Venture Partner Who Has Never Built Anything Announces He Is “Really a Builder at Heart”
MENLO PARK, CA — The 38-year-old, who has spent his entire career writing checks, says he “misses the craft.”
By Crash Windward
MENLO PARK, CA — Speaking at a fireside chat he had organized for himself, venture partner Brett Calloway, 38, revealed Thursday that despite never having shipped a product, written production code, or held a job that did not involve a carried-interest structure, he is “really a builder at heart.”
“People see the Patagonia vest and the LP letters and they assume I’m just an allocator,” Calloway told a half-empty room at a downtown coworking space. “But deep down? I’m in the arena. I’m in the trenches with founders. I once gave a guy feedback on his onboarding flow and he cried. That’s building.”
Calloway, who joined his firm directly after business school and has spent the subsequent 14 years “getting conviction” at coffee meetings, said the realization came to him during a recent ayahuasca retreat in Tulum that he expensed as “market research.”
“I was building the whole time and didn’t even know it,” he said. “Building relationships. Building a thesis. Building a personal brand on a platform formerly known as Twitter.”
To honor his rediscovered identity, Calloway has begun referring to his calendar as “the codebase,” his associates as “my eng team,” and the act of forwarding a founder’s deck to another partner as “shipping.”
Founders in the firm’s portfolio reported mixed feelings. “He DMs me at 11 p.m. with ideas like ‘what if it was also a marketplace,’” said one CEO. “Then he calls it mentorship. Then he asks if we can move the board meeting because he has a padel tournament.”
Calloway has since announced plans to “get his hands dirty again” by personally learning to code, a journey he expects to complete “right after this next fund closes.” He has already purchased a mechanical keyboard and posted a photo of it with the caption “back to my roots.”
“At the end of the day, founders and investors are the same,” Calloway said, sipping a $9 matcha. “We’re both taking enormous risks. The only difference is which one of us loses the money.”