The simple cycle of our founders introducing us to founders they respect has always been an important part of our work at True.

At the earliest stage, before technology matures, before there is a product and before a market is obvious, there has to be trust and alignment between founders and investors.

There may be no better test of that trust than the introductions founders make to the people that they respect as peers.

Over more than twenty years, we have been fortunate to work with more than 1,000 founders. A majority of people we meet today come to us because one of those founders thought we should know each other.

One founder leads to the next.

Trust travels

In the summer of 2020, as we were all learning to live and work through COVID, Ashley Zehnder, co-founder and CEO of Fauna Bio, introduced us to Viswa Colluru.

Viswa was starting Enveda to discover better medicines by learning from nature’s chemistry.

The idea was simple to describe and hard to execute. Plants and microbes have spent millions of years creating and refining molecules, most of which have never been characterized. Viswa believed computational intelligence could help us read that chemistry, understand it and translate it into new medicines.

There was power in the idea of learning from life itself. The hard work still lay ahead, but the promise was clear, and so was the path Viswa described. We led Enveda’s seed round in July 2020 weeks after that initial introduction from Ashley.

Six years later, Enveda has three oral drug candidates in human trials, with many more behind them in the pipeline. We have continued to invest alongside Viswa and the team through multiple rounds.

Ashley’s introduction did not make the investment decision for us. We had to build our own conviction in Viswa, the science and the company he hoped to create. But it started the relationship with something that is especially valuable at the earliest stage: trust. Trust before there is a transaction.

We see this cycle throughout True and we consciously amplify this cycle which expands the network at its farthest endpoints - towards potential founders we’ve not met yet.

A year after investing in Enveda, Viswa thought we should meet two more brilliant scientists Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince who were working on something interesting. That introduction led us to Basecamp Research where we led their second round of financing weeks after that introduction. 

These introductions mean a great deal to us because founders put something of themselves behind them. When someone we have worked alongside for years tells us, you should meet this person, we listen.

Why we follow founders

The same principle helps explain why we follow founders into what they build next.

More than seventy founders have now chosen to build with True more than once.

There is something unusual about getting to know a person over the life of many companies.

You see how they respond when things go well and, more importantly, when they do not. You see how they make decisions with incomplete information, how they attract people to an idea, how they change their minds and how they keep going through the many years of hard work required to build something meaningful.

Founders get to know us just as well.

They see how we behave when the easy answers disappear. They learn whether we are true to our words, whether we are useful and whether we remain there as the company changes and evolves as it must - past that initial set of thoughts at inception.

That history matters.

When a founder comes back with another idea, the new project  still has to earn our conviction. The market may be different. The technology may be different. The questions certainly will be.

But the relationship does not begin again at zero. It has trust built for the right reasons.

The founders are the network

We sometimes talk about the True network as something founders join when we invest.

I think it is more accurate to say that the founders themselves have built it.

More than 1,000 people, over twenty years, carrying with them everything they have learned from building companies.

They introduce us to one another. They help each other recruit. They become customers, advisers and sounding boards. They answer the call from a founder facing a decision they themselves faced five or ten years earlier. Sometimes they return to build again.

Much of the most useful work happens founder to founder.

Our responsibility is to create the conditions for those relationships to grow, to make the introduction when we can, and to partner with capital and care through the years of work that follow.

And then, every so often, a founder we once backed at the beginning sends another remarkable person our way. We love that moment and respect that intention and we answer with respect for the trust that moment embodies.

That is the cycle.

One founder leads to the next. And after more than twenty years, that accumulated trust is what conditions us to be ready to be the first one to believe.