Delivered July 17, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Muggy, 29⁰ C / 84⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• The "Incorruptible" Millionaire

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The "Incorruptible" Millionaire

Last week, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal about a cashier at Costco who has worked for the company since 1986, back when it was still Price Club. After nearly 40 years with the company, and despite his wife going through three major surgeries along the way, he is getting ready to retire with more than $1 million in his 401(k).

Think about that for a second. A cashier at Costco is retiring a millionaire.

The story stayed with me, in part because of its timing. I've been reading Eric Ries' latest book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, and one of the ideas he explores is something he calls "financial gravity." It is the force that eventually pulls so many great companies back to earth.

Most great companies don't start with a spreadsheet. They start with an idea. Usually, there is a founder who sees something other people don't see, or believes something other people don't yet believe. That vision becomes the driving force behind the company, and it informs thousands of decisions about the product, the customer, the employees, and the culture. It is, in many ways, the reason the company becomes successful in the first place.

But then the company grows. The founder gets older, steps aside, or is pushed out. New executives arrive who weren't there at the beginning and don't necessarily understand why things were done a certain way. The company goes public. Analysts start asking questions. Boards start looking at returns. And gradually, almost imperceptibly, the conversation changes.

The questions become: How much more can we charge the customer? How much can we save by cutting employee benefits? Can we reduce headcount? Can we squeeze another point out of the margin? Can we make the product a little cheaper without anyone noticing?

Each decision, viewed independently, can make perfect financial sense. In fact, that's what makes financial gravity so powerful. Nobody walks into the boardroom and announces that today is the day they're going to destroy the company. Instead, they make a series of perfectly rational decisions designed to extract a little more money from the system. The customer gets a little less. The employee gives a little more. The spreadsheet looks a little better.

Until it doesn't.

Eventually, the best employees start leaving. The culture begins to disappear. The customers notice that the product isn't quite what it used to be. The people who remain spend more of their time protecting what exists and less of their time imagining what could exist. The company loses its energy, then its ideas, and eventually its mojo. The people who know how to extract value have replaced the people who knew how to create it.

And, without anything new to propel it forward, the company slowly rolls back into the ocean.

Financial gravity wins.

Which is what makes the story of Costco so interesting.

To understand Costco, you have to go back to the 1950s and a San Diego attorney named Sol Price. Price had an idea for a new kind of retail business—a membership club where customers would pay a fee for access to a limited selection of products sold at the lowest possible prices. He called it FedMart.

But the real innovation may not have been the membership fee or the warehouse format. It was the order in which Sol Price believed a company should serve the people who depended on it.

Customers first. Employees second. Shareholders third.

That was the formula.

It sounds almost quaint today, particularly in a business world that has spent decades preaching the doctrine of shareholder value. But Price believed that if you gave customers extraordinary value and treated employees well, the shareholders would ultimately be rewarded as a consequence.

There is a wonderful story from those early FedMart days that, in retrospect, feels almost too perfect. Price was walking through one of his stores when he noticed a young employee trying to move mattresses by himself. Price immediately chastised him for attempting to do it alone. That young employee's name was James Sinegal.

It was the beginning of a relationship that would ultimately shape American retail.

By the mid-1970s, FedMart had become a successful public company, and the inevitable questions began to emerge. The company had built its reputation by keeping prices extraordinarily low, but the board could see the obvious opportunity. Why not raise them? Why leave all that money on the table?

Sol Price refused.

The formula was the formula.

Customers first. Employees second. Shareholders third.

In 1975, the board removed him.

Financial gravity.

So Price did what entrepreneurs tend to do when someone tells them they can't run their company the way they believe it should be run.

He started another one.

The new company was called Price Club, and the basic idea was the same: members would pay an annual fee in exchange for access to quality merchandise at extremely low markups. Meanwhile, James Sinegal—the young employee Price had once caught trying to move mattresses by himself—would eventually take those lessons and help create his own warehouse retailer in 1983.

That company was Costco.

A few years later, the two companies came together, and the philosophy that began with Sol Price decades earlier survived the merger.

Customers first. Employees second. Shareholders third.

What I find remarkable about Costco is not simply that the formula worked. It is that they have managed to stick with it.

Because the temptation to abandon it must have been enormous.

Imagine how many consultants, analysts, bankers, board members, and executives over the past several decades have looked at Costco and identified all the money the company was supposedly leaving on the table. Raise the price of the hot dog. Increase the markup on merchandise. Reduce employee benefits. Pay people less. Squeeze suppliers harder. Make the return policy more restrictive. Find a way to extract just a little more from the customer and give just a little less to the employee.

There was always more money to be made.

At least in the short term.

But Costco understood that the things financial gravity identifies as inefficiencies may actually be the things holding the entire system together.

Take the famous $1.50 hot dog and soda combo. Costco reportedly sells more hot dogs each year than all of the Major League Baseball stadiums combined. The company could obviously charge more. Customers would probably pay more. Every finance person with a calculator can figure out how much additional revenue a price increase might generate.

But that misses the point.

The hot dog isn't just a hot dog.

It's a promise.

It tells the customer something about the company. It says that even though Costco could charge you more, it won't simply because it can.

The same principle runs through the rest of the business. More than 90 percent of Costco members renew their memberships every year. Kirkland Signature, the company's private-label brand, has become so enormous that if you pulled it out of Costco and made it a standalone company, it would be larger than some of the most recognizable consumer companies in the world.

That doesn't happen because you figured out how to extract every possible dollar from every transaction.

It happens because people trust you.

And trust compounds.

So does loyalty.

Which brings me back to the Costco cashier.

It would be easy to read his story as a story about personal finance. A man worked for decades, consistently contributed to his 401(k), invested his money, and allowed compound growth to do what compound growth does. Eventually, an ordinary employee accumulated an extraordinary amount of wealth.

But I think there is a much bigger story hiding inside it.

The Costco millionaire could only exist because Costco created a place where the Costco employee could exist.

He had to be able to stay.

For nearly 40 years.

He had to have access to healthcare that mattered when his wife went through three major surgeries. He had to have retirement benefits worth participating in. He had to work for a company that viewed employees as people worth investing in rather than expenses that should perpetually be optimized.

Somewhere along the way, I'm certain there was a spreadsheet that showed exactly how much money Costco could save by cutting benefits.

There was probably another spreadsheet showing how much more the company could earn by increasing prices.

And another showing how much could be saved by paying employees less.

That's financial gravity.

The spreadsheet is rarely wrong.

It just doesn't always understand what it's measuring.

Because what is the value of an employee who stays for 40 years? What is the value of institutional knowledge? What is the value of a customer who renews a membership year after year because they trust the company? What is the value of an employee who tells their children that Costco is a good place to work? What is the value of millions of customers believing, perhaps irrationally, that the company on the other side of the transaction is actually trying to give them a fair deal?

Those things are difficult to put into a spreadsheet.

Until, eventually, they show up in one.

In 2000, Costco was valued at roughly $17 billion. Today, its value is more than $400 billion.

Which is where the story becomes almost ironic.

For decades, Costco has operated according to a philosophy that explicitly puts shareholders third.

Customers first.

Employees second.

Shareholders third.

And the shareholders became extraordinarily wealthy.

Maybe that's because Sol Price understood something that financial gravity doesn't. A great business isn't a machine from which you extract the maximum amount of money. It's an ecosystem. Customers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders all depend on one another, and when you relentlessly optimize one part of the system at the expense of the others, eventually the entire thing begins to break down.

There is a lesson here for entrepreneurs, particularly those of us trying to build companies that we hope will still matter long after we're gone.

At some point, every company has to decide what it believes.

Not the words painted on the conference room wall. Not the mission statement on the website. Not the values printed in the employee handbook.

The real order.

Who comes first?

Who comes second?

Who comes third?

Because when financial gravity eventually arrives—and it always does—that order is what determines what happens next.

Sol Price knew his order.

James Sinegal learned it.

Costco kept it.

And nearly 70 years after Sol Price began experimenting with a new way of selling products, a cashier who joined Price Club in 1986 is getting ready to retire with more than $1 million in his 401(k).

The customers did well.

The employees did well.

And, as it turns out, the shareholders did pretty well, too.

As Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the rest of the story.

Have a great weekend -gerry

gerry@doriot.com

Delivered July 10, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Sunny, 30⁰ C / 87⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• The SaaSpocalypse Isn't the Story. The Capitalizat …

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The SaaSpocalypse Isn't the Story. The Capitalization Revolution Is.

Ron Weissman has spent decades at the center of venture investing, and his recent two-part series for the Angel Capital Association on the "SaaSpocalypse" deserves the attention of every angel investor, venture capitalist, and startup founder. His analysis is thoughtful, balanced, and grounded in what many of us are already witnessing firsthand: AI is fundamentally changing software economics.

