Breaking the Silence

⏱️ 3 minute read startups

After six years of silence, I'm back. The world has gone mad, but chaos and opportunity are the same thing. Here's what I've been building: a micro VC where friends pool experience, not money, to build small ventures solo.

I've been quiet for a while. Six years, to be precise. I didn't see the need to add noise to an already deafening world. But something shifted, and I want to talk about it.

The world has gone a bit mad. Markets are volatile, AI is reshaping everything, and most people I talk to are somewhere between anxious and paralysed. But if you know your Taleb, you know that chaos and opportunity are the same thing viewed from different angles. And right now, I see opportunity everywhere.

Here's what I've been working on.

The micro VC that isn't one

For over twenty years I've been in and around the startup scene. I've built companies, sold companies, mentored hundreds of founders, and watched the same patterns repeat. One pattern in particular has been bothering me: everyone still runs for investment as if raising money is the job. It's not. Building something useful is the job. Money is just one tool, and increasingly, it's not the most important one.

With the current generation of tooling, AI agents, no-code platforms, orchestration systems, I no longer see the need for large teams or outside capital to build a real, functioning business. And I know that sounds harsh, but sit with it for a moment. A single person with deep domain knowledge can now build a tool that outperforms what entire teams produced five years ago. And they can do it fast.

This is the experiment I'm running: a micro VC where a small group of friends pool not money, but experience. We pool our insights in venture building. We share patterns, learnings, risk, and reward. And then each of us builds and maintains small companies. Independently, but not alone.

It's the impact of a small venture fund, without a single employee or startup team.

Why this works now

I still love having people around to exchange ideas with. I'm not building in isolation, I'm building in a network. The difference is that nobody needs to raise a round, hire a team, or ask anyone's permission. Each venture is small enough that one person can run it, and good enough that it doesn't need to scale to justify its existence.

We don't have a name for it yet. It's the sum of everything I've learned so far, and honestly, it's the most fun I've had in years.

What's fascinating is watching how far the tooling has come. Over a year ago I wrote my first vibe-coded platform, a rough experiment to see what was possible. Today we have multi-agent orchestrators showing us where things are heading. The gap between "idea" and "running business" has never been smaller.

I'll be writing more about this. The frameworks, the tools, the mistakes, and what's actually working. This blog is my cassette tape. Cheap to make, no gatekeepers, and entirely mine. Time to press record again.