Chapter One – General Partner

I am so excited to announce that I’m becoming a General Partner at Chapter One!

I am deeply grateful to Jeff Morris Jr. and the rest of the Chapter One team for their support and partnership, and the opportunity to continue to build an iconic venture fund.

This is a big moment for me professionally - so of course - it’s been a time of reflection.

I’ve been thinking about what got me here - and the truth is that even though Chapter One’s rally cry is “Seeking Protagonists” - I’ve never instinctively thought of myself as one.

I’m an inside person who loves staring at a computer screen. I don’t like the spotlight. I’m a second child. I don’t experience the highs and lows that most people seem to have. If anything, probably my only superpower is having the genetically low heart rate of an Olympic athlete and the ability to stay level-headed and calm in almost any situation.

But with this promotion, I have to acknowledge that maybe I’ve done some things right. My habits - the grind, commitment, execution, complete sacrifice to work - are all threads that have quietly shaped my own path. They’re the same qualities I look for in the founders we back - and, hopefully, the ones they see in me as a partner.

We’ve always had a strong writing culture at Chapter One, and in that spirit, I want to take this moment to step into being a protagonist and tell my story.

I’ll start at the beginning.

I grew up in Las Vegas, and I’m lucky enough to have a dad who is one of the best poker players in the world.

From the age of six, we played backgammon every weekend at breakfast. By twelve, I was multi-tabling online poker (which, in hindsight, is a questionable parenting decision).

Either genetics or poker wired my brain in a certain way. Nothing is ever good enough. Even when you win: there are always edges you missed, decisions you could’ve made differently, patterns you could have picked up on. That mindset - and constant pressure to improve and refine - stuck with me.

After college, I had the privilege of working for Haralabos Voulgaris’s high-stakes sports betting team. Bob is, without question, the greatest basketball sports bettor of all time. I didn’t do anything else. I lived in London at one point and couldn’t even tell you where Trafalgar Square was.

I felt the weight of being part of something truly elite. Watching how Bob operated - 14-hour days, 7 days a week, a total sacrifice in the pursuit of being the best - I could see what excellence looks like, and the steps to even hope to achieve it.

This first chapter in my life didn’t just shape my work ethic, though. I also learned that you can use data systems to make money and outthink anyone who didn’t have them.

Technology, well applied, gives you leverage that compounds. So when it was time for my next move, I wanted to be at the center of that leverage. I wanted to be in San Francisco working for a big tech company.

I joined Twitter in 2016 as a data scientist on the engineering team tackling one of the platform’s core challenges: detecting and removing fake accounts and large-scale platform manipulation.

What I loved most was the action. You’d ship something, and within hours, the adversaries would adapt. It was a constant battle. And while they had bad intentions, it was also truly beautiful to see how agile they were. They knew technology gave you an edge, too.

Over time, I became one of the technical leads of our team - responsible for building algorithms and models that processed billions of real-time events and scaled to hundreds of millions of users.

We all had to own a staggering amount of surface area. Twitter’s brand was massive, but the company was famously under-resourced. I learned how to zoom out and understand the architecture of a system. Not just put out fires. How to write production code at scale, and think about product, and user experience.

But more than anything, Twitter plugged me into the heart of San Francisco. It was my first true wide-scale exposure to Silicon Valley's ethos: a culture of agency, of people building from scratch, and using technology to solve real-world problems.

Thank you Jeff Ma, for taking a chance on me at Twitter, and thank you, Julian Templesman, for your endless amount of leadership and technical strength.

I left Twitter five years later. I’d had an incredible run but was ready for something new - and like a lot of people in that moment, I got crypto-pilled.

It was the heart of the bull market. If you were there, you’ll remember: 100 - 1000% yields, daily token launches, DAOs and NFTs flooding your timeline. I had a group chat named “We spit on 20%.”

It was also a strange in-between phase of my life. I didn’t have a job yet. I had moved back in with my parents before getting married – my soon-to-be husband was in London. So with nowhere to be but on my computer, my dad and I fell into a routine: morning walks for step count and then crypto. We’d get on the call with his poker friends, talk through the market, and make trades. I spent my days and nights building out systems to automate our decision-making.

