Why I Write

Most venture firms publish content designed to attract founders. The industry calls it thought leadership. In practice, it’s usually polished essays with optimized titles, written more for distribution than for clarity. More brand than brain.

I’m trying to do something different here.

Thinking in Public

The Mimosa Memo is where I publish my underwriting notes. The frameworks, observations, and structural arguments that inform how I allocate capital. These aren’t marketing materials. They’re working documents, edited for readability but not for applause.

I write because it forces rigor. An investment thesis that sounds compelling in conversation can fall apart the moment you try to write it down with any precision. Sentences demand specificity that conversations forgive. When I write, I figure out what I actually believe versus what I’ve been repeating out of habit. There’s a difference, and it’s usually humbling.

That’s the real reason. Not content strategy. Not founder marketing. Writing is the cheapest, most brutal stress test I’ve found for my own thinking. If I can’t make an argument hold up in 800 words, I probably shouldn’t be making it with a wire transfer.

What You’ll Find Here

I tend to write about a few recurring areas:

Capital structure. How rounds are priced, why terms matter more than valuation, and where misalignment hides between founders, early investors, and the cap table that accumulates over time. Most of the consequential mistakes in venture happen here, and almost nobody writes about them clearly because the incentives point toward keeping things opaque.

Venture mechanics. The operational realities of deploying capital at early-stage companies. Fund construction, portfolio math, reserve strategy, follow-on decision-making. The plumbing that determines outcomes long before any exit. I find that founders who understand this stuff negotiate better and pick better partners. That’s not a problem for me… it’s the point.

Frontier systems. The infrastructure, platforms, and foundational technologies I spend my time studying. This is where I do most of my primary research, and the memos reflect that. If I’m going deep on something, it’ll probably show up here.

Founder patterns. What I’ve observed in the founders who build durable companies. I try to be specific and honest about this without romanticizing the process. The founder archetype that venture Twitter celebrates and the founder archetype that actually compounds value aren’t always the same person.

What You Won’t Find

I won’t publish hot takes. I won’t comment on funding announcements. I won’t produce a content calendar or optimize for engagement metrics.

I’m also not going to pretend I have conviction where I don’t. Some of what I publish will be provisional… early-stage thinking that I’m pressure-testing in public. If I change my mind later, I’ll say so. Consistency is overrated when the underlying information changes.

If a memo doesn’t sharpen my own thinking, I won’t publish it. That’s the only editorial standard that matters.

A Note on Tone

I write the way I think, which tends to be direct, structured, and occasionally dry. If you’re looking for optimism about the venture ecosystem, you’ll find some here, but it’ll be specific and earned. If you’re looking for hype, you won’t.

I’d rather be useful to ten founders who are actually building than legible to a thousand people scrolling past. If something I write helps you think more clearly about your company, your round, or your market… that’s the best outcome I can hope for.