Powerset, founded in late 2022, is an investment program with a simple hypothesis: what if the best investors aren’t venture capitalists but other founders, scribbling off checks in between late night coding sessions and board meetings?
Every year, Powerset, founded by AngelList alum Jake Zeller and coaching company Athena founder Jonathan Swanson, hands five to ten founders $1 million to invest in other startups — potentially giving them millions more if the founders bring in good investments. Past cohort members include Paul Copplestone, cofounder of developer platform Supabase, Jordan Tigani, cofounder of analytics company MotherDuck, and software engineer Wes McKinney, who created the Python pandas project. Applications for the third cohort opens this week.
Zeller described Powerset as a sort of decentralized venture fund: there’s no programming to “teach” founders how to invest, no timeline for when founders need to deploy the capital, and no group of managing partners that can veto a deal. Founders take home fifteen percent of whatever profit a deal makes.
It’s an experimental model that rests somewhere between angel investing – except founders are not investing their own personal money – and the old-school VC scout programs, where VCs engaged people, including founders, to help them source deals. The cohort founders are then encouraged to mentor and advise the portfolio companies, like any investor.
In Powerset’s case, however, investments made entirely at the whims of already overworked and stressed out founders. “There are some founders who are so busy with their companies and so picky that they don’t invest at all,” Zeller said. Or a founder will go from making no investments “to being one of the most active very quickly.”
Despite complications, Zeller believes Powerset’s strategy will produce massive returns. “Oftentimes it’s the best founders who are building the best companies are going to make for the best investors,” he said.
Founders, after all, deeply understand the intricacies of building a startup in their field and are constantly on the lookout for top talent anyway. “I’ve never found a genius-level technical founder who’s building an incredible company who just sucks at investment,” he said.
There’s no hard and fast rules for who qualifies for Powerset’s program — just that you are building a company and immersed in the tech ecosystem. “Hopefully your company is getting to a scale where you kind of get some organic connectivity,” Zeller said, meaning that other founders like your product and are naturally reaching out to you.
But Zeller does have one deal breaker: he’s not interested in anyone who views Powerset as an off-ramp to running a company, with aspirations to imminently become a full time venture capitalist. “Those people are going to perform terribly,” he said.
He claims the best performing Powerset participants are founders who plan to spend the next five, ten years building their own company. “If you’re building something that’s hugely important, and your life mission and your life work, you’re not going to invest in some marginal company,” he said. “It doesn’t justify the activation energy.”