$1.7B Apps Fund: How a16z's Most Connected VC Picks Founders | David Haber

Summary

David Haber’s approach to venture investing and company-building centers on people, customer understanding, and durable organizational advantages—not just optimizing for a single fund or investment. His career spans investing, entrepreneurship, financial services, and building Andreessen Horowitz’s New York presence.

Business frameworks and playbooks

“Firm over fund”

A fund is optimized to generate returns efficiently; a firm must also build advantages that compound over time. Potential sources of advantage include reputation, customer experience, distribution, data, technology, lower cost of capital, and organizational knowledge.

Haber sees venture capital as a team sport: serving founders well strengthens a firm’s brand and can lead to referrals and future opportunities. He cites Royalty Pharma as an example of a business whose scale and economics were supported by permanent capital, portfolio aggregation, and access to lower-cost financing.

Find opportunity at the intersections

Haber looks for opportunities between established fields of expertise rather than limiting himself to a single category. His experience across financial services and technology led him to view fintech as a horizontal capability that can be embedded in many kinds of software, rather than only as a standalone sector.

Assessing founders

Haber looks for founders who demonstrate:

• Clarity of thought: Can they explain what they are building and why?
• Founder–company fit: Are they uniquely qualified or motivated to pursue this business?
• Market knowledge: Do they understand the market and learn from earlier attempts, rather than dismissing them?
• Humble confidence: Do they pair conviction with respect for prior work and evidence?
• Ability to mobilize resources: Can they assemble capital, labor, and customers—in other words, sell and bring people and resources together?
• Durable motivation: Haber prefers “missionaries” over founders motivated purely by money, while recognizing that personal hardship or a desire for vindication can be powerful if channeled productively.

Selling as a core founder job

Haber estimates that founders spend 95% of their time selling—to co-founders, customers, employees, the press, and investors.

Effective selling starts with listening: understand the other person’s goals and concerns, address reservations directly, and avoid overselling. Founders can develop sales ability by learning to put themselves in others’ shoes, though Haber considers it difficult to coach.

Customer-led brand building

Build a brand through customers’ stories, not just product claims. Understand the customer’s underlying ambition or need—not merely the transaction.

Bond Street aimed to be viewed as a financial advocate for entrepreneurs rather than simply a lender.

Give-first networking

Build relationships by identifying useful things people need and offering help without expecting an immediate return. Haber’s example is helping people find jobs by making targeted introductions.

At work, he also advocated beyond his formal job description, looking for ways to contribute across teams and business lines.

Use AI to compound organizational knowledge

Vantage organizes previously unstructured meeting transcripts and firm information, categorizing meetings and surfacing relevant context. The larger goal is to create a shared organizational “brain” from conversations, investment notes, memos, and company data.

Haber sees context and taste as increasingly important as AI tools make software easier and faster to build.

Company and operating examples

Bond Street: lending for small businesses

Bond Street started in 2014, when APIs and digital infrastructure were making more small-business financial data accessible. The team integrated with services such as QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, Braintree, Plaid, and credit bureaus, as well as tax-transcript data.

Its premise was to let a business owner connect financial accounts and receive a lending decision in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. The company employed about 40 people, and Haber says building a strong team was one of the outcomes he was most proud of.

Its hardest problem was identifying when a small-business owner was ready to borrow. Without strong visibility into transactional intent, Bond Street had to pull prospects into a funnel instead of presenting an offer at the right moment.

Operational lesson: A software product or platform with existing customer context—such as accounting or payments data—can improve timing, targeting, and customer-acquisition economics.

Bond Street’s podcast and customer-centered office design were examples of using customer stories to build brand and culture. Its conference rooms were named and designed around early customers.

Market timing and execution

Haber says the online-lending market deteriorated in 2016–2017, making conditions difficult for companies in the sector. He is proud of Bond Street’s team and customer impact, but notes that the company did not teach him how to scale from 0 to 40 people to 400 or 4,000.

Lesson: Strong execution cannot fully offset a collapsing market, and scaling an initial team is a distinct operating challenge from reaching early traction.

Royalty Pharma

Royalty Pharma buys royalty streams tied to pharmaceutical products rather than acquiring and operating pharmaceutical companies themselves. In one example, it bought a university’s royalty interest for an upfront payment based on its estimate of future drug cash flows; a pharmaceutical company then handled commercialization.

Haber described the model as highly scalable and noted that aggregating assets helped the company access larger, lower-cost financing. He cited approximately 50 employees and a $25 billion market capitalization as an illustration of its capital efficiency. These figures were discussed in the interview, not presented as a general benchmark.

A small entrepreneurial experiment

In high school, Haber persuaded his school to allow a taco vendor at Friday-night football games, replacing less appealing food options. The vendor sold thousands of tacos and later expanded into other schools and events. Haber estimated that the opportunity contributed to millions of dollars in business for the vendor over the following decades.

Lesson: Spot an unmet need, connect the right operator to the opportunity, and create a setting where demand already exists.

Metrics and timelines

• Founders spend an estimated 95% of their time selling.
• Bond Street started in 2014, employed about 40 people, and aimed to reduce lending decisions from days or weeks to minutes or hours.
• Haber says the online-lending market downturn occurred in 2016–2017.
• Royalty Pharma had about 50 employees and a $25 billion market capitalization, as cited in the conversation.
• Vantage was built on notes from approximately 750 meetings Haber took in one year. It had several dozen users on the platform and operated within the firm’s Slack environment.
• Andreessen Horowitz’s New York office had about 100 full-time employees across the firm at the time of the interview.

Presenters and sources

• Presenter/interviewer: Luba Yudasina
• Guest/source: David Haber, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of Bond Street
• Other organizations and people discussed: Andreessen Horowitz, Bond Street, Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital, Royalty Pharma, Airbnb, and Vantage