Earl Grey Capital is run by Amit Vasudev (Li, Twitter), Alex MacCaw (Twitter), and Matt Sornson (Li, Twitter). We co-founded the company Clearbit together.
Alex, a prolific developer and Clearbit’s founding CEO, was one of the first engineers at Stripe. The original concept of Clearbit was to build “Stripe for business data” with clean APIs, freemium/open-source products, and extremely innovative go-to-market motions (we literally wrote the book on it).
Clearbit quickly became a preeminent “API-for-[X]” business with millions of developers/users, tens of millions in annually recurring revenue / VC funding, historical revenue efficiency, and hundreds of employees.
We spent over 15K hours working together and are colleagues, friends, and family. Simply put, we know how to work together, complement each other’s skills, and get shit done.
Why we’re doing this
We believe there’s a seismic shift in venture capital and that we represent it.
Microfunds outperform and founders want funding from other founders, especially in the earliest stages.
Founders now have the capital, stage relevant experience, and the tactical network to be significantly more valuable in the early sages of company building.
- Access shouldn’t be wasted. We are flooded with high quality inbound from founder friends, have brand & reputation within the startup community, and referrals from our network of other “new age” investors leading institutions who value our early-stage expertise.
- The internet is still young and in its relative infancy. The economy is continues to transition to digital, internet companies will continue to increase in value. It’s the best market in the world and we understand it more than most - particularly the API opportunity.
- Capitalism is awesome, and remains the greatest driver of innovation and human progress the world has ever seen. Capital allocation and early-stage venture drive innovation and make the world a better place.
- There’s an opportunity to do early-stage differently. To run the fund like a startup, building products, community, and network effects into our investment model. Ask us about our early experiments :)
Our roles
Amit is the “CEO” of Earl Grey - he is ultimately responsible for driving returns, investment decisions, supporting our founders, and fund strategy. Earl Grey is his full-time job. As Clearbit’s founding CRO (who could also code), Amit has transitioned into a naturally strong investor. He knows exactly how to speak “founder”, how to win allocation, be analytical & objective with imperfect data, and learn/collaborate with the best investors in the business. Amit studied engineering at Stanford and is based in Austin.
Matt is currently CEO at Clearbit, was its first CMO, and has an incredibly cash-on-cash angel track record. As an Earl Grey GP, Matt’s Clearbit day-to-day creates significant advantages in network, sourcing, and DD. He is endlessly curious and a killer operator - something that deeply resonates with prospective founders. He has also co-authored several books in innovative go-to-market and is deeply embedded within the AI community.
Matt is based in NYC.
Alex is a developer’s developer and still programs nearly every day. He is currently CEO of Reflect, actively creating open-sourced projects, and serves as Chairman of Clearbit’s board. He is also an author, writing books on programming CEO development, and even manager training. As an Earl Grey GP, Alex has tremendous developer/technical brand that he leverages to source and DD investment oppty’s. Alex is based in NYC.
Investing experience
With the Earl Grey I fund, we deployed ~$6.5M across 60+ incredible companies, a number of which have already been marked up. Including all of our angel investments, we have a portfolio of 100+ total investments to-date.
We frequently invest alongside the best emerging and traditional VCs - Josh Buckley, Craft, Quiet, Julian Shapiro, YC, Ankur Nagpal, Packy McCormick, Ryan Hoover, Lachy Groom, a16z, and many more.
May Habib
CEO of Writer
These folks are founders who pick up your strategy, challenges, opportunities, competitive landscape in minutes, and drive a highly generative first conversation. They are the real deal, rolling up their sleeves to help us with intros and knowledge before the wires hit. Take their money if you can.”
Vijay Mani
CEO of Covey
“Amit and Alex are incredible minds to have as part of the Covey team. I’ve worked with some of the best investors in the valley, and they are easily amongst the most valuable. They stand out because they just understand early-stage execution at all levels. Any B2B founder should want them onboard.”
Kevin Martin
CTO of Unspun
“Once Matt decided to get in our pants (we make jeans), he sat down with us and strategized on who the right investors were to bring in, when & how to best approach each one, and what additional angels and experts we could add to best fill a few network and skill gaps. Matt’s top three intros of Lachy Groom, Hyper, and Josh Buckley who ended up leading an expanded round that closed in a few weeks and his agency intros have become a core part of our growth team.”
