# Field Notes No. 2 By Jeff Stowell · 2026-03-12 · Insights > Every VC is an N of 1. Some thoughts on investor fit. Investors deal with illiquid markets. My journey into off-grid radios, and reflections on almost a decade of teaching the next generation of VCs and entrepreneurs in the Midwest. # Field Notes No. 2 - The end of a fantastic journey Welcome to Field Notes No. 2! These last two weeks I'm struck by conversations I've had with Founders _really_ struggling to raise. There are lots of reasons why that might be, but we'll dive into some ways to improve your odds. Additionally, I found a great piece on the explosion in Evergreen funds, I'm dorking out on some simple radio tech, and I'm saying goodbye to a decade-long journey teaching, where I know I learned more than I ever could possibly have taught. ## Something For Founders Crunchbase published an interesting interview this week with Ethan Choi, a partner at Khosla Ventures and ex-Accel, leading growth investments in companies like Klaviyo, 1Password, and Pismo. It's worth a few minutes and [you can read it here](https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/founder-first-investing-ai-khosla-choi/). It's full of the usual "here's what I think about stuff," but what caught my attention weren't any of Ethan's opinions about AI or entry-level jobs or whatever. It was a quieter signal buried in how Choi describes his own evolution as an investor. He claims he's flipped his philosophy: it used to be 80% metrics and 20% founders. Now it's 90% founders. "The only constant is how special the founding team is and how quickly they can adapt." If I may just grab a meme from the shelf... "Big if true!" Here's the real challenge: every VC is an N of 1. Ethan Choi tells us he now runs 90/10 founder "specialness." What makes you or your team, "Special" in the eyes of Ethan Choi? He conveniently doesn't say. Further, the next partner you pitch might run 70/30 metrics-heavy. The one after that is entirely thesis-driven or has a laser focus on market size. It doesn't matter how special your team is if you're not checking those boxes. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another about any of these approaches, but they are wildly different, not usually all that well communicated, and subject to certain individual whims. So how do you figure out what game you're playing before you've spent several cycles just trying to get a meeting? A couple of questions worth working into your early conversations: > How has your investment philosophy changed in the last two or three years? (A VC who can articulate this clearly has actually been paying attention.)" > > "What do companies you say "yes" to often look like? (Forces a partner to show their hand a little. If they won't, that's also signal.) The goal is to qualify them as fast as they're qualifying you. You need to understand that each investor is an N of 1 and adjust accordingly. If I had to raise money today, I'd probably have three or four pitch decks ready to respond to the buckets of investors you find along the way. There's no consensus in VC right now IMO. That can be an advantage if you don't waste time having conversations where you are either addressing the wrong investment approach or can't influence the decision in the first place. ## Something For Investors PitchBook published a sharp piece recently by Nizar Tarhuni, their EVP of Research, titled "[The problem isn't democratizing private markets. It's confusing access with liquidity.](https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/the-problem-isnt-democratizing-private-markets-its-confusing-access-with-liquidity)" I have some pretty strong opinions about this subject! At the risk of perturbing a few good friends... Nearly 100 new US evergreen funds launched in 2025 alone, a 25% expansion, as the semi-liquid market swelled toward $500 billion. Perpetual vehicles raised $86 billion in the first half of 2025 alone. This surge comes precisely as institutional LPs pull back, distributions have slowed, and managers need new capital sources. We've also made a regulatory change, allowing retail investor to invest their 401(k) into these types of private vehicles previously limited to a class of high-net-worth investors. Tarhuni draws the comparison to the 1920s investment trust boom which was preceded by a similar "democratization" pitch up until 1929. The core warning is this: > The push toward retail capitalism isn't driven by a sudden desire for inclusion; it's driven by a fundraising problem. The timing raises questions for me. Where was this urgency to democratize private markets when interest rates were low, multiples were expanding, exits were flowing, and institutional allocators were growing their commitments? There was no such push because allocators didn't need the money. A lot of this confirms what I've been thinking about in the current fundraising environment. When the product being sold is access to illiquidity, and the buyer doesn't fully understand the difference between _access_ and _liquidity_, someone is going to get hurt. The article is clear that this isn't an argument against retail participation in private markets (though I can make one of those too on strictly a returns basis). It's an argument about _how_ that access gets structured, and who actually benefits from the structure. For those of us at the seed and early-growth stage, the direct effect is limited. But the second-order effects of capital flowing out of liquid