Jeff Morris, Jr. on finding your own fund/market fit, having like Lightspeed and Sequoia as LPs, and the ever-changing dynamic between entrepreneurs and VCs

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today’s episode is with Jeff Morris, Jr., founder of Chapter One Ventures, an early stage product fund that has invested in Cameo, Pipe, Alt, and Roam. After a significant track record as an angel investor (including investing in Lyft) he started Chapter One in 2019 that featured tier one investors such as Lightspeed and Sequoia as LPs. Jeff was previously the VP of Product at Tinder, spearheading popular features like Boost and Tinder Gold. He graduated with an MBA from UCLA’s School of Management and is a frequent speaker on monetization, product, and growth.We chat about finding your product market fit as an investor; thinking about scaling yourself, and the ever-changing relationship between entrepreneurs and VCs. A message from our sponsorAnduin is revolutionizing fund management with streamlined fund operations, digitized fund subscriptions, and real-time status updates. Traditional, paper-based subscriptions are costly, tedious and error-prone, with up to 80% of submitted documents being incorrect and considered not in good order.Fund managers lack real-time visibility, facing manual processes, endless back-and-forth and a mountain of emails, documents and spreadsheets.Anduin’s investor onboarding workflow improves the investor experience, bringing clarity, guidance, and efficiency to fund subscriptions which drastically reduces error rates.The Anduin platform allows GPs to perform fund operations simply and efficiently with improved data accuracy, freeing up time so they can focus on what they do best... investing.For more information, or to arrange a demo, visit fundsub.io/ventureunlockedIn this episode we discuss:02:11 Jeff’s journey into investing05:43 Jeff’s learnings as an angel investor to being a scout to starting a firm08:38 The main differences between being an angel investor and a full-time venture capitalist11:13 Adjusting to doing venture full time13:51 How Jeff evolved along each step of the way in his investing career16:22 How he constructed his LP base, and him taking on capital from Tier 1 VC’s17:58 How Jeff thought about fund sizing and what he learnt from his first fundraising22:14 Why bring a Chief of Staff onto a VC firm24:47 The debate between optimizing for # of companies vs. ownership27:27 Learnings from Sequoia about investing and entrepreneurship30:23 Jeff’s decision-making model34:39 The future of the VC 37:17 The pros and cons of having a brand on Twitter/ social media39:52 The most counterintuitive lesson Jeff has learned41:20 Lessons learned from companies that he missed43:26 Inspirations in the VC worldMentioned in this episode:Chapter One VenturesI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Jeff. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com