On deliberate smallness

There is a fashion in private capital toward portfolio breadth — a hundred bets, a thousand, a fund-of-funds that ladders into another fund-of-funds. The thesis is statistical: at sufficient scale, the winners pay for the losers and a little besides.

We have always found that thesis correct and uninteresting.

Fullen Global was started on a different premise — that the real returns in business are not made on the expected value of the next bet, but on the attention paid to the bet already in front of you. Attention is the only thing that does not scale.

So we hold a small portfolio. Three companies, today. Perhaps five, eventually. Almost certainly never more than ten.

This is not a humility move. It is the opposite. It is a wager that with enough time, taste, and operating leverage, a small handful of companies can be made remarkable — and that the act of making them remarkable is the work.

What this means in practice

A founder who works with us gets a partner whose calendar has room in it. Not a quarterly check-in. Not a board observer seat. A working relationship — brand, hiring, product, distribution, the next hire, the next price point — for as long as it is useful.

It also means we say no, often. Most of the companies that find their way to us are good companies. We are not in the business of separating good from bad. We are in the business of choosing the few we can love.

— Andrew