The firm
A small firm, on purpose.
a10 is a private venture firm investing in neurodivergent founders building enduring software companies. We are deliberately small, deliberately concentrated, and deliberately patient.
I.Origin
Why we exist.
We started a10 in 2021 with a single, narrow premise: that the founders most likely to build something durable are often the ones least suited to the rituals of fundraising — minds that compress on technical depth, not on charisma; minds the standard institutional filter has historically read as too quiet, too narrow, too obsessed.
Most of the firms we had previously worked at were optimized, with great care, for a different kind of founder. We did not begrudge them that choice. We simply found ourselves spending most of our time with the people they were filtering out — and noticing, over a decade, how often those people went on to build the things that actually compounded.
II.Thesis
Wired for depth.
Software is increasingly a winner-take-most field, and the winners are increasingly built by people whose attention works differently — engineers and scientists who hold a single problem longer, see further into it, and refuse the easy abstraction. The economies of the next century will be built, disproportionately, by minds the standard institutional ladder has historically failed to recognize at first sight.
We invest accordingly. Our portfolio is, by intention, a portrait of a particular kind of mind: cognition that is, by any honest measure, atypical. We do not consider this a marketing position. We consider it a structural fact about where the work is now being done.
III.Practice
How we work.
Each fund makes exactly ten investments, and we write two check sizes only: ten million dollars, when we lead a Series A in a company we have followed for years; or ten billion dollars, when we step in late, alongside a sovereign or a strategic partner, to compound inside what is already working. Nothing in between. The discipline is the point.
After we invest, we work in private: code reviews, technical recruiting, patient counsel, the occasional flight to wherever the difficult conversation needs to happen. We do not host conferences. We do not run a content engine. The firm does almost no marketing. Most of what we do compounds in the email thread.
IV.Stewardship
What we measure.
We measure ourselves on the durability of our companies — not on markups, not on logo lists, not on the velocity of follow-on rounds. We hold for a decade or longer because the founders we back rarely lose interest in their problem; we did not want a fund that did.
Our LPs have signed on for that horizon. Our partner economics are aligned with realized returns, not paper ones. The structure exists so that the thing we ask of founders — the unreasonable patience that comes naturally to a particular kind of mind — is also the thing the firm is built to practice.
The firm at a glance
Facts, briefly.
The shape of the firm is itself a statement of belief. What follows is the structure that lets the work be the work.
- Founded
- MMXXI
- Funds
- Two, closed
- Investments per fund
- Ten
- Check size
- $10M or $10B
- Stage
- Series A · Strategic
- Hold
- 10+ years
- Sponsorships
- $10K per event
- Offices
- San Francisco · New York