Winners Welcome Podcast, Episode 15 with Richard Kerby, Co-Founder and CEO of Field Ventures.

The hardest part of building a company today is not building. It is knowing what not to build.

Richard Kerby has seen venture from nearly every angle: investment banking, early-stage investing, co-founding Equal Ventures, and now launching Fund I for Field Ventures. Across all of it, one pattern keeps showing up. Founders find a market they love, spot a dozen gaps, and try to fill them all at once. With tools like Replit, Claude, and Cursor making it easier than ever to ship, that instinct has only gotten stronger.

Kerby’s job, as he sees it, is to slow that down. Field partners with founders from inception, often before there is a product at all. The goal is not to validate the idea, because only customers can do that. It is to be a thought partner through the messy stretch of customer discovery. His test is simple: give a customer the product for a month or two, then ask what would happen if you took it away.

That hands-on approach shapes everything about how Field operates. Kerby and Brandon Bryant dig into why Field backs only about 20 companies per fund, and why it holds standing calls with every founder every two weeks. They also get into Kerby’s thesis on service-as-a-software, the idea that AI is moving from selling tools to selling the work itself. In older, overlooked industries with tight IT budgets but large labor costs, that shift could change what customers are willing to pay.

The conversation also covers why the demo is no longer the bar, why domain expertise is now the scarce resource, and why Field does not vote on deals. Kerby also describes the “roller coaster” feeling he looks for in every great investment.

This episode is brought to you by Gunderson Dettmer, the number one law firm in venture capital globally and a partner to leading investors and companies from start to scale.

Watch the full episode and subscribe to Winners Welcome for more conversations with founders, operators, and investors building what’s next.

About The Winners Welcome Podcast

The Winners Welcome Podcast brings elite founders and top investors into thoughtful conversations on pushing past possible, sharing the conviction, standards, and lessons behind building generational companies.

About Harlem Capital

Harlem Capital is a venture capital firm that backs the next generation of winners. The firm partners with exceptional founders with the irrational motivation to build generational companies. All Winners Welcome.

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