Ron doesn't argue that SaaS is dead. Quite the opposite. He acknowledges that software isn't disappearing - it is evolving. Traditional SaaS companies are shifting from per-seat pricing toward usage and value-based models. AI-native companies are reaching meaningful revenue with teams that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. Investment diligence is becoming more technical, more domain-specific, and far more time-sensitive. Exit markets are diverging between legacy software and AI-native businesses, while investors are being forced to rethink how they source deals, evaluate companies, and ultimately generate returns.

His conclusion is difficult to argue with: the venture ecosystem must evolve.

I agree completely.

Where I believe the conversation should continue is one layer deeper. Software economics are only the first-order effect. Every time the cost of building companies falls, the economics of financing those companies changes as well. The real disruption isn't SaaS. The real disruption is capitalization itself.

For nearly eighty years, venture capital has operated on essentially the same architecture. Entrepreneurs pitch. Investors evaluate. A small partnership makes decisions behind closed doors. Capital is allocated. Years later, the market determines whether those decisions were correct.

That model made sense when information was scarce, startups were expensive to build, and capital itself was the limiting resource.

None of those assumptions remain true.

Today, AI has dramatically lowered the cost of creating companies. Small teams can build products that previously required dozens of engineers and millions of dollars. MVPs can be built in days instead of months. Founders have more ways to access capital than ever before. Increasingly, money isn't the bottleneck. The real constraint is determining which of thousands of increasingly inexpensive startups deserve to receive it.

Every advancement in AI produces more startups, more opportunities, and exponentially more information for investors to process. Yet the mechanism for making investment decisions remains largely unchanged. We've layered AI tools onto an investment process designed for another era. Faster spreadsheets, AI-generated due diligence summaries, automated CRM systems, and investment copilots certainly improve efficiency, but they don't change the underlying architecture.

It's the equivalent of installing an AI navigation system in a horse-drawn carriage. The navigation isn't the bottleneck. The carriage is.

Throughout history, technological revolutions have been followed by financial revolutions. Railroads required modern investment banking. Industrialization required public equity markets. The Internet produced online brokerages, crowdfunding, and decentralized finance. AI will be no different. Every leap in productive capacity eventually requires a new mechanism for allocating capital.

This is why I believe new approaches to capitalization are not simply possible—they are inevitable.

The venture industry is moving from a world where capital was scarce to one where credible conviction is scarce. The winners may not be those with the largest funds. They will be those who can discover, validate, and support the best companies faster and more accurately than anyone else.

That requires something fundamentally different than simply adding AI to yesterday's venture capital process.

It requires turning investment itself into an intelligence network. Reputation becomes measurable. Insight becomes collaborative. Conviction becomes transparent. Capital follows collective intelligence rather than replacing it.

Imagine a startup raising capital from 5,000 people instead of five venture capitalists. Each person may invest only $100, but that investment represents more than money - it represents a decision. Every investor is effectively saying, "Based on what I know, I believe this company deserves my capital." One opinion means little. Five thousand independent opinions, each backed by real financial commitment, become a powerful signal because they aggregate knowledge that no single investor or investment committee can possess alone.

Unlike a social media "like" or an online poll, every investment carries economic accountability. People become more thoughtful when their own money is involved. Over time, the network can measure who consistently identifies strong opportunities early, who performs meaningful due diligence, and whose judgments prove accurate. Those investors build reputation based on demonstrated outcomes rather than credentials or popularity.

As those reputations accumulate, the network itself becomes more intelligent. New investors don't simply follow the largest check - they can follow the people who have consistently demonstrated sound judgment. Founders gain access not only to capital but also to a distributed community of knowledgeable supporters whose collective experience often exceeds that of any single institution. Capital begins to flow toward opportunities identified by demonstrated intelligence rather than by the preferences of a small group of gatekeepers.

This doesn't mean a distributed network replaces angels or venture capital. It expands the market they serve. Most angels and venture funds invest after founders have demonstrated traction because concentrated capital requires concentrated confidence. A distributed network changes the economics. Thousands of people investing as little as $100 can collectively back founders at the idea stage because no single participant bears significant exposure. The network funds discovery. Traditional investors fund acceleration. Together, they create a capitalization system capable of financing innovation from its earliest ideas to its largest outcomes.

Have a great weekend -gerry

gerry@doriot.com

Delivered June 26, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Rain, 27⁰ C / 22⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• QAI Beta 1.0 is now live!

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

QAI Beta 1.0 is now live!

After months of development, I'm excited to announce that QAI Beta 1.0 is now live.

The Qualified Accredited Investor (QAI) Certification Program has officially moved from Alpha into Beta, and you can begin today at www.BeQAI.com.

The curriculum is free. The exams are free. You can create an account today and work through the material at your own pace. Whether you're an investor, founder, employee with stock options, or simply someone who wants to understand how wealth is created in the private markets, QAI was built for you.

Unlike most investment education, QAI doesn't focus on one narrow slice of venture capital. It covers the entire lifecycle of private capital formation—from startup creation and venture financing to ownership, governance, exits, and wealth creation. Our goal isn't simply to teach investing. It's to build financial sophistication around ownership itself.

I'm also excited to announce that Penn State Nittany Angels, has become the first angel group to officially adopt QAI as its educational curriculum and build a Venture Trust Network.

A Venture Trust Network is simple in concept but powerful in practice. Every participant has demonstrated a common level of financial sophistication by successfully completing the QAI certification. That shared foundation changes the conversation. Decisions become faster, collaboration becomes more productive, and capital moves at the speed of trust. Instead of spending meetings correcting misconceptions or debating basic venture mechanics, members begin with a common understanding of how the game actually works and can focus on what matters most: evaluating opportunities, helping founders, and building great companies together.

Imagine Reddit if everyone discussing venture capital had actually demonstrated expertise. Imagine conversations where opinions were backed by knowledge instead of headlines or bad experiences. Today, too many people dismiss venture investing because they got burned once or repeat advice they've heard without understanding the underlying mechanics. Fear spreads faster than education.

Everyone has an opinion. Certified knowledge separates informed judgment from uninformed advice. After all, who wants legal advice from someone who never passed the bar?

Today, more than 440 individuals have completed QAI certification during the Alpha program. We estimate the complete certification requires approximately 20–25 hours of study. It's a meaningful commitment, but one that pays dividends for the rest of your investing career.

Ironically, founders may need this education even more than investors.

Most founders believe the most important number in a financing round is valuation. It isn't.

Valuation is often little more than a vanity metric. Sophisticated investors know how to offer an attractive valuation while negotiating terms that determine who actually controls the company during difficult times and who captures the greatest value during a successful exit. Governance rights, liquidation preferences, dilution protection, option pools, board control—these are the mechanics that determine outcomes, yet many founders never learn them until after they've signed the documents.

Employees face a similar challenge. Millions receive stock options or equity compensation without fully understanding vesting schedules, exercise windows, tax implications, or liquidity events. Every year, people unknowingly leave significant wealth on the table simply because no one taught them how ownership actually works.

This is why I believe we're entering what I call the Ownership Economy.

For generations, labor was the primary path to financial security. Increasingly, ownership will become the primary path to wealth creation. As AI dramatically lowers the cost of building companies, entrepreneurship will become accessible to millions more people. That means millions more people will need to understand capital, equity, and ownership if they hope to participate in the wealth those companies create.

Some people will prepare themselves.

Others will learn these lessons only after making expensive mistakes.

As someone who has spent his career in education, I know most people don't wake up eager to study finance. Unfortunately, everyone eventually pays for a financial education. The only question is whether you pay with a few hours of learning today or by paying the Fool's Tax after making avoidable mistakes. One investment builds wealth. The other finances someone else's.

That's why QAI is free.

No subscriptions. No hidden fees. No expensive seminars. Just an opportunity to understand one of the most important financial shifts of our generation. At your own pace.

If you believe the Ownership Economy is coming, and you intend to participate rather than watch from the sidelines, I invite you to explore QAI.

Because understanding the rules of the game is the first step toward winning it.

Have a great weekend -gerry

gerry@doriot.com

Delivered June 19, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Sunny, 27⁰ C / 81⁰ F.

Happy Juneteenth. Juneteenth celebrates a huge step toward realizing the ideals upon which the nation was founded → “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Table of Contents

• Product Announcement Next Week

• RegCF Activation Requires Transparency

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

Product Announcement Next Week

I’m excited to share the next iteration of one of our education products next week.

I know, I know, the last thing people want is more education. But it is my firm belief that the economy is shifting away from labor and increasingly rewarding owners and capital allocators. This is a far more complicated terrain, but the upside of ownership as a wealth creation mechanism cannot be denied. If not for yourself, then for your children and grandchildren, understanding how capital works is becoming a necessity rather than a luxury.

RegCF Activation Requires Transparency

Last week, I talked about Regulation Crowdfunding needing an “Activation Layer” to bridge interested investors into actual investing. Education, confidence, tools, and guidance are all necessary if we want more people participating in venture investing. But activation alone is not enough. The second ingredient is trust. And trust requires transparency.

