E43: Trust, Paying Up, & Homebrew Forever with Hunter Walk

Nov 19, 2025

Hunter Walk, Co-founder of Homebrew and Screendoor, shares his transformative journey from LP-backed investing to a self-funded evergreen model. He discusses the importance of trust and context in working with founders, emphasizing the need for specific advice over generic guidance. Hunter also delves into how valuations signal founder decision-making rather than being mere price tags. He advocates for flexibility in investment size and prioritizing founder alignment over scrappy ownership targets, all while treating a startup like a product in constant refinement.

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INSIGHT

Evergreen Fund By Design

Homebrew planned to transition to an evergreen personal-capital model from day one and accelerated the move in 2022.
The shift protected their ability to stay small, founder-focused, and avoid the dilution of mission that comes with scaling fund size and team.

ANECDOTE

Early Promise To LPs

From day one Homebrew told LPs they'd likely transition to a personal-capital model after a few funds.
That early transparency framed expectations and allowed them to pursue a non-multi-generational vision.

ADVICE

Let The Round Shape Your Check

Fit your check size to what best serves the company rather than forcing ownership targets.
Prioritize alignment with founders and co-investors over hitting arbitrary percent-ownership rules.

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Our guest this week is Hunter Walk, Co-Founder of Homebrew and Screendoor. Hunter has a deep background in product, including from his time at Google and YouTube, but is best known for his investing. Homebrew’s big wins over the years include Chime, Plaid, Gusto, Cruise, and more. We talked about trust and context, product, funnel math, investing life after LPs, and why Hunter isn’t as fussy these days about valuation.

Here's a longer rundown of the episode:

Homebrew → “Forever.” Why Hunter and Satya moved from an LP-backed seed fund to a self-funded evergreen model—and why they accelerated the shift in 2022.

Ditching ownership targets. Early-stage “must-own X%” rules create artificial scarcity for founders; Homebrew now fits their check into whatever round construction serves the company best. Prioritizing alignment with founders and co-investors over leading every round.

Valuation: what it really signals. Price matters less as a target and more for what it reveals about the founder’s decision-making, who’s on the cap table, and the path to the next round—especially when you don’t hold reserves.

Trust + context > generic advice. Hunter’s operating model with founders: build trust to have honest conversations, and keep real context so advice is specific—not just a blog post link.

Meeting math & magnets. You can’t jump into every haystack—so create magnets (writing, references, approachability) to pull the right needles; historically ~1 investment per ~100 inbound companies.

Your company is a product. Hiring, comp, and cadence must cohere like a product system; inconsistency is the cultural anti-pattern.

Focus areas now. Still heavy B2B dev tools (increasingly AI/ML) and FinTech; comfortable as #2–10 on the cap table alongside specialists, which expands where they can help.

Against multi-gen for most firms. Hunter argues many venture franchises lose “fidelity” as AUM and headcount grow—like copies of a mixtape over time.

Investing in Startups is produced by Seaplane Ventures. The show is hosted by Joe Magyer.