Chapter One:
Investing in the companies authoring a future defined by ambition, not constraints.
The history of American venture capital began defined not by constraints but the ability to overcome them. At many points in recent decades, though, you could have been forgiven for thinking that all of this capital wasn't chasing the future as much as it was chasing code and pixels as an end themselves.
Billions of dollars chased a small handful of generational companies who all had one thing in common; the same thing all generational companies have always had: immense and imaginative ambition.
In a world where the cost of creating world-eating software is zero, venture capital is back at square one. It was never about code and pixels. It was always about how ambitious of a future you could author, and how real could you make it.
Unbarred by reality. Molders of plot.
The founder of the past has been more akin to a journalist or a non-fiction writer. Constricted by the facts of the situation and the realities of the world, one can only write with so much imagination. Embellishments are dangerous. Imagination may only take you so far.
The founders of the future are unconstrained by tools, by code, or by team size. They are more akin to sci-fi novelists: they imagine beyond the scope of the average human and are able to plot the course to get there.
They are the protagonists of a prologue, they are the people equipped to part ways with any past, they are the voices and minds that will lead us into the future.
Team:
Product, data, and design leaders turned investors.
General Partner
Jeff Morris Jr.
Jeff Morris Jr. is the founder and General Partner of Chapter One, a seed-stage venture firm built on a simple belief: the best founders think like product people.
That belief comes from experience. Jeff spent years as VP of Product, Revenue at Tinder, leading the team that made it the top-grossing app in the App Store.
He began investing as a scout at Index Ventures and has since backed 11 unicorns at the seed stage, including Mercury, Supabase, Turing, Compound Finance, and Ondo Finance.
He holds a BA from UCLA and an MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management.
General Partner
Jamesin Seidel
Jamesin Seidel came to venture through an unlikely path: anti-spam, online safety, and professional sports betting.
Before Chapter One, Jamesin was the technical lead for platform manipulation at Twitter, where she built algorithms to combat large-scale spam, led white hat investigations, and co-led Twitter's congressional testimony on malicious automation and foreign interference during the 2016 election.
Prior to Twitter, she worked as a professional fantasy sports bettor under Haralabos Voulgarious, using data and automation to find edges in the market.
When she's not investing, you'll find her at the poker table or playing Zelda.
CFO/COO
Doug Dyer
Doug maintains lead roles across finance/operations, fund/portfolio modeling, follow-on investing, and LP relations for Chapter One. He joined full-time in 2021 after serving as the firm’s outsourced CFO via Airstream Alpha (modern CFO firm he founded in 2018).
Prior to becoming a CFO full-time, Doug was an institutional LP for a decade, most recently leading PE/VC investing at the $2B+ AUM Texas Children’s Hospital's foundation. He has partnered with over 100 companies and funds throughout his career as a LP investor and CFO.
Venture Partner
Ty Wilkins
Ty has worked for brand design studios, independently, and for fast-growing startups. He has had the opportunity to design the branding for many great startups including Auth0, Loom, Scale, Vercel, and GitLab. Ty also partnered with Google over four years to brand numerous products including Google Maps, Google AI, Google Analytics, Google Fi, and dozens more. A few of his previous freelance clients include Facebook, Posthog, Target, and Stanford University. As an early employee at Robinhood, his work spanned branding, product design, illustration, and marketing. Most recently Ty led an incredibly talented team of designers, frontend engineers and 3D artists at Scale.
Chief Executive Assistant
Lauren Hill
Lauren Hill is the Chief Executive Assistant at Chapter One, where she plays a pivotal role in ensuring the firm's operations run smoothly and efficiently. A graduate of the College of Charleston with a degree in biology, Lauren's academic journey was marked by her leadership as the finance director for Charleston Miracle, a student-led nonprofit supporting pediatric healthcare initiatives.