The Ride Home Fund is built on top of the Techmeme Ride Home podcast. For five years, 70,000 people have reliably made it a habit to listen to the Techmeme Ride Home podcast to get their daily tech news roundup. And these are not just random listeners. These are some of the most plugged-in technologists, developers, founders, startup workers, venture capitalists and tech journalists in the world. Everyone from the grunts in the trenches working to make startups happen to the C-Suites of FAANG companies are our loyal fans. People don’t listen to the Techmeme Ride Home just for entertainment. It is “news you can use” for folks who are operating in the tech industry. You will not find a better agglomeration of ACTIVE tech industry folks anywhere in one place.

The podcast gives the fund three things: unparalleled deal flow, a unique advantage to get into deals, and a platform that early-stage companies can't get anywhere else.

We offer every portfolio company the opportunity to come on the podcast whenever it is most useful to them. Sure, we can help portfolio companies get written up in TechCrunch, for maybe a sentence or three quoted in the end. But why not ALSO come on the podcast for an hour and talk about what you're doing in your own words?

Portfolio companies that have come on the podcast have:

That is because of the above. Think about it: our money is as green as anyone's. We write smaller checks so we don't crowd anyone else out of allocation. So why NOT take a check from us? It's like a free option on marketing and distribution that can be incredibly powerful at the early stage.

The Ride Home Fund mostly focuses on Pre-Seed and Seed-stage companies, but does go to Series A and even B on occasion, in tech companies or companies creating consumer facing products that are tech adjacent. In terms of area breakdown, we do a lot of SaaS, developer tools, software platforms, consumer tech, a bit of web 3, and even a biotech or two. We target $75k-$250k checks and follow-on where strong conviction warrants.

We source deals primarily from the audience, but our growing reputation has created a bonanza of referrals. We also share carry with members of the audience who provide meaningful facilitation of deal introduction and consummation. And that's one more hidden secret sauce of the fund. The existing LP's are as connected and impressive as the podcast listenership itself. The combination of these two audience funnels is augmented by deals surfaced by my friends, who are also active angels. The meshing of all these funnels allows us access to some of the most interesting ideas before others even see them.

I’m Brian McCullough. You might know me from such podcasts as the Techmeme Ride Home and the Internet History Podcast. I’m the cofounder of Ride Home Media. I wrote the book How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone. I was an inaugural member of the TED Residency program in 2016. Before all that, I’ve been a serial founder including WhoToTalkTo.com and ResumeWriters.com, which was founded all the way back in 1999.

For the tooting my own horn bit, I believe I am a uniquely positioned GP. On the one hand, I’m a respected tech industry historian as well as an industry veteran. If history proved a perfect guide to the future, then historians would run the world. That of course is not true (apologies to Hari Seldon), but it does mean I have a deeper grounding in the long arch of technology than most. Combine that with the fact that my day job (with the Techmeme Ride Home podcast) is to literally trendspot and understand the underlying currents of the industry’s evolution in real time. Every day, to produce the show, I spend 8 hours reading hundreds of articles, writing thousands of words, literally calling the trends we’re seeing as they happen. I already do what VC firms pay teams of analysts to do.

And I’m a three-time founder. I know what founders face, what they need, and what they don’t know they need. I’ve gotten a good sense for what founders are equipped for their role, having worked with so many over the last 20 years.

If I do have an overachieving thesis for investing over the next couple of years, it is that the “it just works” era of the modern technology industry is only now coming to life. This means the realization of efficiencies. And when I say, “efficiencies”, I mean software continuing to eat the world; APIs all the way down; No code; SaaS for everything, all that good stuff.

Efficiencies are what made me fall in love with tech in the first place. Things you couldn’t do before you made everything in the world “smart”. We’re seeing this realized now, whether it means renting out underutilized real estate, or restaurants implementing the lessons that Starbucks learned over the last decade with mobile/infinite ordering, allowing people to make money expressing their passions in the creator economy, or launching autonomous solar powered sailing ships to cruise the oceans to monitor climate change.

My mother likes the say that the modern era is all about it being “impossible NOT to know.” Impossible not to know. Anything. Everything. That is the realization of efficiencies that I’m talking about. You can take that from the obvious example of how you used to stand on a street corner and not see a cab when you needed one, even though three were probably a block over from you without you knowing. It also means even a small business owner being able to deploy cutting edge analytics and operations platforms without the need to know even a lick of code to make it work. I mean, what even is SaaS and no-code and all the rest of it, other than eliminating inefficiencies and abstractions via actionable data to make everything work better?

The “it just works” period of the Internet Era will be about all the abstractions ironed out, in every nook and cranny of everyday life, from the profound to the mundane... to achieve efficiencies as often as scale. Our job is to pick the companies that will do this the best, and if we do, the scale will take care of itself.

I appreciate your interest in the Ride Home Fund. Please let me know if you have any questions.

But also: join me, won’t you?