markets to cover illiquid positions during stress events, institutional pullback, etc. all creates a vacuum at the LP level, and that rolls down hill to every private investor at every stage in one way or another. It's worth understanding the dynamics before they show up in your portfolio. How many of you have seen an evergreen fund in the last six months? Are you investing? ## Something I'm Reading No book this time... I've been reading about [Meshtastic](https://meshtastic.org)! And it's awesome. Meshtastic is an open source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network created in 2020 and built to run on affordable, low-power devices. It uses LoRa (long range... I'm trying to adopt the lingo!) peer-to-peer radio protocol to form a mesh network by rebroadcasting messages to extend communication reach. Each device can connect with a single phone, enabling messaging in off-grid areas. The hardware costs something like $30 a node. No cell service. No internet. No central server. With a tiny powersource and a simple chip, you can communicate freely (in text) as long as you have enough nodes in range of each other. I'm really curious about this kind of stuff for a few reasons, but one of those is that I feel like we are deeply embedded in a monopolistic bubble right now, where many of the now-very-large service providers are providing increasingly deteriorating levels of service for more and more money. How markets and communities respond to situations like this often presents a lot of opportunity. Plus it all looks really fun to build out and we like being outdoors in remote places. So now I've ended up down a pretty deep rabbit hole. The practical applications are pretty interesting. Common use cases include hiking in remote areas, communication during natural disasters, and maintaining contact in areas with internet censorship. Some municipalities are even exploring Meshtastic networks as backup communication systems. It's infrastructure for the gaps, and the gaps seem to be growing somehow. The fact that it's entirely open-source, community-built, and running on commodity hardware is the thing that makes it worth paying attention to in my eyes. If you're into off-grid communication, emergency prep, or just enjoy tinkering with radios and mesh networking, this is your thing. Here are some resources if you're interested. [Introduction / getting started](https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction/) [GitHub (firmware and project)](https://github.com/meshtastic) If anyone else is running nodes or has experimented with this, I want to compare notes. ## Something I'm Thinking About This spring marks ten years since I started creating (with a lot of help) what is now [University Venture Fund -- Crossroads](https://uvfcrossroads.com/). My thesis then was pretty simple: If you give young people in the middle states the same kinds of hands on opportunities in private markets that students on the coasts (or in Utah, where I found the sister program to UVF) get, then you would be seeding a significantly more robust innovation and capital deployment environment that looked more like San Francisco or New York. After nearly 10 years, we have a lot of data to suggest that thesis was correct and I'm really proud of that. But 10 years is a long time to sit in a room with smart young people who are trying to learn venture capital and VC-backed entrepreneurship from the ground up. What I didn't necessarily expect or look for when I started that I know now is that teaching has made me a _much better_ investor. When you have to explain why a term sheet is structured the way it is, not just _that_ it is, you find the gaps in your own reasoning quickly. When a 21-year-old asks you why capital efficiency matters in a world where the biggest outcomes got built on venture-scale capital, you have to have a real answer, not some series of platitudes. Students don't let you hide behind pattern recognition. They want to understand how you got where you got. The other thing that happens over ten years is you watch cohort after cohort of young people go on to work at real funds, build real companies, and make real investment decisions. Some of them are in the industry now. A few have already done things I haven't and never will. _That's the best possible outcome_. And those students are connected and supporting each other as "alumni" in ways I thought were possible, but have exceeded my expectations. I could write something close to a book about my UVF experience, but I'll stop here. I'm all sappy and nostalgic about this because this semester will be the final semester of UVF-Crossroads. At the end of the day, it's hard to run a program in Kansas from Utah. I was never able to raise quite enough money or create quite enough infrastructure or convince quite enough people that the program was worth supporting with some gusto. And so it's time to move on to another journey. But I'm damn proud of this one and I've learned so very much. Side Note: I'm basically un-hireable as an actual teacher because I refuse to follow certain rules, but if you're ever looking for a guest lecturer... Coming up in Field Notes No. 3... What is a CEO anyway? And SAFEs... please stop! Thanks for reading. /JLS --- Canonical URL: https://hayseedcapital.com/blog/field-notes-2 Site: The Hayseed (https://hayseedcapital.com) — writing, coaching, teaching, and early-stage investing by Jeff Stowell. Operated by Hayseed Capital, LLC, Park City, Utah.