Let me provide a recent example.

I’m not going to name the company because that is not the point. I receive their newsletter and recently noticed they were raising capital through a RegCF offering. Naturally, I clicked through to evaluate the opportunity.

The presentation was polished. There were growth claims, market opportunity claims, customer metrics, attractive graphics, and all of the things one would expect from a modern startup fundraising campaign. The company was offering shares at $7.35 per share and investors could receive additional “bonus shares” based on how much they invested. Invest more money and receive more shares.

As I reviewed the offering, I found myself focusing on what was being emphasized: the share price and the bonus shares. What was missing was the information I actually cared about—ownership.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions in venture investing. A share price is not a valuation. A valuation is not ownership. And ownership is ultimately what investors are buying.

If I purchase a share for $7.35, I still need to understand what that share represents. Is it 0.0001% of the company? Is it 0.01% of the company? Does it vote? Does it sit behind preferred stock? Is it subject to future dilution? Does it participate equally in an acquisition? Without understanding ownership, the share price itself is almost meaningless.

So I downloaded the Form C.

My first objective was simple: determine how many shares were outstanding and calculate what percentage of the company investors were actually buying. Surprisingly, I could not easily answer that question. I attempted to reconstruct the capitalization structure using the disclosed share price, offering amount, and share counts that had been provided. The math appeared to suggest that the founders were selling nearly ninety percent of the company.

That immediately struck me as absurd.

No rational founder is selling ninety percent of their company in a Regulation Crowdfunding round. Something was clearly missing from the picture.

So I kept reading.

What I eventually discovered was that investors were purchasing Class B shares that would be held through a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV). The filing further disclosed that the Class B shares carried no voting rights. In other words, investors were purchasing a passive economic interest.

At that point, my questions multiplied.

If investors are purchasing non-voting Class B shares, where are the voting rights? Are there Class A shares? If so, how many exist and who owns them? Are they held by founders? Are there preferred shares outstanding? Are there SAFEs, convertible notes, warrants, or other securities that could dilute investors in the future? What claims on future cash flows exist ahead of the Class B shareholders? What does the fully diluted capitalization table actually look like?

These are not obscure questions. These are the first questions any venture capitalist asks before making an investment.

In fact, I would argue that the quality of the business opportunity is secondary to understanding the capitalization structure. I don't care how exciting the product is. I don't care how large the market is. I don't care how compelling the growth story sounds. If I cannot understand the capitalization table, I cannot value the opportunity.

The deal may be economically attractive. The deal may be economically terrible. Without understanding ownership, I have no way of knowing.

No venture capitalist in the world invests without confirming every claim to equity on the capitalization table. No sophisticated angel investor writes a check without understanding ownership, governance, control rights, dilution risk, and liquidation preferences. Yet retail investors are routinely expected to make decisions based on share prices, bonus shares, marketing materials, and simplified narratives about future growth.

That is not democratization. That is oversimplification.

For RegCF founders - and to some degree the platforms themselves - transparency creates trust and capital follows trust. This is not an SEC issue. This is a business issue. The objective should not be merely satisfying disclosure requirements. The objective should be helping investors understand what they are buying.

Every offering should clearly disclose the capitalization structure, ownership percentages, voting rights, liquidation preferences, option pools, SAFEs, convertible securities, and fully diluted ownership. Not because regulators require it, but because investors deserve it.

I continue to view Regulation Crowdfunding as Internet 1.0. The early internet created access, but it lacked sophistication. Eventually better infrastructure emerged, better user experiences emerged, and better trust mechanisms emerged. The same thing will happen here.

The current model of raising money from the general public while reducing the conversation to share prices and bonus shares is ultimately an obsolete model. In its worst form, it creates an environment where marketing receives more attention than ownership and where investors are encouraged to focus on opportunity before understanding economics.

That is backwards.

The future of Regulation Crowdfunding will not be built solely on activation. It will be built on activation, trust, and, ultimately, liquidity (but that’s for a different post). The next generation of venture investing infrastructure will allow investors to understand exactly what they are buying, who owns what, how control is structured, where they sit in the capital stack, and what outcomes are required for them to generate returns.

When trust increases, participation increases. When participation increases, capital formation improves. And when capital formation improves, Regulation Crowdfunding may finally begin to achieve the vision that inspired it in the first place.

Retail investors are not stupid. They deserve real financials. They deserve real capitalization tables. They deserve to know who owns what. And they deserve to understand exactly what they are buying before they invest.

Have a great weekend -gerry

gerry@doriot.com

Delivered June 12, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Sunny, 30⁰ C / 87⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• SpaceX goes public

• Reg CF Solved Access. Now We Need Activation.

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

SpaceX goes public

Today is a historic day for the capital markets.

SpaceX raised $88 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation and finished its first day of trading up 19%, making it more valuable than Tesla.

As a result, Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire—at least on paper. To put that into perspective, a trillion is one million multiplied by one million.

The IPO also created thousands of new millionaires, again on paper, reinforcing a theme I've written about often: capital is playing an increasingly outsized role in wealth creation relative to labor. The largest fortunes of our era are not being created through wages and salaries. They are being created through ownership.

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk's impact on business, technology, and capital markets is impossible to deny. Few entrepreneurs have built companies at this scale across so many industries, and today's milestone cements his place in business history.

Now begins the next chapter. Will SpaceX ultimately justify this valuation? Will it exceed expectations? Those questions will be answered over the coming decades.

For today, congratulations to everyone who took the early risk, contributed to the mission, and helped build one of the most extraordinary companies of our time.

Reg CF Solved Access. Now We Need Activation.

This week, KingsCrowd published data showing that May was the weakest month for Regulation Crowdfunding since 2021. Total capital raised declined significantly, breakout campaigns were scarce, and activity across much of the ecosystem appeared noticeably thinner. While there are always month-to-month explanations for market movements, the broader trend raises an important question: why does retail venture continue to feel fragile despite having more access, more platforms, and more awareness than ever before?

Most industry participants immediately look toward regulation for answers. Some argue that investment limits are too restrictive. Others point to disclosure requirements, compliance costs, or market conditions.

I think we may be asking the wrong question.

Over the past decade, Regulation Crowdfunding accomplished something remarkable. It opened the door for everyday investors to participate in private markets. Prior to the JOBS Act, venture investing was largely reserved for accredited investors, institutions, and industry insiders. Reg CF fundamentally changed that.

But opening a door and building a market are not the same thing.

The internet offers a useful analogy. The early internet wasn't a failure. It was simply the first version. Over time, new layers emerged that made the ecosystem more useful, more accessible, and more valuable. Search engines helped people discover information. Social networks helped people connect. Mobile devices changed how people interacted with the web. Entire industries emerged on top of the original infrastructure.

Retail venture may be entering a similar phase of evolution.

I increasingly believe the challenge is not access. The challenge is activation.

To understand why, it helps to think about how venture capital has historically worked. Venture investing has never really been about transactions. It has been about networks. Angel groups, venture firms, accelerators, founder communities, university ecosystems, and professional networks all play an important role in helping people discover opportunities, develop judgment, and build conviction before capital is ever invested.

The problem is that these activation systems were built for relatively small groups of participants. They work well when the audience consists of founders, operators, angels, and accredited investors. They do not naturally scale to tens of millions of people.

Reg CF changed that equation.

For the first time, private market investing became accessible to ordinary investors at scale. Suddenly, the potential audience wasn't a few hundred thousand angels and venture capitalists. It was millions of people who were interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, and wealth creation. People who understood that some of the greatest wealth creation events in history occur long before a company reaches the public markets. (See SpaceX above)

Many of these individuals have probably said the same thing at some point:

"I wish I could have gotten in at the very beginning."

The industry often interprets that statement as investment demand. I think it is better understood as activation demand.

There is a significant difference between being interested in venture and being prepared to participate in venture. One is curiosity. The other requires education, experience, confidence, and community. Traditional venture ecosystems create those outcomes through networks. Retail venture still lacks a scalable mechanism to do the same thing.

That is why I increasingly think about venture as four layers.

The first layer is Venture Interest. This is where people become fascinated by innovation and emerging companies.

The second layer is Venture Activation. This is where individuals learn how venture works, discover founders, evaluate opportunities, and develop the judgment necessary to participate intelligently.

The third layer is Venture Investing. This is where capital is allocated through angel investing, venture funds, Regulation Crowdfunding, Regulation A+, and other investment structures.

The fourth layer is Venture Liquidity, where value is ultimately realized through acquisitions, secondary markets, and public offerings.

What strikes me about the current retail venture ecosystem is how much attention we devote to the third layer while largely ignoring the second.

In many ways, this is exactly where the internet found itself decades ago. Access existed, but the supporting layers had not yet been built. Search, social, mobile, and cloud computing ultimately expanded the market by making participation easier and more valuable. They transformed passive users into active participants.

