A podcast · hosted by Martin Tobias · Incisive Ventures
Conviction
before proof.
Founders, professional investors, poker players — and anyone deploying capital under low information and huge uncertainty. The bets that pay off the most are the ones that sound stupid at the time. The First Bet drags them back to the moment before they knew — what they had to go on, why they bet anyway, and what they saw that everyone else missed.
The Test
Every great capital allocation sounds stupid before it works.
Couch-surfing for strangers.
Buttons that summon cars.
A check into three slides.
The First Bet sits with the people who pushed chips in anyway — and pulls apart what they saw that nobody else did.
The Lens
Every guest has one rule they carry into every bet.
Not a story — a portable heuristic. The thing they reach for when the information is thin and the chips are already in.
This wasn’t a reckless leap, it was an asymmetric bet — with capped downside and massive upside.
Intuition—the tool most investors treat as a superpower—is demonstrably unreliable in early-stage VC. Intuition only works in environments with clear feedback loops. Early-stage ventures? Not exactly that environment.
Everyone's a gangster until they gotta wire the money.
I'm not a risk taker. I'm a risk trader.
The Feed
Latest episodes
EP10: Howard Lindzon - Investing in the "Degen Thesis"
Howard backed Robinhood and Alpaca when almost everyone else thought trading was a bad bet, and how “low information” to opportunity changed everything.
Listen →EP9: Mike Ma - Coach First, Capital Second
He backs founders before the check—because the real signal shows up in the 30 days first.
Listen →EP8: Alex McNaughten - Going all in as a Founder
The safest move can be the biggest mistake. In this episode, Alex McNaughton explains why he left a profitable life in New Zealand to go all in in SFO.
Listen →EP7: Brian Bell - AI as decision support in Venture
Brian Bell of Ignite Ventures on building a repeatable venture decision system — fragility scores, founder signals, and where AI actually helps.
Listen →Ep6: Ihar Mahaniok - the Immigrant VC
Ihar Mahaniok of Geek Ventures on backing immigrant founders, seeing Instacart early, and how his framework changed over 100+ investments.
Listen →EP5: Aram Attar: the Mindset way for LPs to invest in Fund I GPs
Aram Attar explains why intuition fails in early-stage VC and how the best investors make smarter low-information decisions.
Listen →The Newsletter
Never miss a bet.
Each episode: the bet, the Lens, and the transcript — the book, serialized.
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