Those months fundamentally shaped my understanding of blockchain’s potential. Despite market cycles since, the ability to transact instantly, settle with digital currency, and organize with incentives transformed my view of the global economy. Blockchain remains a core investment strategy at Chapter One - a third of our capital has always gone there and will continue to do so.

Now, we’re at the moment I met Jeff Morris Jr. (JMJ)

My first meeting with Jeff was a bit surreal. He felt so familiar. I had followed him on Twitter for years – he was at the center of the tech conversation. An opinioned product and revenue person with real-world first-hand experience building a rocketship: Tinder.

Within minutes, I knew I wanted to work with him. At that point, I’d spoken with a number of startups and venture funds, but I was looking for something very specific – I wanted to join a company with ambition, clarity, and an edge. I wanted to join someone who had a real vision.

And Jeff had one: a young, scrappy, product-obsessed fund built for founders by people who have actually built things. A fund that could outwork and outperform any of the first-generation Sand Hill Road funds.

I was first hired at Chapter One to build out our data and engineering systems – specifically, sourcing infrastructure that could give us an advantage in the market without having to hire 50 associates. I built scrappy, iterative pipelines that searched the internet for early signals: founders at inflection points, leaving a job, shipping a side project, or launching something new.

And while I was doing that, in parallel, Jeff started pulling me into investment calls – since at the core of every pitch is, of course, technical infrastructure and systems architecture.

I quickly came to appreciate that our skillsets were deeply complementary. Jeff has a brilliant product mind – he can spot world-class engineers, understand feasible go-to-market strategies for new categories, and relate to founders who know how to put products into market. While I bring a technical background, having built high-stakes and fast-paced systems at scale.

I’m being made GP just as our newest fund kicks off. And I want to shape that fund along the most important threads and lessons that each of the previous chapters of my life have given me.

Data, will be key to how we spot opportunities and act on them. I’ve learned that writing and network are important, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop coding. I’m committed to working with Jeff to expand our engineering systems. I think it’s a huge edge I bring, and I’m surprised by how little tooling and infrastructure there is even at the largest funds.

So will place. This is an obvious lesson, but a sense of place and community matters in startups and investing. Building long-term relationships is essential in the industry. I’m excited to continue to run poker nights, host Product Market Fit events, and plan hackathons that bring together top technical talent to collaborate and build cool things.

And beyond everything else, I’m excited to work with founders connecting technology with real-world problems and human experiences. This is a time filled with so many pressing, difficult and important challenges, but also so many opportunities to do something about them using technology. We’ve never lived in a time where visions can be turned into reality so powerfully or meaningfully.

AI has redefined what small, talented teams can build. The competitive edge now lies in creativity, clarity of thought, and technical execution. We're witnessing a re-bundling of software around intelligence - with industries being reimagined from the ground up. Everything feels like it’s up for grabs, and the founding moments of the next wave of category-defining companies are happening right now.

All the companies I’m lucky enough to support and work with – thank you – Bob, Mohammed, Jasper, Yuchen, Faizan, Michelle, Bryan, Mike, Rok, Mert, Anupam, Cam, Fig, Christina, Kyle, Morley, Antonio, Adam, Andros, Noah, Jonathan, Evan. Everyone else in my life and my family. Thank you for always being there. It takes a village.

Jeff - thank you again for all your support and leadership. It’s an amazing feeling to work for someone whom you learn from every day.

If you got this far, thank you for reading my story - figured if any moment, this might be a one-shot time to tell it.

Ok, now back to work - continuing to build the fund, championing the most talented, brilliant, and driven founders as the true protagonists, and writing the next Chapter together.

Let’s go!! 🔥 🔥 🔥

Chapter One is an early-stage venture fund that invests $500K - $2M checks into pre-seed and seed-stage startups.

If you’re a founder building a company, please feel free to reach out on Twitter (@seidtweets) or Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesin-seidel-5325b147/).