Retail venture may need a similar evolution.

At Doriot, we believe there is a missing layer between passive retail interest and venture investing. We call that layer Venture Activation. The idea behind VentureStaking® is not to replace venture investing. It is to create a pathway that helps people develop conviction, build judgment, and participate in innovation before they commit capital.

If that thesis is correct, then the future growth of retail venture may not come from more platforms or more offerings. It may come from activating millions of people who are already interested but have never been given a structured way to participate.

Reg CF solved the access problem. The next chapter of retail venture may be solving the activation problem.

Have a great weekend -gerry

gerry@doriot.com

Delivered June 5, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Sunny, 28⁰ C / 83⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• The New Rules of Wealth

• Capital Is Winning

• AI Accelerates the Shift

• Dollar Debasement Punishes the Saver

• The Blur Between Worker and Owner

• The Democratization Opportunity

• The New Formula

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The New Rules of Wealth

For generations, the formula for a good life was simple:

Go to school. Get skills. Work hard. Buy a house. Earn more. Save along the way.

Labor and savings were the undisputed path to prosperity. Today, that formula is becoming less robust for younger generations.

Across the global economy, wealth is aggressively shifting away from labor and flowing directly to capital - to those who own businesses, software, intellectual property, and financial assets. This isn't a temporary market cycle; it is the defining economic reality of our time.

The question is no longer just how hard you work.

The question is what you own.

Capital Is Winning

The data tells a clear story of a decades-long shift. In 1980, labor captured roughly 58% of economic income. Today, that share has fallen dramatically while corporate profits have surged.

The catalysts are familiar, but their compounding effect is unprecedented:

• Automation systematically replaced routine labor.

• Globalization hyper-commodified the workforce.

• Software scaled dramatically faster than organizations could hire.

Look at the shift in corporate architecture. In the 1980s, IBM was a global titan employing hundreds of thousands of people. Today, Nvidia is worth many times what IBM ever was, yet it operates with a fraction of the workforce.

The modern economy rewards leverage, and the ultimate form of leverage is ownership.

AI Accelerates the Shift

Historically, technology automated muscle. AI automates mind. Tasks that once required entire teams of analysts, marketers, lawyers, and programmers are now being executed by software in seconds.

This doesn’t mean human beings become obsolete. It means a fraction of the people can now create an exponential amount of value.

But here is the catch: that value doesn't automatically trickle down to workers. It concentrates at the source—flowing directly to whoever owns the systems, data, and intellectual property.

Capital scales. Labor remains bound by the clock.

Dollar Debasement Punishes the Saver

And while AI devalues your future hours worked, currency debasement melts away your past hours saved.

The structural necessity of printing trillions of dollars to fund government deficits, conflicts, and mounting interest payments means the purchasing power of cash is continually eroded.

When savers lose 3% to 5% of their money's value every year to inflation, a low-risk, conservative cash strategy increasingly becomes a guaranteed financial loss.

For decades, Americans could rely on hard work and disciplined saving to build wealth. Today, simply saving dollars is often not enough. Assets appreciate. Cash depreciates.

The Blur Between Worker and Owner

This doesn't render labor irrelevant. Skills, execution, and relationships still matter immensely. And we all need to continue investing in new skills to remain relevant.

In fact, the highest-performing workers already understand this—they don't act like employees; they act like owners. They leverage technology, build audiences, and demand equity.

The line between labor and capital is blurring. The most valuable talent is paid in equity, not just salaries. Founders and early employees don't build wealth because they work 24 hours a day; they build wealth because they own a piece of the engine.

Look at private tech giants like SpaceX. Their recurring internal stock sales have minted thousands of employee millionaires entirely in the private market.

By the time a company like that ever opens to the public, much of the life-changing wealth has already been created. Retail investors buying stock on day one of a public listing rarely see those explosive, trajectory-altering returns.

The message is clear: the economy increasingly rewards two groups — those who invest in the engine early, and those whose labor is valuable enough to earn a piece of it from the inside.

The Democratization Opportunity

For generations, ownership was a closed club. Venture capital was reserved for institutions. Private equity was gate-kept by insiders. The vast majority of people had no choice but to participate through labor alone.

That gate is finally beginning to break.

Thanks to technology, crowdfunding, and shifting regulations, access to private markets and asset ownership is opening up to the public. This isn't just a trend; it's one of the most important financial developments of our era.

But most people were never taught how modern ownership works.

And it isn't a free market if you don't understand the game.

This is where education becomes critically important.

If capital is capturing the lion's share of economic value, then broadening access to ownership may become one of the most important drivers of economic mobility. The goal isn't to replace labor. It's to pair labor with ownership.

The New Formula

The old playbook is still there:

Skills → Job → Income

But adding the new playbook is becoming mandatory:

Skills → Ownership → Wealth

Work remains essential, but work alone is no longer enough. The people who thrive in the coming decades won't just trade hours for income. They will accumulate assets, invest in businesses, and capture a piece of the value they help create.

This is the ultimate financial lesson of the AI era.

For those of you at the end of your careers, you are on the other side of this transition. But your children and grandchildren are increasingly going to face the reality of it. They will need the skills, confidence, and access to participate in an economy where ownership matters more than ever before.

In the 20th century, economic mobility was primarily driven by earning power.

In the 21st century, it will increasingly be driven by ownership.

Understanding that shift—and helping the next generation participate in it—may be one of the most important investments we ever make.

Have a great weekend -gerry

gerry@doriot.com

Delivered May 29, 2026 @ 5:22pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Blue Skies, 27⁰ C / 80⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• The Next Layer in Venture: Activation

  • Venture's Missing Farm System

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The Next Layer in Venture: Activation

For the past fifteen years, venture infrastructure companies have been building the machinery of capital formation — syndicates, SPVs, rolling funds, crowdfunding vehicles, and fund administration platforms. Each iteration reduced the friction between investors with capital and entrepreneurs with opportunity.

This infrastructure was genuinely difficult to build. It required lawyers, engineers, regulators, and a tolerance for administrative complexity that most people do not possess. Call it the Transaction Layer.

The Transaction Layer exists to solve a single problem: how do we move capital toward opportunity efficiently? For most of venture's history, that was the frontier.

Today that frontier is approaching maturity, and AI is only accelerating it. The clearest recent example is Wefunder announcing Syndicates, a new product for Reg D raises. The significance isn't the product itself — it's who shipped it. When the #1 community platform can offer the same accredited-investor structure that was once the specialized domain of AngelList, it tells you the infrastructure has commoditized. The hard thing has become a product almost anyone can ship. That is what a mature layer looks like.

And while the pipes have been built to move capital efficiently and in compliance with securities regulations, almost no infrastructure exists for developing the people who will ultimately deploy that capital, build companies, or allocate resources.

• No place to test judgment before risking capital.

• No place to develop conviction before making consequential decisions.

• No place to discover whether someone possesses the instincts required to become a founder, investor, or allocator.

That is the missing layer. Call it the Activation Layer.

Venture's Missing Farm System

Every important industry eventually reaches this point. First it builds access. Then it builds efficiency. Eventually it builds participants.

• Professional sports needs more than stadiums; it relies on AAU, high school, collegiate athletics, and developmental leagues.

• Medicine needs more than hospitals; it relies on medical schools, clinical rotations, residencies, and fellowships.

• Aviation needs more than aircraft; it relies on flight schools, simulators, certifications, and thousands of hours of supervised training.

• Even corporate America leans on universities to serve as its training and feeder system.

Venture has never built this systematically. Instead, it asks people to arrive fully formed — become a founder, write the first angel check, raise the first fund, make decisions under uncertainty, risk capital, lead organizations, allocate resources — without ever offering a place to practice first.

The result is not that it screens out unqualified players. It screens out tens of thousands of undiscovered ones.

And this may finally be the moment to fix it. The same AI that is commoditizing the Transaction Layer is what could make an Activation Layer buildable for the first time — a place to accumulate reps, face real judgment calls, and develop conviction long before a dollar is ever at risk. We have spent fifteen years perfecting how capital moves. The next frontier is developing the people who will move it.

That is the opportunity.

Have a great weekend -gerry

gerry@doriot.com

Delivered May 8, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Sunny, 23⁰ C / 75⁰ F.

It’s graduation week for most universities.

To the students: congratulations on making it through four years of hard work, late nights, pressure, and growth.

And to all the parents who supported them every step of the way — financially, emotionally, and mentally — well done. This milestone belongs to you too.

Table of Contents

• The Clarity Act is not about Crypto. It’s about fi …

• Enter stablecoins.

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The Clarity Act is not about Crypto. It’s about financing America.

Everyone is framing stablecoin legislation as “Washington finally embracing crypto.” But if you zoom out, something much bigger is happening. The U.S. government has a structural financing problem.

• Deficits continue exploding higher.

