backed companies that the best VCs funded at later stages. LPs were impressed because they couldn’t even get into those funds and they were buying in at much better prices with us. But we learned the hard way that the emperor has no clothes.
We went down a different path after the dotcom crash. Control your own destiny is a mantra that should apply to founders as well as smaller, early stage VCs. Don’t be a feeder fund. Find your own path and the LPs will eventually flock to you because you’ve not only beaten the big VCs but because you’ll still be around decades from now doing what you love doing, long after others have gone home.
i genuinely don’t understand how some VCs get out of bed every morning just to chase deals everyone already agrees are good.
lately, making pre-consensus bets is pretty much the only thing that genuinely excites me in VC.
at this point, it’s almost a form of intellectual stimulation. there’s something incredibly addictive about backing companies nobody believes in, trusting your own judgment, and then watching everyone suddenly lose their minds over them 12 months later.
Big multistage funds now decide which startups become consensus.
If you're a founder, that leaves you two kinds of investors.
Consensus investors show up once everyone already agrees on you.
Pre-consensus investors back you before anyone agrees.
At Incisive Ventures, we only do the second.
That means we're in before the data proves you right. We judge the founder, not the traction. And we're the ones who stay in your corner when the big funds are still saying "come back when you have more."
300+ pre-seed investments over 20 years.
If you're building something nobody believes in yet, pitch me. DMs are open.
my dad. 64 years old. on a factory floor in Honduras, deploying AI and digitizing industrial operations alongside the client.
age is just a number. mindset is everything.
Edgar Vicente retweeted
1% of companies represent 90% of AI spending.
Of that 90%, 80% of this spend are from unprofitable VC backed companies.
So, roughly, $0.70-75 of every dollar of AI spending right now comes from AI companies spending VC investment dollars.
As a result, the revenue quality in AI is currently poor. This happened in previous cycles as well, like cloud when early users of AWS were mostly venture backed startups.
The thing, though, is that before AWS could scale and pull thru GCP and others as legitimate cash machines, there were a few clearing events to sort out these brittle revenues.
This is the extrapolation of Ken’s point. We will need to transition from speculative AI spending to consistent, reliable spend that shows up in public market earnings reports.
This hasn’t happened yet because most of the breathtaking revenue growth comes from LPs investing in VC funds who then send it to startups.
VC is probably the most unfair yet beautiful industry out there.
you can spend 5 years building a fund, struggling to get noticed, and then one portfolio company absolutely explodes and changes your fund’s reputation, your career and your life overnight.
one single investment can change everything.
and the crazy part is everyone has a shot. even the smallest fund nobody has ever heard of.
the real problem with this pseudo-liquid private market is that we’re rewarding some companies with liquidity when they’ve barely started, with massive uncertainty and very little substance behind them.
at least in public markets, many companies have real revenues, proven businesses and actual economic impact.
if this gets out of hand, we’re not just creating a financial bubble. we’re creating a socioeconomic problem.
once again, the (invest -> mark up -> sell secondary) game 95% of VCs aspire to play atm is a product of the excessive financialization of the private market as a consequence of excess cheap private capital that deters companies from creating liquidity for shareholders in the public market.
in the absence of any regulatory oversight whatsoever, there is effectively an aspiration by all participants of the asset class to create a pseudo-liquid private market (all the upside of public market liquidity, none of the regulatory downside; though I doubt that status quo would continue indefinitely with regulatory interference at some point). massive and frequent funding rounds (not just the size but frequency of raises in "hot" private companies is astounding) is, by design, what everyone wants and not an unwanted side effect
a lot of this could be fixed by encouraging companies to go public sooner (which would involve sucking capital out of the venture banks)
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¡Hola, Comunidad de Madrid! 🇪🇸 Nos emociona anunciar que llegamos a España, empezando por Madrid. Esta será nuestra primera región en España y la segunda en la Unión Europea. Planeamos lanzar nuestro servicio de ride-hailing totalmente autónomo en la Comunidad en 2027.
this is a fairy tale.
go talk to boring real economy businesses. most are still living in the stone age.
b2b software is more alive than ever.
they don’t want to vibe code their core operations. they want people who understand their processes, software that works and someone accountable when shit breaks.
even billion-dollar companies won’t gamble with their core business.
the amount of insanely talented europeans you meet in sf is wild.
they’re literally one of the key pillars behind the bay area’s success.
just came out of a meeting with the founder of a vc fund managing $1B+.
20+ people on the team, yet his best deals and biggest returns still come directly from him.
we both agreed vc doesn’t scale.
the moment you try to turn it into a scalable machine, you lose the very thing that makes it work.
one negative thing i’m noticing in SF
a lot of non-US founders come here chasing the american dream, then the visa becomes such a pain that they start optimizing the company around staying in the US.
raising money becomes a visa strategy. then you optimize for vanity metrics that make investors horny instead of actually finding real pmf and building a sustainable business.
