The GoingVC Podcast – uncovering new paths into VC, diving deeper into alternative models, and addressing areas of weakness with Asad Ali, and JJ MacLean (@jjmaclean) from the GoingVC team.
GoingVC is a global community and career development program for venture capital. To learn more or to checkout our guides, content, models and VC research checkout https://www.goingvc.com/blog
Feedback? We’d love to hear it: podcast@goingvc.com
👋 Hey Listener!
We're really excited to be bringing to you today our conversation with John Forbes at Julian Capital and Deep Checks. As always, if you've got any questions, feedback, guest ideas, or just want to say hey, don't hesitate to shoot us a message at podcast@goingvc.com.
John Forbes (@john___forbes) started two businesses before finishing high school, joined Dorm Room Fund as its youngest partner at Berkeley, and helped take a disaster-coordination startup from zero to product-market fit before landing at Julian Capital, a pre-seed and seed deep tech fund. He also runs Deep Checks, the largest deep tech funding platform. He joins JJ and Asad to talk about why deep tech is having its moment, the three risks investors get wrong, and how AI is rewiring diligence.
Sections
- Origin story — T-shirts and wellness apps in high school, four years at Dorm Room Fund (including a 20-block sprint to the interview), and a climate tech wedge into deep tech
- Why deep tech, why now — Software's compressing multiples, falling defensibility, and the structural tailwinds pulling capital toward hardware
- Deep Checks — Solving the matching problem in deep tech: one-minute applications, batches every three weeks, and vetting investors who are actively deploying, not just ”deep tech curious”
- Life as a principal — Sourcing, diligence, LP updates, and building a startup for startups
- Infinite curiosity — Why sitting at the frontier with founders chasing their magnum opus never gets old
- The biggest mistakes in deep tech diligence — Underwriting market pull, wrapping your head around the shape of technical risk, and stress-testing the competitive landscape
- How deep tech founders should pitch — Less metrics, more proof that you're the exceptional founder for this exact business
- AI in deep tech — Core to the product, core to the workflows, or an extension of your own brain
- Trends and a shout-out — Surprisingly uniform submissions across subsectors, and Aalo's small modular reactors for data centers
- The future of diligence — Expert-level context at your fingertips, and why asking the right questions now beats being the expert
- Advice for emerging managers — Sourcing is the input that matters most; picking and winning don't matter if you're not seeing the best companies
- Book — David McCullough's John Adams biography (and wanting to be Ben Franklin when he grows up)