• Interest expense is becoming one of the largest line items in the federal budget.

• And Treasury issuance keeps accelerating.

The machine only works if someone keeps buying the debt.

Historically, foreign governments played that role. China recycled massive trade surpluses into U.S. Treasuries. Japan absorbed enormous amounts of American debt. Foreign central banks helped fund and stabilize the dollar system for decades. In many ways, U.S. global dominance was built on its ability to export dollars abroad and have the rest of the world recycle those dollars back into U.S. debt markets.

But that dynamic has been changing for years.

China’s Treasury holdings peaked around $1.3 trillion in 2013 and have fallen substantially since then. Foreign ownership as a percentage of total U.S. debt has also declined as Treasury issuance exploded faster than external demand.

At the same time, central banks around the world have been increasing gold purchases and slowly diversifying reserves away from pure dollar exposure.

That doesn’t mean the dollar is collapsing. But it does mean Washington needs new buyers.

Enter stablecoins.

This is where the story gets interesting. Most people still think of Tether and Circle as crypto companies. They’re not.

They are rapidly becoming some of the largest buyers and distributors of short-duration U.S. government debt in the world.

According to the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee presentation released in April 2025, stablecoin issuers are already estimated to hold more than $120 billion in U.S. Treasury bills.

And Treasury is openly discussing what happens if stablecoins grow to $2 trillion in market cap over the next several years.

Why?

Because every stablecoin minted requires reserves.

And under proposed legislation like the GENIUS Act, those reserves must largely be held in:

• U.S. Treasury bills

• Reverse repos

• Cash equivalents

• Government money market funds

In other words:

Stablecoin adoption creates structural demand for U.S. debt.

That’s not speculation anymore.
That’s literally how the system is being designed.

The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee even states directly that:

And more importantly:

In other words, the U.S. government is now openly modeling stablecoin growth as a future source of Treasury demand. That is an extraordinary development.

Because this changes the role crypto plays in the global financial system. For years, crypto was viewed as a potential threat to dollar dominance. Now it increasingly looks like the opposite.

Stablecoins may become the next evolution of the eurodollar system.

Except instead of offshore banks distributing dollars globally, blockchain networks distribute synthetic digital dollars backed by U.S. Treasuries.

That’s a massive shift.

Every wallet holding USDC or USDT effectively becomes an indirect holder of U.S. government debt.

Every emerging market citizen using stablecoins to escape local currency debasement increases global demand for dollar-backed assets.

Every cross-border stablecoin transaction extends the reach of the U.S. monetary system without requiring the traditional banking rails.

That’s why stablecoin regulation suddenly became bipartisan. Washington doesn’t just want to regulate stablecoins. It wants to integrate them into the financial plumbing of the dollar system.

And honestly, what choice does the US have if it wants to continue to export US Dollars to the world? If sovereign buyers are slowing while deficits continue expanding, the Treasury needs an alternative distribution mechanism.

Stablecoins solve multiple problems simultaneously:

• They expand global dollar access

• They increase demand for short-duration Treasuries

• They reinforce dollar dominance online

• They create programmable settlement infrastructure

• And they do all of this through private-sector balance sheets instead of central banks

That last part matters. Because what we’re witnessing may be the privatization of dollar distribution. Not through banks. Not through governments. But through internet-native financial networks.

The irony is incredible.

Crypto was originally designed to escape the traditional monetary system.

Instead, stablecoins may become one of the most important tools for extending the lifespan of that system.

The CLARITY Act is not just crypto legislation.

It’s the beginning of a new Treasury distribution architecture.

And most people still think this is only about digital assets.

Have a great weekend - Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered April 17, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Sunny, 27⁰ C / 80⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• The “Consumerization” of Wealth

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The “Consumerization” of Wealth

When I graduated from college in the 1990s, my friends and I were focused on one thing: owning a home.

Earning less than $50,000 between us, my wife and I meal-prepped, rarely ate out, and even skipped cable just to save for a down payment. Within a year of getting married, we bought our first home in Broad Ripple, a hip suburb of Indianapolis. It wasn’t complicated - it just required discipline and an actual pathway to an “obtainable financial goal”.

At the time, there weren’t many ways to “shortcut” wealth. Outside of a trip to Nevada or New Jersey, the lottery was about as close as it got. Over a decade, I doubt we spent more than a couple hundred dollars on it.

Fast forward 30 years, and the landscape looks very different.

Today, many young people don’t believe homeownership is attainable - and in many markets, that belief isn’t irrational. Prices for starter homes have risen significantly, interest rates remain elevated, and even the cost of insuring a home is becoming more unpredictable. At the same time, institutional buyers have increased their presence in parts of the housing market, adding another layer of competition.

When a foundational path to wealth feels out of reach, behavior starts to change.

Recent research suggests that individuals who feel “locked out” of long-term wealth-building opportunities often shift toward short-term outcomes - spending more, saving less, and in some cases, taking on higher-risk financial bets.

That shows up in different ways:

• speculative trading in stocks and crypto

• rapid growth in prediction markets

• increased normalization of “high-risk, high-reward” thinking

But not all risk is created equal.

While most forms of speculative behavior tend to produce negative outcomes over time - an estimated 85% of gamblers lose money across their lifetime - there are forms of high-risk investing that reward discipline and diversification. Historically, venture portfolios built with broad exposure have produced 15–25% returns over long time horizons.

To be clear, I’m not judging anyone. These behaviors aren’t irrational in isolation. If the traditional path feels closed, betting on a life-changing outcome can start to feel like the only path left. The problem isn’t that people are willing to take risks - it’s that the system is pushing them toward outcomes that reward immediacy over discipline.

Layer in social media - where success is constantly visible and often exaggerated - and the pressure intensifies. The result is a system where many are chasing outcomes that only a small percentage will ever realize.

In short, we’re conditioning our young people from cultivating wealth to consuming it in pursuit of an instantaneous breakthrough moment.

And yet, when you look at how long-term wealth is actually built, the pattern hasn’t changed much:

• ownership in real assets

• building companies; and

• investing in those who build

All three activities require the same discipline: delayed gratification.

This is why I care about democratizing venture investing to non-accredited investors.

If homeownership is delayed or inaccessible, then participation in innovation becomes even more important. Not as a gamble - but as a structured way to engage with value creation and have a pathway to cultivate wealth.

The challenge, especially in the United States, is that many people have been conditioned to observe entrepreneurship rather than participate in it. Venture investing is often seen as opaque, risky, or reserved for insiders — and in many ways, it has been built that way.

As Peter Thiel once said, “competition is for losers.” The most successful investors understand the value of access, information, and proximity - and those advantages tend to reinforce themselves over time.

As a result, venture remains largely concentrated among a relatively small group of participants, not necessarily because of a coordinated effort to exclude others, but because the system has historically rewarded those already inside it.

Meanwhile, platforms that encourage short-term, high-risk financial behavior continue to grow - because they are simple, accessible, and emotionally compelling.

In effect, we’re making it easier to consume wealth than to build it - a shift that doesn’t bode well for the long-term health of the United States.

And there is a compelling venture impact opportunity here. Whoever can flip people from speculating on events to speculating on entrepreneurs - and turn long-term investing into something people actually aspire to - will build a very valuable company and be a part of the solution to a financially healthier society.

Have a great weekend - Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered April 10, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Overcast & Balmy, 23⁰ C / 73⁰ F.

Table of Contents

• Upcoming Event Alert

• How do we make money and what do we do with our ti …

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

Upcoming Event Alert

Investment Crowdfunding Week 2026 kicks off next week 🚀

Hosted by my friends at Kingscrowd, this year’s event is shaping up to deliver twice the impact of last year - and 2025 set a high bar.

If you’re curious about how innovative companies are building with their communities - and how you can get involved - I highly recommend signing up (it’s free).

I’ll also be co-moderating one of the pitch sessions on Tuesday @ 3:00pm ET. Hope to see you there!

How do we make money and what do we do with our time?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about AI and the future of venture. I think it’s going to radically reshape what it means to be an entrepreneur and what it means to be an investor. But underneath all of that, when I think about problems that need to be solved, I believe it comes down to two fundamental questions:

1) How do we make money?; and

2) What do we do with our time?

Here’s my thinking:

For most of modern history, those questions have been answered for us. We were placed into a system built around a simple loop: people work, people earn, and people consume. From an early age, we are trained into it - school as preparation for work, work as the mechanism for income, income as the fuel for consumption.

Over time, consumption became just as important as labor. Entire industries evolved to encourage it, shape it, and accelerate it. Access to easy credit made it possible to spend beyond immediate means, keeping the system expanding even as underlying conditions shifted. The result is an economy built not just on production, but on continuous consumption.

That system works as long as the loop holds.

AI begins to break that loop.

If a growing share of economically valuable work can be done by machines, then the link between labor and income weakens. Fewer people are required to produce the same output. Entire categories of work compress. And if that happens, a very simple question emerges that we don’t yet have a clear answer to:

Who is the consumer in a world where fewer people are required to work?

