Venture Capital Has Lost The Plot.

The quiet rebellion to bring discipline and integrity back to early-stage investing.

Venture capital has lost the plot. What was once a service business built on trust, judgment, and long-term partnership has become a content machine. Sociologists have long noted the transition of institutions from quiet dignity to spectacle, where a field is rooted in mastery, discretion, and trust, and eventually shifts towards theater, eclipsing the work itself. Early-stage venture capital is unfortunately well into that transformation. A place where the loudest voices often know the least about the work, where “visibility” has replaced substance, and where performance is measured in ‘hot takes’ instead of results.

LPs, the very people trusting managers with their capital, are left in the dark for months, sometimes years, with no meaningful updates on what they are actually invested in. When they do hear from their managers, it is often in the form of shallow metrics that reveal little about the true health of the portfolio or the prospects of their capital compounding.

On the founder side, the gaps are just as glaring, and the bar is as simple as just showing up! Some of my closest founder friends, people with large, brand-name lead investors on their cap table, still reach out to me for the critical introductions they need, for advice on a go-forward plan, or for help navigating a major decision. I am always wondering: where are their lead investors in these moments? Why am I the one getting the call? The answer is usually unspoken, but clear. Those relationships are not real partnerships.

The industry has developed an odd pride in showing how little we care about the work. It has turned into a competition to prove whose calendar is fuller, whose commitments are more elastic, whose attention is more fleeting. We glorify busyness, but not depth. We prioritize optics over outcomes, another hallmark of the shift from quiet dignity to spectacle. Far too many fund managers disappear for months at a time, only to resurface with updates that are vague, incomplete, or self-congratulatory. Some go silent entirely until they have a new fund to raise.

I did not come into venture capital through the traditional apprentice-to-partner track, but I did get a front-row seat to how the industry actually operates. My path started at Starburst, a strategy consulting firm quite unlike any comparable shop. Think Deloitte or McKinsey, built specifically for aerospace and defense. We were hired by some of the most important corporations and government agencies in the world to help them discover, invest in, and partner with startups. Our clients were not small innovators. They were the companies running national air traffic control systems, building fighter jets, launching rockets, and securing critical infrastructure.

Starburst sat in a rare position at the intersection of governments, prime contractors, and the scrappy startups trying to break into highly regulated, slow-moving, safety-critical industries. We knew how these blackbox businesses operated, where they clashed, and where there were slivers where opportunity for real partnerships took off.

Like many others in our space, we believed the next logical step was obvious: convert the relationships behind our consulting contracts into LP commitments and start investing behind that access and know-how. Easy. After all, we were already sourcing deals, introducing startups to billion-dollar companies, and helping structure partnerships that moved markets. How different could running a fund really be?

It turns out the answer is very.

The first thing I learned was that running a fund and building an institutional investment firm are two entirely different games.

A fund writes checks. An institution builds systems, relationships, and trust that compound over decades.

I did not just learn this in theory. I learned this by being thrown into the deep end.

I was the youngest on the team, with the bandwidth and curiosity to say yes to everything. That meant I was not just “seeing” deals; I was living them. I worked with hundreds of founders, day in and day out. Not just in their highlight moments, but in the raw, defining ones: the gut punch of losing a contract that would have kept the lights on; the painful decision to pivot after years of sunk effort; the late-night call to say a customer had walked away. Those moments reveal character, both the founder’s and the investor’s.

I learned that communicating losses is often more important than celebrating wins, because that is when trust is either built or broken.

Simultaneously, I was getting a crash course in the less glamorous, but equally critical parts of operating the business. I helped run fund formation from scratch. I managed fund administration. I selected and negotiated with an audit partner. I built LP reporting processes and delivered those updates directly. I learned the importance of getting the accounting right, making the reporting clear, and choosing partners who shared our long-term view. These operational foundations are not side jobs; they are the backbone of an enduring firm.

I loved my time at Starburst. It was an environment that tested resourcefulness, where you could be fully immersed in the work, sitting with founders one day, negotiating with primes the next, and mapping market entry strategies for government customers the day after that. The broader Starburst network has produced remarkable alumni who continue to shape the deep tech and industrial landscape. Alumni have gone on to found companies like Karman Industries, a next-generation industrial heat pump company, and Grid Aero, building the future of air cargo. Others have become leading early-stage deep tech investors, launching their own $100M+ venture funds, or joined breakout industrial startups as employees, such as Apex Space, now backed by more than $500M in venture capital.

Toward the end of my tenure, however, something bigger was taking shape.

