Mark Goldberg is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Chemistry, a new early-stage venture firm with a $350M debut fund backing standout software companies from Seed to Series A. Prior to Chemistry, Mark was a Partner at Index Ventures, where he led early-stage investments across software and fintech for nearly a decade. Before Index, Mark was one of the first business hires at Dropbox, helping the company navigate hypergrowth.
Discussed in this episode
- Why Mark studied international relations, and why venture feels like “the liberal arts of jobs”
- Index’s US “invisibility” era and what that taught him about building a new firm
- The Chemistry spinout thesis: “take great multi-stage DNA, reconstitute it with focus”
- Fund design: pre-seed → seed → A, light reserves, and concentrated doubling-down
- Hiring strategy: network access > spreadsheet diligence
- Culture principles: excellence, performance, “no one takes themselves too seriously”
- Conviction-based investing vs consensus IC, and why omissions are the real killer
- The hardest lesson in venture: managing co-founder dynamics (and when to just listen)
Episode highlights
00:00 — “A+ people want to work with A+ people.”
01:46 — GTMfund’s 2026 prediction: big players come roaring back (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Uber/Waymo).
14:51 — GTMfund platform metrics: thousands of support items, intros, hires, and fundraising connects.
26:29 — Why Mark left Index to build Chemistry: big-fund lessons, rebuilt with focus.
33:39 — Chemistry’s strategy: early-stage focus, light reserves, and building for “product-market discovery.”
44:05 — “Venture doesn’t scale well.” Why Chemistry stays small to avoid bureaucracy.
49:59 — Events that actually work: chess tournaments, surfing, and hobby-driven gathering > happy hours.
54:56 — Investment process: conviction, not consensus—optimize for outliers, not averages.
1:10:32 — Hardest lesson in venture: co-founder dynamics, and learning when to listen (not “advise”).
Brought to you by: AngelList
From starting as a small, operator-led rolling fund, to evolving to an institutional platform, AngelList has been a core partner in every phase of GTMfund’s growth. Their software-first fund admin infrastructure allowed us to scale without sacrificing agility — from onboarding hundreds of LPs seamlessly to handling compliance, capital calls, and reporting as our fund size evolved.
As we expanded from Fund I to Fund II, AngelList took care of the back-office operations, allowing us to stay focused on what matters most: investing in world-class founders and building the strongest go-to-market network in venture.
They’ve scaled with us across funds and into the future.
If your fund is growing in size or complexity, check them out at www.angellist.com/gtmfund.
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