At the same time, something else is happening - something more subtle, but equally important.

When the requirement to work weakens, people do not automatically redirect their time toward meaningful or creative pursuits. In many cases, the opposite happens. Time shifts toward passive consumption and speculative activity. Watching instead of building. Betting instead of creating. Endless scrolling, day trading, sports betting, prediction markets - systems that offer stimulation and the promise of reward, but are largely disconnected from the creation of real value.

This is not a moral failure. It is a structural outcome. In the absence of direction, people gravitate toward what is easiest, most available, and most immediately rewarding.

Which means the real risk is not just economic disruption. It is drift. A world where human potential is not elevated, but diluted—spread across distraction and speculation.

But this is not the only path.

If AI reduces the need for human execution, it also changes where human value sits. The constraint is no longer the ability to do the work. It is the ability to decide what work is worth doing.

That is where entrepreneurship comes in.

Not entrepreneurship as it has traditionally been framed—building large organizations, raising capital, scaling headcount - but something more fundamental. The act of seeing something about the world that others do not, and organizing resources to bring a solution into existence.

In that sense, entrepreneurship is not going away. It becomes more important.

If execution becomes abundant, then advantage shifts to judgment, to understanding human behavior, to earning trust, to building distribution, and to creating things that people actually care about.

AI, in this context, is not the enemy. It is leverage. It allows individuals and small teams to execute at a level that previously required entire organizations. It lowers the cost of experimentation. It makes it possible to move from idea to reality faster than ever before.

Which means the path forward is not to resist the shift, but to invent within it.

And this is not something that will be solved by Silicon Valley alone. It is not Wall Street’s job to figure out. It is not Washington’s job to define for us.

It is ours.

We are going to have to become owners, not just participants. Capital allocators, not just consumers and watchers. We will need to support and empower the small percentage of people who can see what comes next - those with the vision and courage to build new systems, but who need capital, trust, and collective backing to bridge from the current reality to a new one.

This is not just about making money.

It is about building a new model for how we live, how we create, and how we participate in the world.

The questions remain the same.

How do we make money?

And what do we do with our time?

But the answers will not be given to us.

We will have to create them.

Have a great weekend - Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered April 3, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Partly Sunny, 26⁰ C / 78⁰ F. Good Friday.
Happy Easter this weekend.

Table of Contents

• The new moat in venture investing

  • It’s community and distribution.

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The new moat in venture investing

I was on a call with a prominent angel investor in a major Midwest city. It wasn’t the content of the conversation that stuck with me. It was the tone.

At one point, they said they were getting “very defensive.” Not because I was being aggressive, but because what I was suggesting didn’t match their lived experience.

And I get that. If you’ve made money in venture over the last 20 years, the playbook worked.

1. Find SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies.

2. Back strong teams.

3. Wait for traction.

4. Rinse and repeat.

But you can’t look at the past of venture and assume the future will behave the same way.

Because software is going to zero, you don’t need massive engineering teams. You don’t need to raise millions just to build something. The old advantages - technical complexity, capital to hire developers, time to ship - start to disappear.

So the question becomes, what’s the moat?

It’s not code. And, ultimately, I don’t believe its Agents (unless you’re operating on proprietary data that nobody else has). OpenAI, Anthropic, open source — it’s all converging. The gap closes. Capabilities spread. It’s like operating on rented land.

So what is it?

It’s community and distribution.

Who has real attention? Who has real human trust. Who can move people? That’s the game now. And the uncomfortable truth is you can’t buy that early.

Most venture investors - let’s just be honest - only invest in traction. I’d argue 98.5% of investors are not willing to join a founder at the starting line.

So who builds the community? Who creates the distribution? Who generates the early signal? The founder. Alone.

Or we change the game.

This is where the conversation turned.

I suggested something simple.

What’s more valuable?

Twenty $50K checks…

or 10,000 people with $100 each in the same deal — whether through an SPV today or equity tokens tomorrow?

That’s not just capital.

That’s distribution.
That’s community.
That’s signal.

And that’s where things got defensive.

Because in the traditional model, the value comes from the check writers. And that has been true. But I don’t believe we’re playing that same game anymore.

And before someone says it can’t work, the rules already exist. Through Regulation Crowdfunding, we can legally facilitate democratized venture rounds.

But, we still need a bridge to venture. A way for people to learn by participating. Where capital is deployed in small amounts up front, almost like an ante bet in poker. Where discovery comes before investing, and community is built before traction.

Not throwing money into a black hole of a cap table and hoping it works.

Something different. Collectively discover, confirm, then make the seed bet.

A system that actually feels winnable. Something that operates more like a prediction market, but not in the sense of I win, you lose. More like we’re early together, and we either get it right together or we don’t.

Because that changes behavior. People pay attention. They engage. They learn. And over time, they get better.

I’ve been teaching the younger generations for 22 years and they don’t just want returns. They want proximity. Proximity to opportunity, to innovation, to what’s next.

And whether people realize it or not, venture has always been about proximity.

Wealth follows innovation. And the only way to be in proximity to wealth is to be in proximity to innovation.

So what’s the missing layer in Venture that the “non-traditional” angel investors can fill?

It’s Discovery.

Traditional angels don’t fund discovery. They wait for sure bets (well as sure as a bet as possible).

But what if the next generation doesn’t? And what if there is a system that allows a new generation of investors to take 90% less risk up front but get rewarded over the Angel and Seed Investors that want to wait for the “sure thing”? Where “calculated risk-taking” is more valuable than check size?

That’s the moat. Being in proximity before the world sees opportunity.

We’ve put together a 21-day Discovery program if you want to learn how to build that muscle. But whether you join or not, this shift is happening.

AI is here.

The old playbook isn’t.

Have a great weekend - Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered “Friday the March 13”, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Clearwater, FL (on Spring Break) - Overcast, 25⁰ C / 79⁰ F

Table of Contents

• Wealth Follows Innovation — But Proximity Determin …

  • The Proximity Problem

  • Proximity Is No Longer Just Physical

  • Why This Matters for Younger Generations

  • Moving Toward the Frontier

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

Wealth Follows Innovation — But Proximity Determines Who Benefits

There is a pattern that shows up again and again in history:

Wealth follows innovation.

Not speculation.
Not credentials.
Not even effort alone.

When new technology, new systems, or new ways of organizing the world emerge, value is created - and those closest to the innovation capture most of that value.

The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth around manufacturing.
The computer revolution created wealth around software.
The internet created entirely new industries.

Today we are watching the early stages of another wave driven by artificial intelligence, automation, and new digital infrastructure.

But there is a hidden rule behind all of these shifts.

Innovation creates wealth, but proximity to innovation determines who benefits.

The Proximity Problem

For previous generations, proximity often meant geography.

If you wanted to be part of the tech revolution, you moved to Silicon Valley.
If you wanted to be part of finance, you moved to New York.
If you wanted to work in entertainment, you moved to Los Angeles.

Opportunity clustered around physical hubs.

Today the world is more connected than ever - but proximity to innovation is still surprisingly difficult.

Young people face several barriers:

• Traditional education systems move slowly
• Corporate career paths reward stability rather than experimentation
• Many institutions are built to preserve the past rather than create the future

As a result, many talented people spend years far from the frontier where new ideas are being built.

Proximity Is No Longer Just Physical

The good news is that proximity to innovation is changing.

Today it can mean being connected to:

• startup communities
• open-source projects
• emerging technologies
• builders who are experimenting and launching new ideas

You don’t always need to move across the country.

But you do need to move toward the builders.

Proximity today is intellectual, digital, and social.

It means spending time where new ideas are tested, debated, and built.

Why This Matters for Younger Generations

The early years of a career are incredibly important - not because of the job title, but because of what environment you are exposed to.

Exposure to innovation accelerates learning.

You see:

• problems before the rest of the world notices them
• tools before they become mainstream
• opportunities before they become obvious

This compounds over time.

The people who end up building the future are usually the ones who spent the most time near the frontier.

Moving Toward the Frontier

For young people today, the question is simple:

How do I move closer to innovation?

Some ways to do that include:

• joining early-stage startups
• participating in open-source communities
• building small projects with new technologies
• surrounding yourself with builders rather than spectators

The goal is not to chase hype.

The goal is to be present where new things are being created.

Because over time, the pattern continues to hold:

Innovation creates the future.
And those closest to it shape—and share in—the wealth it generates.

Our answer is to build a Discovery Network - a place where innovators bring bold ideas and thousands of curious minds gather to discover, evaluate, and support them.

The game is called VentureStaking®.

— Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered March 6, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Not a cloud in the sky, 18⁰ C / 64⁰ F

Table of Contents

• Software is Going to Zero

• The Cost Curve Is Collapsing

• The Gatekeeper Era Is Over

• Enter the Venture Discoverer

• What a Venture Discoverer Does

• The Vision

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

Software is Going to Zero

In 2013, Marc Andreessen laid out a thesis that "Software will eat the world."