As my role grew, I began meeting more of my idols in venture, the people I assumed set the standard for what the business should be. The more I met them, the more disappointed I became. Here were managers stewarding hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, of dollars who could barely maintain quality relationships. Scheduling a meeting meant going through an EA, waiting months, only to have it canceled for reasons that did not pass the straight-face test. We all reschedule. Life happens. When last-minute cancellations become the expectation, however, it signals something deeper: disinterest.

Even worse, LPs in the funds would go months, even years, without receiving substantive updates. When updates did come, they were shallow, surface-level performance numbers without real insight into portfolio progress or strategy. I kept wondering: if this is how the industry’s most celebrated players operate, who is actually building the institutions LPs and founders deserve?

Beyond the daily grind at Starburst, we observed a compelling trend emerge in our dealflow and across the macro landscape. Exceptional talent was leaving core aerospace and defense to go tackle broader industrial problem sets such as those in manufacturing, construction, energy, and beyond. These were people who had built spacecraft, fighter jets, and complex defense systems at places like SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir, Tesla, Rivian, and more, now applying that same capability to physical industries starved for innovation.

My partner Van talks about this a lot, and you should follow him for his perspective. For me, alongside recognizing that trend, something else was crystallizing. We had built conviction not just in a market opportunity, but in the idea that early-stage venture capital itself needed a different way of operating. A way that is high-integrity and long-term in its orientation, a return to its roots of mastery and quiet dignity. A way that respects both founders and LPs by being transparent, disciplined, and present when it matters most. A way that fixes the gaps we have been talking about: the disappearing act when things get hard, the surface-level communication, and the absence of real partnership.

Generational Partners was born from those two convictions: that the next generation of breakout industrial companies will be built by this wave of exceptional A&D talent crossing over into new frontiers, and that they deserve an investment institution that shows up for them in a way the industry has largely forgotten how to do, distracted by the spectacle.

A story from recent memory captures exactly what we are trying to build. A friend who had previously worked at one of the tier-one venture firms came to our first-ever Annual General Meeting to show support. The night before, she asked about the agenda and said, “You are going to separate the LP update from the core event for everyone else, right?” My response was, “What’s the rest of the event if not that?” Everyone would get the same update: our portfolio companies’ valuations, the entry prices we invested at, how they are actually performing relative to the image their social posts might project, and the unvarnished truth about where we stand. Her question made it clear that her expectation was for information silos; different details for different audiences. That is exactly the kind of behavior we hope to destroy. This business, one built on the backbone of trust from both founders and LPs, should be built on radical transparency.

What continues to surprise us is how many of our LPs are not first-time venture investors, yet still tell us, “We love your reporting. You are always on time. You are always over-communicating.” They mean it as a compliment, and we are grateful for it, but to us, this is just the baseline. We feel like we have so much more to share ahead, and do not see our current behavior as exceptional. The fact that it is perceived that way says less about our brilliance and more about how low the industry standard has fallen.

That same principle is at the core of how we approach building relationships. Investor friends often ask how we get in front of so many founders, LPs, and co-investors. My answer is almost always disappointing to them: there is no magic. We do the brute-force work of finding people, showing up, and building relationships on a mutual work ethic from day zero. We do not promise, we deliver. When we cannot deliver, we own that too.

I do not have “proprietary” relationships. Not with founders. Not with LPs. That is by design. Venture capital has a gatekeeping problem, an obsession with protecting contacts as if someone might steal them.

Here is the truth: if someone can “steal” your LP or founder, the relationship was not real in the first place.

At GP, I will tell you who we talk to and who we back, because I am confident in the work we put in alongside them. That confidence is the moat. I want to see more of that behavior in the industry.

We are building Generational Partners as an institution for early-stage venture capital, not a niche curiosity, not a cult of personality. An institution with high-integrity operations, disciplined fund math, clear and frequent communication, and a deep respect for the capital we steward. One with radical transparency so LPs know exactly what they are invested in, and founders know exactly where they stand. One that shows up in the unglamorous moments, not just the ones fit for a press release.

Our goal is to help make this level of transparency and care the expectation, not the exception.

If you are an LP, demand better, from communication to conviction. If you are a founder, choose investors who prove they care when no one is watching. If you are a VC, remember this is a service business, not a content creator business.

Venture capital may have lost the plot, but the next generation of firms will find it again, not through noise, but through trust, transparency, rigor, and endurance.

That is the story we are writing at Generational Partners, and we are always eager to meet the founders, LPs, and peers who still believe this business can be built on integrity.