Welcome to our final newsletter of the year. Instead of a standard Early Access edition like last week’s about AI-powered construction permitting software Ulama, we’ve opted to take you behind-the-scenes on the thesis behind what happened this year at Coeus Collective, while also sharing where we’re going from here.

At the start of the year, we made a contrarian bet: to fix the capital allocation gap between founders & investors, we had to fix our industry’s media and community model first.

Twelve months later, a16z acquired Turpentine, VCs started hiring "Heads of IRL," and we became a venture studio. Here's how the thesis became reality.

The Problem

The startup ecosystem currently has two intertwined crises, and understanding how they connect is essential to understanding what we built this year.

The first revolves around founder storytelling. Great founders were being overlooked not because their companies weren't compelling, but because no one was telling their stories in ways that mattered.

Traditional business media was optimizing for clicks, not for truth. Founder-led media was optimizing for clout, not for substance. So the result was noise, not signal. Companies that were highly technical often had the worst coverage, as media favored business models that were easier to understand.

The second crisis is newer, but perhaps more urgent: capital allocation. New York and other cities outside of SF & Silicon Valley are filled with exceptional founders building real companies.

At the same time, there's a surplus of individuals who want to angel invest: folks who have capital and conviction but lack deal flow and context. The gap between these two groups isn't a lack of interest. It's a lack of infrastructure. The traditional venture model, with its geographic concentration in Silicon Valley and local network dependencies, wasn't designed to solve this. Rather, it was designed to perpetuate it for the select few who had been a part of this industry since its inception.

We built Coeus Collective to close both gaps simultaneously. Not through separate initiatives, but through a single integrated system that has developed into a proprietary flywheel: media creates community, community surfaces opportunities, opportunities become investments, investments become stories.

The future of venture doesn't separate these functions. It compounds them.