Mike Vernal @Conviction
I am thrilled to welcome Mike Vernal as a General Partner at Conviction.
At Conviction, at the eve of the AI revolution, we hope to build a new breed of venture capital firm. We strive to offer a radically different level of understanding and service to the founders we serve. At a time when funds are growing larger, less personal and less discerning, we aspire to long term relationships, a very high hit rate and outsize returns. Done this way, venture does not scale. Each person we add to our partnership must raise the bar and make us as a partnership better. The bar for a partner is really the bar for a cofounder.
What do you want in a cofounder? Character, motivation, alignment and ability.
On character: Mike is completely trustworthy. He has the conscientiousness and the pure desire to help that I would seek myself in a board member. As the saying goes, if your values are clear, your decisions are easy. From the eight years I’ve known him, his sterling reputation with founders, and the last year of Mike advising the fund, it’s clear that our hard decisions would be easy together.
On motivation: this is perhaps controversial, but rarely are people so nice *also* so ambitious and competitive. It is a specific type of ambition that is suited to build an early-stage venture firm. Startup investing at its best is a service industry. Our success is the success of others. Mike works ferociously, loves to win and hates to lose, but he gets more joy from seeing his teams win more than from his own victories.
Venture, as a maturing industry, is also richly staffed with people who are risk-averse and in “manager mode.” Mike will forever want to move fast and break things, and his only mode is “founder mode.”
Beyond these traits, Mike and I have a shared view of success. We hope to build a leading venture firm that is a trusted business partner to the most important technology companies of tomorrow. We value our reputations and our performance above fund scale. To achieve this, we expect to do a lot of work for a very long time, and continually trade off short-term economics for long term potential. Mike can absorb this multi-year marshmallow test, and shape the firm to do so.
It is dangerously hard to measure “ability” in venture. You’re only ever as good as your next investment, and it is critical to maintain humility and paranoia about it. But Mike has taste, is smarter than me, asymmetrically right, and — of particular importance to us at Conviction — is an independent thinker. As venture firms grow, the natural pressure to bow to politics mounts. Mike is constitutionally incapable of being political. He is hyper direct. He is never trying to be the smartest person in the room. He is always truth-seeking. In combination with good taste, that leads to good investing decisions.
Mike’s bar for excellence is set extremely high. He is calibrated by his own operating career as a technologist at Microsoft and then a top engineering and product executive at Meta. He partnered with legendary companies at Sequoia (Notion, Rippling, Clay, Captions) and as an individual angel (Cursor, Cognition, Decagon). Mike has good taste, and the ability to distinguish an early Facebook from an also-ran. His natural instinct is to help companies become the most ambitious versions of themselves, because he has been part of greatness.
As with models today, no measure is as important as the vibe check. Conviction is a part of the ecosystem we serve, which means we are unapologetically nerds — curious technologists. Mike, with love, is a nerd’s nerd.
Visiting a close friend recently, his wife, unprompted, an executive at Notion, said “I heard you’re working with Mike! I love having Mike on the board. He’s the dream thought partner for every product and growth person.”
For me, too. I could not imagine a better business partner than Mike. I’m excited for the founders who get to work with him.