The Emerging Manager Playbook: Thesis, Track Record, and VC Decision-Making

When Martin Tobias appeared on How I Raised It in July 2024, he was running Incisive Ventures, a $10 million pre-seed fund focused on B2B software. His path into venture was unusual: he had been a three-time venture-backed CEO, an angel investor, an LP in 17 funds, and had built one of the larger syndicates on AngelList before formalizing his investing strategy into a fund.

What makes the conversation particularly interesting for venture investors isn't simply Tobias's thesis. It's how deliberately he built the machinery around it.

His approach touches almost every problem an emerging manager has to solve: defining a thesis that is narrow enough to be meaningful, building a track record that actually proves the thesis, sourcing companies before everyone else sees them, deciding under extreme uncertainty, and continually improving the investment process.

And perhaps most importantly, Tobias treats venture capital less like a collection of individual bets and more like a system that can be designed, tested, and improved.

This article is based on a previous episode of the How I Raised It podcast. Fund sizes, portfolio counts, market conditions, and other time-sensitive details below reflect what Tobias described at the time of the conversation and should not be read as current 2026 figures.

1. A VC Thesis Has to Be Specific Enough to Change What You Do

Tobias's thesis was straightforward on the surface: Incisive invested in pre-seed B2B software companies that “reduce friction at scale.”

But the interesting part wasn't the phrase itself. It was how much the thesis actually constrained his behavior.

He described Incisive as a pre-seed B2B software investor and explicitly listed areas he did not invest in, including consumer, CPG, drug discovery, and crypto. He also had a specific definition of what pre-seed meant to him: the company should already have an MVP, some customers, several months of market experience, and early revenue rather than simply an idea.

That level of specificity solves a problem that many emerging managers encounter: confusing a description of an investment strategy with an actual investment strategy.

“Early-stage technology” is a description.

“B2B software that reduces friction at scale, at the pre-seed stage, after an MVP and initial customer traction” is closer to an operating system.

It tells founders whether they should approach you. It tells LPs what kind of portfolio they are actually buying. And, perhaps most importantly, it gives the investor a framework for deciding what not to spend time on.

Tobias was deliberately public about this. He used Twitter, his website, blogs, and podcasts to explain what he was looking for because he saw the venture-founder relationship as an information asymmetry problem. Both sides spend enormous amounts of time trying to determine whether there is a fit, while most of those conversations ultimately lead nowhere.

The thesis therefore becomes part of sourcing.

A founder who understands the thesis can self-select into the funnel. A founder who doesn't fit can move on. And the investor spends more of his limited time on companies that already have a reason to be there.

For an emerging manager, that distinction matters. A thesis isn't just what goes on the first page of an LP deck. It should influence "who you meet, what you research, what you say no to, and what kind of reputation you build in the market."

2. The Most Valuable Track Record Is the One That Proves Your Future Strategy

One of Tobias's strongest points for emerging managers was also one of the most practical.

Your historical investment record isn't automatically a useful track record.

It depends on whether it supports the strategy you're asking LPs to fund.

Before Incisive, Tobias had made roughly 250 angel investments. But he didn't present all of them as evidence that he was qualified to run a B2B software fund.

Instead, he focused on a narrower set of 74 investments that fit the B2B software thesis he was actually pursuing.

His reasoning was simple: if you're asking LPs to give you money to invest in one strategy, showing them success in an unrelated strategy doesn't necessarily increase their confidence. It may actually create confusion.

That creates an important distinction for emerging managers:

A track record isn't just a history of winning investments. It's evidence that you can repeatedly execute the strategy you're now selling.

An investor who has made money in crypto, consumer, SaaS, climate, and healthcare may have an impressive personal portfolio. But if the new fund is a concentrated B2B enterprise software strategy, LPs still need to understand why those historical investments prove the manager can execute this strategy.

Tobias said this was something he learned through VC Lab, where he tested and refined his thesis with other investors. The exercise forced him to separate his overall investment history from the subset that actually supported his new fund's positioning.

For emerging managers, this has another implication: the track record can start before the fund.

Tobias suggested that managers with limited capital can begin building evidence through angel investments or syndicates. The objective isn't simply to show that you can pick companies. It's to demonstrate that you can source opportunities, win allocations, make decisions, and ultimately generate outcomes around a particular thesis.

That makes the pre-fund period more than preparation.

It can be the first version of the fund.

3. At Pre-Seed, Founder Quality Can Matter More Than Product Complexity

At the pre-seed stage, Tobias said he spends substantial time evaluating the founding team because there simply isn't enough company history to rely on.

His framework starts with a practical observation: an early-stage company has to perform several jobs simultaneously. Someone has to build the product, sell it, raise money, and operate the company. He said he generally prefers two or three founders because he rarely sees one person effectively covering all of those responsibilities.

But his founder assessment goes beyond résumés.

Tobias describes venture as a pattern-matching game, based on having met thousands of founders over many years. One characteristic he specifically looks for is curiosity.

He deliberately asks difficult questions during meetings. The response matters.