He was right.

Over the past decade, trillions of dollars of wealth were created by companies that built software to create entirely new industries and streamline existing ones. Billions of venture dollars poured into this movement, and it proved extremely lucrative.

Software also created something investors love: stickiness and defensible moats. If a company built the software, competitors simply couldn't recreate it easily. Years of engineering work, proprietary codebases, millions in accumulated technical debt that kept the drawbridge up — that was the game. Build it, own it, defend it.

But today, something new is happening.

AI — and increasingly agentic AI — is beginning to eat software itself. Having spent 600 hours working with agentic coding, there is no doubt in my mind that we are on the precipice of a major tectonic shift in venture.

The Cost Curve Is Collapsing

Think about what it took to build a SaaS (Software as a Service) product five years ago. You needed a founding team with at least one strong engineer, probably two or three. You needed months to build an MVP. You needed runway — usually $500K to $1M just to get to something shippable.

That was the entry fee.

Today, that fee is evaporating.

A solo founder with a clear vision can now do in a weekend what used to take a team a quarter. AI tools are generating production-quality code, writing tests, debugging errors, and architecting entire systems — in real time, on demand. Agentic frameworks are going further: planning features, writing them, testing them, and deploying them with minimal human intervention.

This isn't theoretical. Founders are already shipping:

• Full-stack web apps built in days by a single person handling product, design, and code simultaneously.

• Internal tools that used to require a dedicated engineering hire, now spun up by operations teams with no coding background.

• Niche SaaS products targeting specific industries — legal, healthcare, logistics — built by domain experts who finally have the tools to match their knowledge.

The pattern is the same everywhere: people who deeply understand a problem are no longer blocked by their inability to build the solution.

When the cost of software approaches zero — and the number of people needed to run a company drops dramatically — something inevitable happens:

Entrepreneurship explodes.

The Gatekeeper Era Is Over

For decades, Silicon Valley acted as the gatekeeper to the entrepreneurial economy. You needed to be in the room. You needed the network, the warm intro, the Sand Hill Road meeting. Capital was concentrated. Talent was concentrated. The tools to build were expensive and required years of training.

That geography created a filter. Most of the world's best ideas — and most of the world's best founders — never made it through.

Some people in the technology industry are trying to slow this narrative down. They say the change is exaggerated, or that it will take decades. Denying this reality is as naïve as believing viruses cannot cross geographic borders.

Reality moves faster than expectations.

The next great company might be built by a nurse in Nashville who understands healthcare workflows better than any Stanford CS grad. A logistics operator in Indianapolis who has watched the same inefficiency play out for twenty years and finally has the tools to fix it. A teacher in rural Texas who sees exactly what students need and can now build it herself.

These are not hypothetical profiles. They are the next wave. They always were — they just lacked the tools.

And when startups explode, opportunity explodes with them.

Enter the Venture Discoverer

Here's what most people are missing in this conversation: the opportunity isn't just for founders.

It's for the people around them.

The old venture model required institutions. Sand Hill Road existed because discovering and funding great founders demanded proximity, pattern recognition built over decades, and enough capital to absorb the inevitable failures. The process was centralized by necessity.

But what if discovery itself is about to be decentralized?

Think about who actually has early access to the next generation of great founders — before the institutions do. It's not the partners at Sequoia. It's the people who share a hometown, a diaspora, an alumni network, or a community with those founders.

The Nigerian community in London. The Indian alumni network of a mid-tier state university. The former colleagues of someone who just left a corporate job to build. The Discord moderator of a niche professional community where a founder is solving a problem no one else has noticed yet.

These people have something no institutional investor can buy: trusted proximity.

That's the foundation of a new kind of investor — the Venture Discoverer.

What a Venture Discoverer Does

A Venture Discoverer isn't just an angel investor with a smaller check. The model is fundamentally different.

Traditional venture is about pattern-matching against proven signals: the Stanford pedigree, the prior exit, the hot market. Venture Discoverers operate on a different signal entirely — deep community knowledge. They know which people in their network are brilliant, hungry, and underestimated. They've watched them operate for years. They understand their domain, their work ethic, their character.

And beyond capital, they bring two things that matter enormously at the earliest stage:

Belief. The first investor in any founder's journey doesn't just provide money — they provide social proof. They say publicly: I've seen this person, and I'm betting on them. In communities where that kind of validation has historically been hard to find, it's transformative.

Distribution. A Venture Discoverer embedded in a diaspora, an alumni network, or a professional community has organic reach to exactly the people a founder needs most: early customers, early hires, early advocates. That's not a small thing. That's often the difference between a startup that gains traction and one that doesn't.

The best Venture Discoverers won't be competing with institutional VCs for the same deals. They'll be finding founders that institutional VCs will never see — until it's too late to get in early.

The Vision

Imagine a world where every major diaspora has its own network of Venture Discoverers actively backing founders from within it. Where every mid-sized city has a community of locals who invest in the builders among them. Where alumni networks don't just facilitate job placements but seed the next generation of companies.

This isn't charity. It isn't altruism dressed up as investing. It's a genuine edge.

The founders coming out of these communities are building for markets they understand intimately. They have distribution channels that feel organic because they are organic. And they're being discovered before the competition arrives.

Silicon Valley didn't build its dominance through geography alone. It built it through density of trust — people who knew each other, believed in each other, and backed each other early.

That density of trust exists everywhere. It always has.

For the first time, the tools exist to turn it into a venture strategy.

The next wave of entrepreneurship may come from anywhere. The people who recognize that first — and act on it — won't just witness the shift.

They'll own a piece of it.

— Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered Feb 27, 2026 @ 5:36pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Not a cloud in the sky, 18⁰ C / 64⁰ F

Table of Contents

• The Economic Revolution Starts in Your Head

• Brain Rot

• Brain Food

• This Is an Economic Issue

• Venture Is Brain Food

• AND

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking® - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The Economic Revolution Starts in Your Head

Six hours a day.

That’s what the average young adult now spends scrolling.

Not learning.
Not building.
Not investing.

Scrolling.

We shouldn’t be surprised that anxiety is rising, attention spans are shrinking, and fewer people feel economically in control.

We are consuming cognitive junk food at industrial scale.

Brain Rot

“Brain rot” isn’t just slang.

It’s what happens when your mind is flooded with endless, low-quality digital content — short-form videos, doom-scrolling, AI-generated noise, outrage loops.

High stimulation.
Low substance.

The effects compound:

• Shortened attention span

• Mental fog

• Anxiety and comparison

• Poor long-term decision-making

It’s junk food for the mind.

You don’t leave a scrolling session sharper.

You leave hollow.

Brain Food

Brain food is different.

It requires effort.

Deep reading.
Complex problem-solving.
Real-world conversations.
Building something that didn’t exist yesterday.

Brain food builds cognitive resilience.

It increases focus.
Strengthens memory.
Improves judgment.

Brain rot is passive.

Brain food is active.

One consumes.

The other compounds.

This Is an Economic Issue

Here’s the part most people miss:

You cannot build wealth with a distracted brain.

You cannot allocate capital well if your attention span is 22 seconds.

You cannot think long-term if your nervous system is trained on constant novelty.

Attention is economic infrastructure.

If someone else controls it, they control your trajectory.

Venture Is Brain Food

Venture is not just about startups.

It’s a discipline.

To build or stake in a venture, you must:

• Identify real problems

• Evaluate incentives

• Allocate capital

• Manage risk

• Delay gratification

That’s cognitive protein.

That’s ownership thinking.

At its core, venture itself is the problem we must solve — because most people were never taught how to think like owners.

They were trained to be employees.
Trained to consume.
Trained to react.

That’s why perhaps the greatest value proposition of our new model of venture, VentureStaking®, is the learning component.

You learn how value is created, how capital compounds, and how strategic patience beats emotional reaction.

It shifts you from spectator to stakeholder.

That shift changes everything.

Okay, that’s it for now, have a great weekend everyone……

AND

If you believe our current trajectory isn’t sustainable — and that we need to back a new generation of entrepreneurs determined to change it — then I invite you to join the waitlist to VentureStake this next generation of builders (and learn a tremendous amount about venture in the process).

With our entry-level program — the Silver Package — starting at just $100 for a 12-month cohort, participation is designed to be accessible.

This isn’t about watching from the sidelines.
It’s about learning, backing, and building.

Let’s win the future — together (www.doriot.com)

— Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered Feb, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Cold chance of snow, 2⁰ C / 36⁰ F

Table of Contents

• The Day the SEC Came Calling

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking® - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

The Day the SEC Came Calling

Happy 2026, everyone.

It’s been over three months since I last posted an article or shared an update. I could offer a dozen explanations, but the real one is simpler: I was exhausted by the trajectory of where things seemed to be heading.

