Welcome back to Field Notebook!

Here are some of the thoughts, essays, and hot takes that have surfaced across the Redbud team this month. In Edition #5 of Field Notebook, we discuss kingmaking, the viability of raising as a part-time founder, and whether you should build in stealth or in public. 🥳

Redbud VC invests $250k-$500k in early-stage tech founders. We deliver insights and learnings we shared over the last month to our over 15,000 readers.

Most VCs try to pick winners. Kingmakers try to create them — backing a company early with a check large enough to crown it the category leader before the market decides.

Not all kingmaking is the same. Sometimes capital is a genuine prerequisite — frontier AI, defense, infrastructure that can't be built incrementally. But more often it's deployed as a weapon: to buy distribution, subsidize growth, and manufacture the appearance of inevitability before anyone has earned it.

Capital creates signal. Signal shapes belief. Belief drives behavior. That's why it can work in specific conditions.

In capital-intensive categories, money is a raw material, not a strategy. In true network markets, capital can subsidize one side long enough to lock in the other. Enterprise buyers genuinely prefer well-capitalized vendors — stability is a buying criterion. And when the underlying thesis is right, capital accelerates genuine momentum. @databricks is the landmark case: @a16z led every round from the $14M Series A onward after they asked a16z for $200k. They pushed seven PhDs to think beyond a $50M academic exit. @peterthiel bet on @SpaceX because he believed rockets were a monopoly waiting to happen. The $671M became $18.2B because the thesis was right. The capital was conviction made tangible.

But those conditions are rarer than the strategy is deployed. Capital cannot manufacture product-market fit — it only buys time and talent to find it. Large balance sheets breed parallel bets, premature hiring, and confusion between growth and product validation. Premium valuations compress returns even on winners. And the best founders have leverage to take less capital; the ones who take kingmaker checks often need them to paper over weak unit economics.

The base rate is damning. Most $100M+ rounds since 2018 have not produced commensurate outcomes. Inflection, Adept, and Character are early evidence that kingmaking in AI is already failing. Convoy, Bird, and Fast raised enormous sums and failed anyway.

Figma beat InVision. Cursor is beating the incumbents. Customers, not capital, get the final vote.

This isn't new. In 1903, Samuel Langley had the full backing of the Smithsonian, $50,000 in War Department funding, and a team of engineers. The Wrights had roughly $1,000 and a wind tunnel they built themselves. When the Aerodrome collapsed into the Potomac twice, the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk nine days later.

There's also a cost the kingmakers don't absorb. Kingmaking concentrates capital in a handful of firms, inflates valuations across the stage, and forces every other investor to pay up or sit out.

It creates zombie unicorns — companies too big to fail gracefully but unable to grow into their valuations, locking up talent and capital for years. It pulls LP money toward mega-funds even though fund size is inversely correlated with returns. And it trains the next generation of founders to optimize for the next round rather than the customer.

The kingmakers themselves can survive on brand and secondaries. The companies, the LPs, and the ecosystem absorb the cost.

The current AI cycle is the largest live kingmaking experiment ever run. The next 24 months will produce real evidence. But the history is clear: the best venture returns have come from disciplined check sizes and founder-driven momentum, not manufactured inevitability.

The market still decides. Capital just speeds up the answer — and often the answer is no.

Short answer: Yes.

For most of VC history, investors had a hard rule: no investment unless you were full-time. When we started our incubator, we had that same point of view. But the bar for what you can build part-time has changed. The rules should too.

Longer answer: Now more than ever, you can raise funding without being full-time because of what you can do on nights and weekends. A great engineer can keep their salary while doing customer and product discovery — building conviction in what they're making before they quit, and long before they ask an investor to believe in it.

We've funded numerous entrepreneurs while they're still in their full-time roles because we can see high execution velocity while part-time. When we first invested in Rebulk, they weren't full-time. But they were shipping product constantly and acquiring customers. They went on to join YC after our investment. Today, they’re crushing it. Seeing what founders can do part-time is one of the best indicators of what they'll do when it's their only focus.

Someone part-time may have a family, multiple kids, or a mortgage — there are real reasons you can't just quit tomorrow. That's understood. But the scrappy founder finds a way anyway. Maybe they fund it with early revenue. Maybe they're just really good at articulating what they're building. If you can do that clearly, you can raise before going full-time, and you might not even need a lead to do it.

If you're a non-technical cofounder going part-time and you don't have much proof of concept, it's going to be hard to raise. Needing money just to hire your technical co-founder is a tough sell. Investors aren't funding your vision of what the team could look like — we're funding what the team has already shown.

If you want to raise without being full-time, you need two things:

Most founders default to stealth because it feels disciplined. Typically, it's not.

What stealth actually protects

Stealth only makes sense when you have something worth protecting. A technical breakthrough. A proprietary dataset. A regulatory wedge a well-resourced competitor could exploit the moment they see it.

If a larger player could move fast once alerted — stealth buys you runway. It delays the moment your idea lands on a VP's roadmap at a company with 100x your resources.

But that scenario is rarer than founders think. Ideas are cheap — R&D is basically zero, and unfair distribution is what's actually unique. You shouldn't be scared of someone stealing yours. Just go execute. And if someone copies you, that's a good signal. It means you're onto something.

What stealth costs

Building in stealth has a price.

You lose the feedback loop. Early customers are the only real test of whether you're solving an actual problem. The further you build from their reality, the more expensive your wrong assumptions become.

You lose organic distribution. Building in public generates a compounding asset — an audience that arrives at launch already primed to care. Stealth companies launch cold, spending money to acquire attention that public builders earned for free. Migrate Mate sponsored visas for influencers in exchange for content. Jam made creative videos.

You lose talent. The best engineers have options. A company they can't talk about is harder to recruit into.

The right question isn't "could someone copy this?"

Almost anything can be copied. All you need is Claude and some Redbull.

The right question is: does building publicly destroy the specific thing that makes this valuable?

One of our portfolio companies, High Degree, built in stealth for months. They're developing steam-based soil treatment equipment that kills weed seeds and soilborne disease — hard tech, physical product, real IP. Stealth made sense. They needed to validate the machine before the world was watching.

If the moat is technological secrecy — build in stealth for a defined window, reach defensible scale, then surface.

If the moat is distribution, brand, or network effects — stealth is actively harmful. You can't build a loyal community or a word-of-mouth loop in a vacuum.

If the moat is execution and team — stealth is largely irrelevant. A competitor knowing what you're building doesn’t really matter if you're better at building it.

There are exceptions.

Biotech, defense, deep infrastructure. Long development cycles where premature disclosure creates legal or regulatory exposure. For everyone else, the math doesn't work.

The honest default

Most software startups aren't building anything secret enough to justify stealth. The execution risk — wrong product, wrong customer, running out of money — dwarfs the competitive risk.

Building in public accelerates learning, cuts customer acquisition cost, and forces you to articulate your value before you're comfortable doing so.

Stealth should be a deliberate, time-bounded decision — not a comfort blanket that protects founders from public accountability.

Customers vote with their wallets, not their awareness. Build in public and let them.