Indie.vc, a six-year-old effort by O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures to invest small amounts in bootstrapped businesses, shuts down after results left LPs unimpressed
6 years ago, a mysterious Tumblr site appeared on the internet. Tweets: Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : The idea was to back the next GitHub, which became profitable early on and didn't take any VC money for its first four years. Limited partners were unimpressed, particularly as many of their other VC fund bets kept minting overnight unicorns. https://www.axios.com/... Michael Jackson / @workmj : The VC fund model hasn't changed all that much since Georges Doriot launched ARDC in 1946. The reality of why is that LPs don't like different. https://www.axios.com/... Joshua Schoenaker / @joshschoen : VC mode only “works” with a power law it turns out? https://twitter.com/... Parker / @pt : This is disappointing. We still don't have enough options for founders and this felt like a very worthy one. Hopefully we see moar creativity/innovation like this going forward. https://twitter.com/...
Axios
Context & Ripple Effects
Indie.vc was O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures' bet against the standard venture playbook: small checks into profitable, bootstrapped businesses on the GitHub model — companies that grew without touching VC for their first four years. After six years the results didn't clear the bar, and limited partners who watched their conventional fund bets mint overnight unicorns lost patience.
O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures ends its only vehicle for backing capital-efficient bootstrapped companies, and the founders of such businesses lose their most visible dedicated funding source.
Bryce Roberts is forced onto the defensive, publishing a postmortem days later to explain the failure to the same LP community that passed on the results.
Second-order effects
LP dollars keep consolidating into the conventional endowments-and-unicorns format — the same dynamic behind Bessemer Venture Partners' record $4.6B twin-fund raise and Founders Fund rolling an undersized Fund VIII into its ninth fund rather than shrinking deployment.
Alternative financing doesn't disappear but migrates down-market, away from institutional funds toward micro-VCs, solo capitalists, and AngelList's quarterly Rolling Fund subscription model.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, genuine structural experiments in how startups are financed get pushed out of institutional LP portfolios entirely, leaving the 1946-vintage fund structure entrenched at scale while innovation happens in small, retail-accessible vehicles with no LP committee to disappoint.
Bootstrapped, profit-first companies become structurally underserved by professional capital, ceding that financing gap to revenue-based lenders and founder-controlled growth rather than equity funds.
The trend: Institutional LP conservatism keeps pushing venture model experiments out of traditional funds and into small subscription-style vehicles, while mega-funds absorb an ever-larger share of the capital.
The idea was to back the next GitHub, which became profitable early on and didn't take any VC money for its first four years. Limited partners were unimpressed, particularly as many of their other VC fund bets kept minting overnight unicorns. https://www.axios.com/...
The VC fund model hasn't changed all that much since Georges Doriot launched ARDC in 1946. The reality of why is that LPs don't like different. https://www.axios.com/...
This is disappointing. We still don't have enough options for founders and this felt like a very worthy one. Hopefully we see moar creativity/innovation like this going forward. https://twitter.com/...
The compost from @indievc's unfortunate collapse will enrich this next era in unimaginably creative ways. I see many new beginnings on the other side of this end. It's a movement, not a moment. #ZebrasUnite 🦓♥️🔥 🦄 @bryce https://twitter.com/...
While the institutional LPs might not see the opportunity, the founders do. Very few firms have been able to capture the hearts and minds of founders as @indievc has. I'll always be grateful for the opportunity I had to work alongside @bryce and the team. https://twitter.com/...
✨ It's unfortunate to see @indievc come to an end but wow has @bryce and his team inspired so many of us to keep pushing the boundaries of VC! 🙌🏽 Proud to have been part of the https://indie.vc/ Scout program + invested in @Thimbleio through it. https://medium.com/...
🦄🔥 Kudos to @Bryce and @timoreilly for dedicating a half decade plus to a noble experiment in changing the way VC works - Gone but not forgotten! https://medium.com/...
this really bums me out. @bryce is an innovator and pioneer. https://indie.vc/ is the future of capital, even if it was a little ahead of its time... https://medium.com/...
Sad to see this post about the end of @indievc. Believe early-stage companies need more funding options, and @bryce and team have been trailblazers. Rooting for alt-models like @tractorventures and @LighterCapital to carry the torch. https://medium.com/...
If we want to maximize new company creation & entrepreneurship, we need many different funding models at scale, not just VC (which is perfect for high growth start-ups but not most other co's). @bryce was onto something w/ @indievc & I am sad to see this experiment come to an end…
I'd put my house on @bryce's theses being broadly proven and widely believed 20 years from now, with enormous market players In today's structurally conservative (principal-agent problem) institutional LP market though, that seems to count for little https://twitter.com/...
Flexible capital is hard to pull off, and the end of @IndieVC shows that it's hard to get LPs behind it, too. Def a loss, and warning sign, for the early-stage startup ecosystem https://medium.com/...
https://indie.vc/ calls it quits: sadly, most investors want big exits, not a bunch of sustainable independent companies paying dividends https://medium.com/...
Truly sad to see @indievc end. Deep respect to @bryce, a pioneer paving the way to serve entrepreneurs beyond the traditional VC model. Institutional change in the capital markets does not come easy. When change finally comes, and it will, we shall remember Bryce's vision. https:…
I'm shocked and saddened by the announcement that @indievc is shutting down. I have tremendous respect for what @bryce and his team accomplished over the past six years, and appreciate that they paved the way for funds/accelerators like ours. https://medium.com/...
In 2015 VC's wouldn't TOUCH the influencer/creator space. Sure venture loves creators now but 6 years ago they thought it a “fad” or “not a venture scale industry”. I knew they were wrong and @bryce was the only one (I talked to hundreds) who agreed. https://twitter.com/...
This one hits hard for me, but @bryce and @indievc pushed so many things forward, for the ecosystem and for me personally. A whole new class of investors and thinking have emerged from this burning unicorn head. ♥️🦓✨ https://twitter.com/...
This breaks my heart. https://medium.com/... If indie-style investing was showing worse returns, that'd be one thing. But, they're not. The problem, instead, is that LPs (the moneyed interests that invest in funds) *don't believe* in it. 🤬🤬🤬 https://twitter.com/...
. @indievc asked a *very* important question of the market, and it's really too bad they are winding down. I suspect the answer to that question is still out there.