I had run out of things worth saying. The momentum felt stalled. After Doriot completed the first-ever VentureStaking® Round — a historic milestone by any measure — there was this strange silence. No clear next chapter. No obvious narrative. Just questions I didn’t yet have answers to.

It was a period of reflection and skill-building — during which I logged more than 500 hours working with AI and building software.

Then, on a Friday morning in mid-January, walkingback from a workout, I opened my inbox.

There it was.

A letter from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

And just like that, 2026 began.

The letter was from the Office of Enforcement.

They were requesting that I voluntarily provide information about our VentureStaking® Round, which closed in August 2025, to evaluate a potential violation of securities laws.

Now, as you can imagine, receiving a letter like that is jarring. Your heart skips for half a second. Your brain runs through every possible scenario in under three.

But then something interesting happened.

I took a deep breath.

And I followed my coach’s advice and said out loud:
“Best thing that has ever happened to me.”

Why?

Because scrutiny creates clarity. And clarity creates momentum.

I picked up the phone and called the SEC officer listed on the letter. We discussed the request, the parameters, and what they were looking for. He was cordial. Professional. Direct. Exactly what you would expect.

And here’s the thing: I have nothing to hide.

Based on existing case law and the structure we built, I am confident we did not offer a security for sale. If the SEC ultimately reaches a different conclusion, it would reflect a novel interpretation of how this structure fits within existing frameworks.

That conviction isn’t bravado. And to be clear, I’m not trying to skirt securities laws or engineer something in the gray to do anything nefarious. Our model is built to operate within — and in many ways depend upon — the SEC framework.

Frankly — and I know this isn’t always the popular view — I believe the SEC has laid a strong foundation for making venture investing accessible to retail investors. The real issue hasn’t been overregulation; it’s been a lack of innovation in capital formation. Ecosystems around the world keep trying to replicate the Silicon Valley model, forcing a square peg into a round hole.

VentureStaking® represents a different capital formation architecture — one designed to address structural inefficiencies that traditional venture models have struggled to solve.

As structured, and based on our analysis of existing case law, we believe it does not constitute a security.

It also helps that I’m a lawyer and spent three years inside a regulatory permitting and enforcement agency. I understand how these processes work. I understand that if there are questions, the only department equipped to fully examine them is Enforcement.

That’s their role.

So about a week later, I sent them everything they requested — and more. Not defensively. Not reluctantly. Proactively. I provided additional information to help them reach a conclusion efficiently and transparently.

If you believe in what you’ve built, transparency isn’t threatening. It’s validating.

As I write this, I don’t know what happens next.

Maybe a Wells Notice.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe more questions.
Maybe a precedent-setting moment.

But here’s what I do know:

This is an invitation.

An invitation to move forward with Doriot at a higher level.
An invitation to stop building quietly and start building boldly.
An invitation to seek the capital required to commercialize VentureStaking® across the globe.

We own the trademark.
We’ve filed the patent.
And today, I’m excited to say we’ve launched our new website and prototype.

You can visit us at www.doriot.com.

www.Doriot.com 

For the first time, we are inviting Funds, Angels, and Retail investors to express interest as we conduct a formal “Test the Waters” campaign.

Eight years.

Eight years of building in the soil.
Designing. Structuring. Testing. Refining.
Explaining an idea that didn’t fit neatly into existing boxes.

For a long time, nothing was visible.

And now — I can see the first shoot breaking through the surface.

It reminds me of bamboo. For years, it grows underground, unseen, building its foundation. Then when it finally emerges, it can grow 80–90 feet in a matter of weeks.

People think it grew overnight.

It didn’t.

The roots were forming the entire time.

2026 feels like emergence.

If you’ve followed this journey, thank you.

If you’re curious, come take a look.

And if you believe the venture ecosystem is ready for a new structure — one that aligns incentives differently and expands access globally — this is the moment.

The roots are deep.
The foundation is built.

Now we grow.

— Gerry

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)

Delivered November 21, 2025 @ 12:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Overcast and balmy, 9⁰ C / 49⁰ F 🍁 

Table of Contents

• 4 Forms of Entrepreneurship

  • 1. Entrepreneurship by Innovation

  • 2. Entrepreneurship by Imitation

  • 3. Entrepreneurship by Acquisition

  • 4. Entrepreneurship by Licensing / Franchising

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking® - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

4 Forms of Entrepreneurship

This past week, in a class discussion, a student shared that she wanted to be an entrepreneur - but felt held back because she “didn’t have an innovative idea.” That remark sparked an interesting conversation about what entrepreneurship is: organizing resources to deliver a product or service that solves a problem.

In that light, you don’t always need to invent something never seen before. What matters is seeing a meaningful gap or need, then putting together people, skills, capital, systems and execution to fill it.

Here are the four broad forms of entrepreneurship — along with examples — and what resources & skills each tends to involve.

1. Entrepreneurship by Innovation

Yes, this form starts with an original idea (a new product, service or business model) that wasn’t available before or significantly changes what existed. This is high risk because you may be creating both market and product from scratch. But also high reward, since you can capture first‑mover advantages or build new categories. Think about about OpenAI, a game-changing innovation.
Resources & skills needed: Strong vision, R&D (or creative/technical development), marketing to educate the market, risk capital, resilience. Innovation at scale is very hard and extremely expensive.
Pro Tip: You have to be driven by a future you want to see versus the allure of making money.

2. Entrepreneurship by Imitation

This is where entrepreneurs adopt or adapt a business model that already works—possibly in a different market or with slight improvements. This is how most companies start. For example, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, but he didn’t invent the internet or social media. MySpace and Friendster came before him, but he built a better mousetrap. It’s lower risk (you’re building on something that’s already proven to work), but it still requires strong execution and category-level innovation to stand out from what already exists.
Resources & skills: Ability to recognize a successful model and adapt it to a new market or context. And frankly, this is an easier sell to potential investors. Not that it will be easy to raise capital, just less friction because it doesn’t require investors to use their imaginations as much.
Pro Tip: If you don’t have a radical new idea, that’s okay. Ask “Which business model elsewhere impresses me — and could it work here (or in this niche) with adaptation?” and “How will I adapt it to this context to make it relevant?”

3. Entrepreneurship by Acquisition

In this form, an entrepreneur grows by acquiring an existing business (or its assets), then building, improving, or scaling it. You’re stepping into something that already has customers, cash flow, and infrastructure—but with room to grow or fix what’s not working. There’s even a growing funding model called a Search Fund, where investors back individuals—often first-time CEOs—in their search to buy and operate a small to mid-sized business. It’s a smart path for those who have leadership chops but would rather scale something solid than start from scratch.
Resources & skills: Capital (often more, because you’re buying a business), due‑diligence skills (to assess the business you’re acquiring), change‑management skills (to improve it), strategic vision for growth.
Pro Tip: If you go this route, make sure you really love the business—enough to dive in and learn every part of it. Building a company is hard, but messing one up is surprisingly easy. If you’re not all-in, acquisition can become a quick path to burnout or bad decisions.

4. Entrepreneurship by Licensing / Franchising

In this form, the entrepreneur obtains rights (a license) to use someone else’s intellectual property, brand or business model — or grants those rights to others (if you’re the franchisor). It’s a lower‑risk way to operate because some of the brand, know‑how or business model is already proven. But there may be less flexibility, higher fees/royalties, and less control.
Resources & skills: Capital for the license/franchise fees, operational discipline (you may have to conform to standards), customer service, marketing within the franchise or license rules.
Pro Tip: You have to be willing to follow clear instructions to make sure the business runs by design, not by guesswork. At the end of the day, you’re playing with someone else’s ball and bat—so there’s less room to freelance or bend the rules.

Putting it all together
Millions of potential young entrepreneurs will navigate one of these pathways (or combinations of them). Choosing your path matters because each calls for different types and levels of capital (money, time, skills, networks) and different attitudes toward risk, control and creativity. Here are some quick comparison questions your readers might ask themselves:

• Do I have a brand‑new idea (Innovation) or am I more comfortable adapting something proven (Imitation)?

• Am I looking to build from scratch, or buy an existing business (Acquisition)?

• Do I prefer to operate under my own model or buy into a proven model/licence (Licensing/Franchising)?

• What resources (funding, skills, mentors, systems) do I already have, and what will I need?

• How much risk am I willing to take — and how comfortable am I with uncertainty vs proven setups?

Closing thought
The student’s comment that she didn’t have an “innovative idea” is totally valid — and actually a helpful starting point. Because entrepreneurship doesn’t only demand a radical idea. It demands insight into a problem + willingness to organize resources and execute. Start by understanding which form of entrepreneurship you’re drawn to can help you move from “I don’t have an idea” to “Here’s how I can proceed.”

Wishing you a focused and fulfilling weekend and special time with family and friends over the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

gerry (gerry@doriot.com)