Chapter One (venture firm)

Founder Jeff Morris Jr. was an early employee at Tinder, where he served as vice president of product and revenue, led the revenue team that made Tinder the top-grossing app in the App Store, and worked through the company’s early monetization, its IPO and several years as a public company. He led product and revenue at Tinder for four years and left in late 2019.⁠[1][2][3]

In 2016 Morris began investing as an angel and as a scout for Index VenturesIndex VenturesIndex Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1996. It invests from seed through growth and operates across London, San Francisco and New York, supporting technology companies through a transatlantic network.Open the full entry; as a scout he invested in the seed rounds of Dapper Labs and Compound Labs. In 2017 he launched Chapter One as its sole investor. His debut fund raised $10 million in total, starting with $1 million from his first AngelListAngelListAngelList is a startup investment platform company based in San Francisco, United States. Founded in 2010 by Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, it began as a mailing list recommending startups to angel investors, went on to launch online fundraising, Syndicates (co-investing), rolling funds, and other products, and later shifted into a fund administration and back-office services platform for venture capital funds and private markets.Open the full entry outreach.⁠[1][3][4]

An earlier Chapter One fund invested in the seed rounds of more than a dozen startups, including Compound, Dapper Labs and the Bitcoin rewards platform Lolli.⁠[4]

On December 14, 2021, Chapter One announced that it had closed a $50 million fund to back early-stage crypto projects with checks of roughly $500,000 to $2 million, earmarking about $10 million for projects related to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). The fund focused on design and usability to make crypto tools easier for ordinary users, with staff spending time inside portfolio startups to help with user experience and design. Its backers included Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry, Chris DixonChris DixonChris Dixon is a programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, and the founder and managing partner of a16z crypto. He co-founded SiteAdvisor and Hunch, helped create Founder Collective, and later joined Andreessen Horowitz, investing in technology companies such as Coinbase. He is also the author of Read Write Own and has long written about blockchains, network ownership, the open internet, and the combination of AI and crypto.Open the full entry, Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and Alexis OhanianAlexis OhanianAlexis Ohanian (born April 24, 1983) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and author, a co-founder of Reddit and the founder of the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005, co-founded Initialized Capital, and later expanded his work into women’s sports, climate philanthropy, and investment software.Open the full entry.⁠[4]

The team then included Jason Marder, former head of design at Stripe; Menelaos Mazarakis, who joined in summer 2021 after working on Facebook’s crypto initiative Novi and on product experience at Instagram; and Doug Dyer, a former investment manager at Texas Children’s Hospital. Dyer had served as Chapter One’s outsourced chief financial officer through Airstream Alpha, a firm he founded in 2018, before joining full-time in 2021. Morris said at the time: “There’s a lot of things that worked in Web2 that could be incorporated into Web3.”⁠[4][2]

As of December 20, 2021, Los Angeles-based Chapter One, with Morris as founder, managing partner and solo general partner, had closed a $40 million early-stage fund focused on web3 and was raising a separate $20 million opportunity fund. Its limited partners included Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners, while Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon invested in a personal capacity. The new fund had made five investments, in DAO infrastructure, NFT experiences and learn-to-earn games, and Chapter One planned to add support services, a media arm for web3 education and developer resources on token usability and governance in 2022.⁠[3]

As of October 2024 Chapter One managed about $130 million, was investing from its second fund and planned to activate a third fund in the first quarter of 2025. Its limited partners included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, and its team members had held product leadership roles at Twitter, Tinder, Robinhood and Scale AI.⁠[1]

Chapter One describes itself as “the most product-obsessed venture firm in the world” and as a seed-stage firm built on the belief that “the best founders think like product people.”⁠[2]

Morris has backed 11 unicorns at the seed stage, including MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry, Supabase, Turing, Compound Finance and Ondo Finance. Portfolio companies featured on Chapter One’s website include Mercury (marked as partnered in 2020), Supabase, Ondo, Together AI, Helius, Superhuman, ether.fi, Erebor, Mach Industries, Epirus and General Intuition, spanning fintech, developer tools, crypto infrastructure, artificial intelligence and defense technology.⁠[2]

Chapter One’s general partners are Jeff Morris Jr. and Jamesin Seidel. Morris holds a BA from UCLA and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Seidel was previously the technical lead for platform manipulation at Twitter, where she built algorithms to combat large-scale spam and co-led Twitter’s congressional testimony on malicious automation and foreign interference during the 2016 election.⁠[2]

Other team members include chief financial officer Doug Dyer, investor Karolina Dubiel, investor and research partner Haillie Lower, program lead and investor Sasha Zhang, and designer partner Cambree Bernkopf.⁠[2]

Chapter One: Official website: https://www.chapterone.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/chapterone (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chapter-one-ventures/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Substack: Public account: https://chapterone.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][5]