Common Magic's year in review, 2025 edition

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Today’s newsletter is purely about my solo fund Common Magic. Links at the bottom for readers less interested in that.

Every six months or so I book walks in with people I think of as mentors.

Last summer, in the first year of Common Magic, one long-term investor told me; ‘don’t overthink what you do. Our fund is [ranked highly] and we still get it wrong most of the time’

(For anyone who has ever met me, wish me luck on the overthinking bit)

This year, coming into year two, he said; ‘you’re heading into the hardest part of the cycle. Everything truly great takes time. So you have to find ways of assessing progress and grading yourself’

With that in mind, here’s my review of 2025 in Common Magic land. What went well? 

I invested in ten brilliant pre-seed and seed teams across five countries giving the fund 25 portfolio companies.

Founders like Harrison who cofounded Paddle at eighteen and took it from 0 -> $100M ARR, now on a mission to build better data products to help humans focus on high-quality work not bad cold emails.

Or Mollie who led the UCL's Bartlett School during the time they reached #1 global ranking for their frontier work in AI in architecture now on a mission to build containerised micro-factories and accelerate sustainable housing.

Or Krijn who raised $100M during his time as cofounder & CEO of Meatable, now on a mission to build the command and control centre for large capital projects (because you can tell the ambition and focus of a society by what they build).

Many other teams are in stealth but this year I helped founders customer advisory boards in techbio, design Discord onboarding for dev tools, and brainstormed how to build a consumer brand for products embedded within chat interfaces for next-gen search (fun, hard).

Velocity and progress feel great.  

Two earlier investments didn’t get to where we wanted and both teams sold to customers. One, Lucent Data, announced their exit to Ospiens last week. It’s brave to start something from nothing and so hard. It's always better to sell than shut down. Selling, even at small scale, honours work done and every little bit of capital returned counts in a tiny fund. 

As you read everything else here, remember; deciding where to invest is honestly the only thing that matters for a venture fund. 

But, like my mentor suggested, results aren’t clear for years. Despite what your ego says, you have limited ability to help. So you’d better get on with other work to improve your decision making and increase the scope of brilliant founders you meet. Go build that brand.  

Events are fun, easy for me to run and work with the fund’s thesis of products with community at their core. I ran some great ones this year including interviewing James Hawkins of Posthog on building self-driving startup culture, Developers Developers Developers as a KubeCon side event, Thom Wolf at Hugging Face & Selim Benayat at Nothing on building next-gen consumer hardware and Chris Pendragal of Granola on daily use AI-native software. Judged a bunch of hackathons and wrote about why the humble hackathon is back. 

I also ran a series of smaller-scale founder/operator meetups and dinners in Amsterdam, Berlin, London and New York. At Superventure, three cool funds partnered to run a breakfast for a good slice of the new tiny fund scene. I tested out running an Annual General Meeting to bring together many of my own investors with founders and friends.

Some events I’d give myself 10/10, others more like 7/10 but I realised in writing this a third of the founders I backed this year came, indirectly or directly, through events. I’m still hearing about cofounders that met at things I ran in '24, '23, '18... Overall, if you can get people together for high-quality small-scale gatherings, just do it. 

After a few years less involved in what I call "good crypto", shoutout Protocol Berg and Cypherpunk Camp for exposure to new ideas and new people. Andrej Karpathy talks about how AI automates anything verifiable; there are cool things happening in this scene beyond stablecoins. 

Out of 500 applications, Common Magic got selected as one of twenty funds in the Mountside emerging manager program. A great way to ringfence time and think about firm building alongside others brilliant peer funds.

I spent a lot of time trying to understand what was happening in technology, culture, geopolitics and therefore the world. Best reads of 2025; the Swerve, the Wager, Antimemetics.

Had a mindworm about manufacturing and b2b/b2c hardware this summer and accidentally became a book reseller by importing Reggie James’ Hardware 2024 into the European tech scene; then learnt why Reggie had not done this himself (European fragmentation; RIP my sanity in the post office queue).  

Sara Berkhai interviewed me for her zine, The World is Ours, on how we reimagine education.

Got coached by Freddie including a 360 degree feedback process that I tried hard to get out of, was painful to go through and extremely useful. Strong recommend for Freddie. 

I scheduled less meetings; checked and contributed to social media less. Said no to at least ten panels, talks and retreats I would have said yes to in 2023 and kept high standards for when and for what I travel. 

Bought this one pair of really great trousers. Started this newsletter. Kept my head during a pretty mad year in the ~markets.

So what went less well?

In “no shit, sherlock” news, I keep learning about the endless grit needed to overcome inevitable issues in company building. Special shoutout to the (not fund portfolio) company where we survived many painful months untangling multiple issues who are heading into 2026 stronger than ever, minus me as a board member. Time to focus on CM.

I learnt hiring in venture firms, especially as a solo investor, is really hard. Roles are ambigious and high agency, weirdly detailed and diverse. Salaries are not high, vibe fit is queen and not many people want to be with you putting the bins out after something runs late. I'll try again here in 2026.

Did all the background work collecting data for an open source repo of small funds in Europe (so founders find us more easily); got stuck on the enormous gap between my product taste and product execution. Another for my '26 list.

I didn't find the office of my dreams this year (the above pic was another false start).

But overall?

Outside of work, there was a lot of proper time with people I love.

2025 was a good year.

2026 is important. More investments to make, more companies to support and of course the start of Common Magic II. Many lessons learnt; new operating principles and refined thesis coming soon.   

Links!