Calm Company Fund: Five Years In

Very happy to see an update from them. After a year of radio silence I was beginning to imagine the worst, and I didn’t feel confident referring founders to them.

I'm big believer in both the vision and what Tyler and team have been getting done. I've heard nothing but good things from bootstrappers who decided to and were then able to raise from them.

I’ve seen it all:

* Impact funds * ESG funds * “Founder Friendly” funds * Benefit Corp funds * Veteran Funds * Non-Profit fund * OpenSource Funds

Guess what? They are all the same as “Only profit matters” funds

Why? Because it’s the same limited partners funding these funds, and it’s the same set of 2000 people who have all the money and the absolute last thing they want to do is have less of it.

Anything that’s not a down the line Gordon Gekko/Axe cap fund is at best diversification, and at worst a tax buffer or slush fund.

There is no way to both play in the world of capitalism and also benefit the people who are actually building it, because the act itself takes away the ownership from the actual employees who are creating the value in the first place. It is literally zero sum because there’s an equity pool at the founding that is - at every funding round - made less and less relevant as owners. Note, I said owners, not how much their “equity” is worth in their Schwab account.

I genuinely believe the fund founders think they are doing a good thing. I know some of these fund founders and they genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing but “the practicalities of the market” are such that fucking people out of ownership “they have no choice. They have to return something to their LPs.”

By nature, there is no other possible action investment capital can take but literally theft from the employees creating value via “dilution.”

We just had this conversation the other day about liquidation preferences etc…nobody is fooled at this point at what is going on