A founder who becomes defensive may reveal something about how they handle uncomfortable information. A founder who responds with curiosity—“that's an interesting question; I should look into that”—signals a willingness to learn when confronted with something they haven't considered.

The other characteristic he emphasized was the ability to get the first customers.

In his view, building software is becoming easier, particularly with AI-assisted development. The harder problem was getting people to actually use it.

That shifts the diligence question from:

“Can this team build the product?”

to:

“Why will these particular people be able to get the first 10 customers?”

Tobias looks for an existing relationship with the industry, customer access, and some unique insight into the problem. His favorite founder stories tend to involve entrepreneurs who personally experienced a problem, tried existing solutions, became frustrated with them, and eventually decided they had to build something themselves.

For a pre-seed investor, that kind of founder-market connection can be more informative than a polished pitch.

The pitch deck tells you what the founder believes.

Their history can tell you why they believe it.

4. Emerging Managers Need to Prove They Can Manage Other People's Capital

Tobias's own transition from angel investor to fund manager offers another useful distinction.

Angel investing demonstrates that you can invest your own money.

Managing a syndicate demonstrates something additional: other people are willing to invest alongside your judgment.

Tobias built a large AngelList syndicate before launching his formal fund. He described the syndicate as a way to demonstrate that people beyond his immediate personal network were willing to trust his investment decisions.

That becomes particularly relevant when raising a first fund.

Tobias's advice to emerging managers was blunt: the first close is often going to come from people who already know you. He suggested that a manager needs some combination of personal capital, a track record, and a network of people capable of making the first commitments. From there, those initial LPs can become sources of introductions to family offices, high-net-worth investors, and eventually institutional capital.

But the network only gets you so far.

The underlying question remains:

Why should someone trust you with capital?

That's why Tobias places so much emphasis on having a thesis-consistent track record. If the fund is going to invest in B2B software, the evidence needs to show that you can identify and support B2B software companies.

This also explains why he was interested in programs such as VC Lab. He described the program as a way to pressure-test a thesis, develop the fund strategy, practice fundraising, and learn from other emerging managers. More importantly, it gave him a community of peers, something that can be particularly valuable for solo GPs who don't naturally have partners with whom to share deals, LP relationships, and portfolio support.

The broader point is that becoming a fund manager is itself a process of proving capabilities.

Pick. Source. Win. Manage. Repeat.

The fund is the institutionalization of those capabilities, not the thing that creates them from scratch.

5. The Hardest Part of VC Is Deciding What Not to Invest In

Perhaps the most revealing part of the conversation comes when Tobias discusses his own investment process.

In the interview, he said that deal flow wasn't his biggest problem. The difficult part was reaching conviction.

He described having a limited number of investments he could make each year while reviewing thousands of companies. That turns venture into a selection problem: out of an enormous opportunity set, how do you identify the handful of companies where you want to put meaningful capital to work?

His response was to treat decision-making itself as something that can be engineered.

Tobias described building an “anti-portfolio” system that tracked companies he had rejected and then monitored what happened to them afterward. The purpose wasn't to rewrite history. It was to identify mistakes in his decision process. If a company he rejected subsequently became highly successful, he wanted to understand what information he had missed at the time.

That distinction is important.

A missed investment doesn't necessarily mean the original decision was wrong.

He illustrated this with Shopify. A VC could have looked at the e-commerce market at an early stage and concluded correctly, based on the information available at the time that the market was relatively small. What the investor might have missed was that Shopify itself could dramatically expand the market by making it easier for businesses to start selling online.

The lesson isn't simply “invest in companies that create new markets.”

It's that investment mistakes need to be diagnosed at the level of reasoning, not just outcomes.

Tobias also described using something akin to the “secretary problem” or optimal stopping problem when evaluating opportunities. If you have a defined pool of alternatives, seeing enough of that pool gives you a better basis for making a decision rather than reacting to the first attractive opportunity you encounter. He applied the concept to sectors as well: when evaluating a company in a particular category, he wanted to see enough comparable businesses to develop an informed view of the opportunity.

For venture investors, that points toward a more deliberate approach to pattern recognition.

Pattern matching is useful.

But systematic exposure to enough patterns is what makes the pattern matching useful.

Final Thought

Martin Tobias's July 2024 conversation offers a useful way to think about building a venture firm: the differentiation isn't necessarily in finding a clever phrase for the thesis.

It is in making the thesis operational.

The thesis determines what you source. Your sourcing determines what you see. Your track record demonstrates whether you can execute the strategy. Your decision process determines what makes it into the portfolio. And your post-investment work determines whether the value you promised founders actually exists.

That creates a feedback loop.

The more companies you see, the better your pattern recognition can become. The more decisions you make, the more opportunities you have to study your mistakes. The more tightly your track record aligns with your thesis, the clearer your positioning becomes to LPs and founders.

Tobias's approach is ultimately less about having a perfect thesis on day one and more about "building a repeatable investment system around a point of view and continually improving that system as evidence accumulates."

For an emerging manager, that may be the more durable form of differentiation.