Adam Draper on Writing the First Check

On October 14, 2026, Adam Draper joined Adeo Ressi for Venture Trailblazers. Adam runs Boost VC, which he started in 2012, and he writes $500,000 first checks at a pace of about a deal and a half every week.

He's been investing for 16 years. He was the first investor in Coinbase, and an early investor in Benchling and Amplitude.

Watch the full session: Venture Trailblazers Featuring Adam Draper

Below is what he covered, from how he decides to the fundraise that nearly ended the firm.

Adam has been consistent on this for 14 years. The first check into a company is the most impactful one, and it's the point where you build a real relationship with the founder.

Boost VC describes its job as making sci-fi a reality. They were the first fund to focus on Bitcoin. Then during COVID, when everyone else piled into software, they went the other way into hardware and aerospace. That meant K2 Space, Radiant, Starfish and Venus.

Now they're moving into what Adam calls new bio, because he sees two shifts happening there at once. Healthcare is moving from the hospital into your house, and treatment is shifting from chemistry to biology.

He also made a point about who's buying. Everyone assumes pharma is the only customer for biology data, but language models are now a huge buyer too, and consumers are becoming one. If he had to bet on which market gets biggest over the long term, he'd pick consumers.

Adam gave us the actual funnel. About 300 deals a week come through their filters, the team meets with roughly 50 of them, and they do one. A slow month is three deals and a big month is around eight.

Part of the reason he can run that pace is historical. When his grandfather was investing in the 1960s and 70s, there were maybe 200 possible deals a year, and in his dad's era it was closer to 2,000. Today Adam puts the number somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000.

The structure of a fund never changed to match, because most firms still do 20 to 25 deals. So if you can do more deals and keep your ownership, he thinks you should.

Boost started as an in-person accelerator, which trained them to work at high volume, and when they moved to being a pre-seed fund they kept the speed and switched to rolling applications.

Adam splits his yeses into two kinds, and the first is a no-brainer. He'll be 15 minutes into a meeting and think, why haven't we said yes yet? Big market, a founder who's been at it a long time, somebody who understands it better than anyone else.

Three weeks before the session he said yes to a company building a cannon on the moon that fires regolith back to Earth.

The second kind is a big thinker, and those are often the best returners. His tell for them is emotional, because if you hear a pitch and you laugh at it or you get angry at it, that's probably the future.

Colossal Biosciences, which brought back the dire wolf, is the one people are still skeptical about.

He used Airbnb to make the point. The friction was that nobody would pay to stay in a stranger's house, and what nobody saw coming was that rating systems would get trusted enough to make it work. Uber had the same shape. Don't get into strangers' cars, then only get into strangers' cars.

What he's looking for is rational people doing irrational things.

Someone asked how he runs diligence in a week and a half, and his answer was blunt. His job in a meeting with a founder is to believe them.

A checklist is something you keep so you can explain yourself after a bad decision. He isn't trying to tick boxes, he's trying to work out whether this person can actually do the thing and whether they'll spend every waking moment on it.

He screens for commitment, either to the vision or to the team, and for clear communication. People who explain complex things simply are usually a level ahead, and people who overcomplicate usually understand it less well than they think.

He admitted the bias costs him, because Boost has missed companies where the founder hadn't figured out how to communicate yet.

This was the best story of the hour, and it's worth reading if you're raising right now.

Three or four years in, Adam was raising a $38 million fund, having raised $500,000 and then $6 million before that. At 2% a year on roughly $7 million, he and his co-founder were splitting about $10,000 a year between them, and they were two weeks from running out of money.

He flew to the East Coast to pitch a well-known endowment. He said the word Bitcoin and the meeting ended. Fifteen minutes, done.

Two weeks earlier he'd told his grandfather that fundraising was hard, and his grandfather asked how many people he'd met. Adam said 300 investors. His grandfather thought about it and said, well, maybe you're doing it wrong.

So he changed his opening line. He walked into the next meeting with a family office and said this won't work unless you're interested in Bitcoin or virtual reality, and that if they weren't, he'd educate them anyway.

That one sentence changed every conversation after it, because he led with the risk and people relaxed. That family office became a major LP and is still in the funds today. Boost closed its latest fund at $87 million.

Adam divides venture into two games. One is the optimization of access, which is the later rounds, and if you're a new GP trying to win there you'd better come with gloves.

The other is the optimization of luck. That's pre-seed, sometimes seed, and friends and family rounds. It's where people feel uncertain, and it's the game he plays and the one he thinks new managers should play, because the bigger funds are structurally pointed somewhere else.

He explained why with a story. He once asked an executive at a large private equity firm what they spend on diligence for a deal that falls through, and the answer was $50 million to $75 million. That's more than his entire fund.

Big funds aren't the enemy here, because they're what lets your companies scale once they're ready. They're playing a different game, and he thinks it's culturally hard to play both at once.

The mantra in venture is to be non-consensus and right, and that combination pays off in a big way when it lands. Adam has come round to thinking that consensus and right still wins, and the payoff is only smaller because the price is higher.

On selling, his grandfather's line was that you're never sad if you sell half. Boost recently sold part of a position with the founders' permission, and it returned much of the fund. Adam was careful to say that isn't a strategy of theirs.

Default to movement, and try something every day. The best chess players read the board in front of them rather than running if-then statements three moves deep.

Don't take anyone's advice, including his. Use it as data for whatever your own judgment is already telling you.

And pick up the phone, because he thinks people don't call each other enough and he gets more done in one call than in a week of messages.

His last point was about optimism. He sees people he admires taking the pessimistic side on AI almost by reflex, and he'd push back on that every time, because you never want to be the person hoping for the end.

One of his friends in venture puts it another way. You never know which vintage is the vintage, so you never want to be the one who isn't investing.

Venture Trailblazers Featuring Adam Draper, recorded October 14, 2026. More sessions are on the VC Lab YouTube channel.

Adam's point about the optimization of luck is the whole case for emerging managers, because the best entry points sit at the earliest stage and that's where new firms can win.

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Apply to VC Lab at govclab.com. If you're raising funds two through four, look at the Emerging Institute.