488. Lessons from 600+ Investments, Founder Profiles that Win, Reserve Strategies that Drive Returns, and the Hidden Potential in Consumer Standouts (Charles Hudson)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Charles Hudson joins us today from San Francisco. He's the founder and managing partner at Precursor Ventures, an early stage VC firm investing in the first institutional round. He's invested in notable companies, including The Athletic, Juniper Square, Carrot Fertility, and Bobby Bay. Before founding Precursor, he was a partner at Softech, Uncork. And earlier in his career, he cofounded Bionic Panda Games and worked for In Q Tel. Charles, welcome back. It's so good to be back. Thanks for having me, Nick. It's been too long, Charles. We had you on the show, jeez, May 2016. Oh, wow. And I think, yeah. Can you believe that? Almost ten years ago. That's nuts. And you have launched Precursor at the time, so I think that was fun one. And you can bring us up to speed to get, a bit here. Can you give us an update on on Precursor, kinda your big milestones, you know, for the firm and and how the strategy has evolved? So I think in '16, we'd only closed our first fund. I think we were maybe a two person firm at that point. And if you fast forward to today, we just closed fund five in December. So that felt great. That was a $66,000,000 fund. We've got about $250,000,000 under management at this point. The crazy thing is we've made almost 500 investments in the last eleven years. So we've been yeah. We make, like, 40 a year. We've been very, very busy. And what was once a team of one or two is now a team of 14. And so the team has grown quite a bit. AUM has grown. Portfolio has grown. The only thing that hasn't really changed is we're still just doing pre seed and seed investing. Trying to find the best teams we can doing that zero to one work. And, I'd like to think we've learned some things about the business since then that maybe weren't obvious to me in '16. Amazing. Congratulations. Give us a breakdown of the team. So you have 14 folks. Like, how do they Yeah. Specialize and, you know Yeah. How do you kinda carve out different types of work for the team? We have a very different structure than most funds. So I'm still the …