To our LPs, our operators, our portfolio CEOs, and the friends of the firm —
Eight years ago I started Stealth with a quiet conviction: that the venture model — find a founder, write a check, hope — was an obsolete way to produce companies. That the right model was closer to industrial process than betting on horses. That if you could document the system and run it at scale, the studio's enterprise value would compound in a way no single fund ever could.
2026 is the year we proved that conviction out loud.
Eighteen active operating companies. $340M in aggregate portfolio value. $28M in aggregate ARR running through the portfolio. 412 people working inside Stealth-incubated businesses. And — for the first time in our history — a documented method that doesn't depend on me being in the room.
I'll spend the rest of this letter on four things: what we got right, what we got wrong, what the next decade looks like, and a quiet thank-you to the people who built this with me.
What we got right.
The single most important decision we made — and it was decisively non-obvious at the time — was to build talent infrastructure before we needed it.
In 2019, when Stealth had four portfolio companies and was scrambling to hire engineers and designers like every other early-stage holding company, we made a strange call. Instead of hiring more recruiters, we built a platform: Forkaia. The thesis was that every Stealth company would need a constant supply of work-tested junior talent, and that owning that pipeline would compound enormously over time.
Forkaia was not a portfolio company. Forkaia was infrastructure that happened to become a portfolio company.
Today Forkaia is itself a $40M+ company with revenue, partnerships at over 1,000 universities, and a talent pool of more than 10,000 work-tested students. Every Stealth company hires from it on day one for a flat $5,000 placement fee instead of paying recruiters $20,000–$40,000. Last year alone, Stealth portfolio companies sourced 186 hires through Forkaia. The cost savings to the portfolio in recruiter fees alone exceeded $4M — money that stayed inside the system instead of leaking out to external service providers.
That's the studio model in one paragraph: don't buy what every operating company needs. Build it once, share it across the portfolio, and let it become an asset that compounds.
The second thing we got right was patience on capital. We never raised a flashy mega-fund. We never deployed at venture speed. We took Stealth through eight years of bootstrapped, deliberate growth — and in 2026, we are valued at multiples of what we'd have been worth if we'd taken outside money at the wrong moment. Slow capital is sometimes the fastest capital.
What we got wrong.
I owe this section the most honesty.
We waited too long to document the system. For the first six years, the "Stealth Method" was a thing in my head and the heads of a few senior people. Onboarding a new operating CEO meant transmitting that method through osmosis — long calls, ad-hoc Slack threads, late-night dinners. It worked, but it didn't scale, and it made Stealth dependent on me in a way that was bad for the company and worse for the operators.
In Q1 of this year we finally wrote the playbook down. The result is the page that now lives at stealth1000.com/method. It's the same 5-phase system we've been running for eight years, just made legible. The first cohort of FIRs trained on the written playbook outperformed the previous cohort trained on osmosis on every measurable dimension. That's the cost of waiting six years too long — you can't recover those cycles.
The second thing we got wrong was undervaluing brand. I used to think the work would speak for itself. It does — but it speaks much louder when there's a coherent voice on top of it. Our company name was so understated that for years we lost deal flow to studios with louder voices and weaker work. We're correcting that now, deliberately, with this letter being part of the correction.
What the next decade looks like.
I'll tell you what I see when I close my eyes.
I see Stealth at 75 active operating companies by 2032. I see those companies cumulatively employing more than 5,000 people. I see at least three of them at $100M+ ARR. I see the studio infrastructure — Forkaia, Round Z, the CRM, the credentialing system, the brand engine — operating across all of them with the kind of leverage that makes traditional venture studios look like cottages by comparison.
And I see strategic alliances that compound it further. Our membership in NVIDIA's Inception Program already gives our AI-native companies access to GPU credits, compute resources, and enterprise introductions on day one. PhoneCamp, our first exit, was acquired this year — proving the studio model can produce the full lifecycle from incubation to M&A inside a single decade.
I see a Stealth Fund I — our first outside capital vehicle — that puts the studio's mechanics in front of institutional capital. Not because we need the money. Because the LP relationships seed every future founder, every customer intro, every standalone Series A for the rest of the decade.
I see a culture where the strongest operators in the country apply to Stealth's Founder-in-Residence program before they consider starting solo. Not because solo founding is wrong — many of them will eventually do exactly that — but because Stealth gives them a way to compress the first 24 months of company-building into nine, with day-one infrastructure they couldn't build themselves.
And — most importantly — I see every Stealth-built company that wants to be standalone, becoming standalone. The studio model only works if the companies coming out of it are genuinely free to graduate. We hold meaningful equity. We continue to provide leverage. But we never become a hostage to our own success. The companies want the Stealth ecosystem because it makes them more valuable, not because they're trapped in it. That's the line we walk, every quarter, every board meeting.
A quiet thank you.
The people who built this with me know who they are, and I won't embarrass them publicly. But I owe a few groups a thank-you in print.
To our operating CEOs at Forkaia, Insolar, Round Z, VCTR, C3POE, Madson, Howl, BAM, Launchpad, Side Hustle, and every founder leading a company across our active portfolio: you carry the actual work. The studio gets the press, but you ship the code, close the customer, fire the wrong hire, and stay up worrying when the rest of us are asleep. The compounding value of the studio is just a downstream effect of the operating value you generate. Thank you.
To our LPs and capital partners — those of you who wrote checks into Round Z before we had any of this proven out: you took conviction risk on a system that wasn't documented. The fact that you're still with us means more than the numbers in this letter. We will earn it.
To our students and Forkaia® members — over 12,000 of you have come through our talent pipeline. Many of you are now Stealth alumni, working at Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, SpaceX, and elsewhere. Some of you will be back as Founders-in-Residence. The platform exists because you trusted it before it had proof.
And to my family — you know.
One last thing.
The most undervalued asset in venture today is patience. Everyone is in a hurry to declare winners, declare exits, declare narratives. We are not. The Stealth Method is built to compound across decades, not quarters. The companies in our portfolio will look, on the surface, like every other slow-burn early-stage business — until the day they don't.
The studio enterprise value scales with the number of companies it produces, not with the outcome of any single one. That's the entire game.
If you've made it this far, thank you. We'll write Volume II in May 2027. The numbers will be higher. The story will be longer. The conviction will be the same.
Build with us. Or watch us build. Either way, the next decade is going to be loud.