Wins Above Replacement: The New Way to Judge Founders

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

Welcome back to another episode of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital.

In this episode, I sit down with Carter Reum, Co‑Founder of M13, to explore his journey from Goldman Sachs and a shelved Oaktree offer to founding and exiting a beverage company and building a multi‑billion‑dollar venture platform. We discuss how Carter reframes “risk” through probability‑adjusted outcomes and asymmetric upside, his “microscope and telescope” framework for balancing execution with long‑term vision, and the idea of “wins above replacement” as a way to assess founder‑ and investor‑fit. Our conversation dives into what it means to build a truly operator‑led VC firm, the wide gap between value‑add and “negative value” VCs, and how M13 uses discipline, retrospectives, and portfolio construction to separate process from outcomes in an AI‑driven, increasingly frothy market.

Carter Reum is M13’s Co-Founder and Managing Partner. After building and selling VEEV Spirits, Carter and his brother Courtney co-founded M13 in 2016, designing it as the firm they wanted as founders. M13 has since backed 18 unicorns at seed or Series A and ranks #3 globally by HEC Paris–Dow Jones. Before M13, Carter was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and co-authored the bestselling Shortcut Your Startup. He serves on the board of LACMA.

Topics in this conversation include:

* Rethinking Risk and Probability-Adjusted Outcomes (2:02)

* Using a Microscope and Telescope to Build Enduring Companies (8:56)

* How M13 Was Designed as a Different, Operator-Led VC Firm (12:58)

* Operator to Investor and How VCs Should Work with Founders (17:08)

* Early-Stage Investing, Imperfect Information, and Wins Above Replacement (20:06)

* Travis Kalanick, Negative Value VCs, and Why Most Investors Miss (26:26)

* Building an Institutionalized VC Platform, Culture, and Process (31:56)