Tusk Venture Partners

Another great TECH WEEK by a16z event I'm hosting next week. I'll be joined by Joseph Connor of Odyssey where we will discuss the intersection of policy and product and how startups should be navigating highly-regulated industries in today's day and age. RSVP for #NYTechWeek: https://lnkd.in/eY45cCpG

I am thrilled to announce my new company: Hint Throughout my career, everything I have built has been rooted in one thing: teaching people how to care for their homes thoughtfully, beautifully, and with great intention. I’ve wanted, for years, to build a tool that would bring to life everything I’ve written about - all my experience in and around the home - to help every homeowner manage their home.  Last year, at my farm, I had a good chat with my neighbor Kyle Rush. He began describing the early ideas of a new venture, and he was describing exactly what I had been envisioning for years. A few weeks later, I sat down with Kyle and Yih-Han Ma, shared my vision, and realized that our collective expertise, when combined with the latest in technology, would let us build Hint to work on behalf of every homeowner in America.  Hint is an always-on home management platform that keeps your home organized, protected, and always working for you. For more than 40 years I have been documenting how a well-run home should work: the standards, the seasonal routines, the small decisions that prevent expensive problems. All of that expertise is now embedded in Hint, working on your behalf before you even know you need it.   Think of it as a digital extension of the trusted teams that have helped me care for my homes for decades, the contractors, the plumbers, the gardeners, the designers, now available to every homeowner.   I’m proud to announce that we have raised $10 million in seed funding from Montauk Capital, Slow Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey, and my friend Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy. Thank you to Lily Mae Lazarus at Fortune for telling our story (link in comments).    Hint officially launches this summer. Sign up at https://lnkd.in/eZU8PXxf

Honored to be included on Business Insider’s list of top seed investors for 2026. Grateful to have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional founders building ambitious companies in complex industries. Congrats to the other great investors recognized. https://lnkd.in/eVcr_CCc

I’m excited that we can finally announce the launch of Hint.  We’re building the future of homeownership alongside the preeminent expert in the home - Martha Stewart. Hint is years in the making for both of us.  Martha has spent decades sharing her wisdom with millions and envisioning building a tool that could put it into action for homeowners.  I’ve spent the last ten years building large home services businesses and hearing that you wanted more. You said you wanted an expert that knows you and your home - and who only cares about what’s in your best interest and is always looking out for you - guiding you through every decision in the long journey of homeownership, and making each step as easy and enjoyable as possible.  That’s Hint.  Human expertise + technology, working for your benefit.  To empower homeowners.  To make homeownership affordable.  To let you fully and completely enjoy your home.  This is the agentic future as it should be - personalized, expert, proactive, and working for you.  We’ve built amazing tech and assembled an amazing team.  And to our investors - Kevin Colleran and Slow Ventures (our lead investors), Amplo, Tusk Venture Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey VC, and other great investors, like Brian Kelly - thank you for supporting our mission.    Special shoutout to Philip Krim and Montauk Capital.  This is as much Philip’s vision as mine or Martha’s.  Appreciate the ideating, capital, tactical support - and as importantly, fielding my questions, listening to my complaints, and providing sound advice, all the time.  This was just Day 1 of building the future.  On to the next! http://bit.ly/hint-fortune

Big news (and not an April Fools joke): Our Co-founder Bradley Tusk's podcast, Firewall, has been nominated for its first ever Webby Award! The Webby Awards are the Oscars of the internet, and their interview of then-candidate Zohran Mamdani from April as part of City & State NY’s Race to Gracie Mansion series is up for best individual episode. Bradley and Firewall are up against some huge names (including Oprah herself), so please take a moment to cast your vote in support and help them win the the People's Voice Award. VOTE: https://lnkd.in/eeqcaW4a

The barrier to building software is collapsing, but the barrier to getting it adopted isn't. AI makes it easier than ever to build a product. But when building is easy, the product alone stops being the advantage. The constraint is distribution. More products will get built than ever before. Fewer will actually get used. In many industries, especially regulated ones, distribution isn't just sales. It's permission. Permission to integrate. Permission to access data. Permission to operate inside existing systems. The advantage is shifting from those who can build to those who can get adopted. That's where the real scarcity is

AI is making it easier than ever to build software. That’s exactly why most of it won’t matter. When everyone has access to the same models and capabilities, horizontal tools get commoditized fast. The product itself stops being the advantage. So what does matter? Domain depth. In vertical markets, the hard part isn’t writing code. It’s understanding how the industry actually works, how workflows operate, how data is structured, and how decisions get made under real-world constraints. AI doesn’t solve that. If anything, it raises the bar. In regulated markets, this dynamic is even more pronounced. The complexity isn’t just operational, it’s structural. You’re building around compliance frameworks, approval chains, counterparty relationships, and institutional trust that took years to establish. That’s not a feature you bolt on. It defines the product from day one. When building software gets cheaper, the advantage shifts to the companies that understand these environments deeply and are already embedded in them. Horizontal gets crowded. Vertical gets stronger. AI isn’t replacing vertical software. It’s making it inevitable.

We just raised a $19.2M Series A to completely reinvent mental healthcare for teenagers. Somethings is on a mission to end the youth mental health crisis by ensuring that every teen has the genuine human connections that they need to thrive. We’ve taken a completely different approach to solving the youth mental health crisis — by listening to teens and actually building the product that they have been asking us for. When teens struggle, they usually don’t want to start at a clinic. They want someone who understands their world, who answers when it actually matters, and who doesn’t feel like part of a system. So that’s what we built. Somethings connects teens with a real, trained human mentor — closer to a trusted older sibling than a therapist’s office — someone they can talk to throughout the week, in the moments life actually happens. Four years ago I had a really hard choice: build something the healthcare system would easily pay for, or build what teens actually wanted and figure out payment later. The first path would’ve been faster. But we chose the second. Then spent years convincing the system prevention is better than reaction. And its working. Today thousands of teens use Somethings through state programs and national health plans, because intervening early works better than waiting for crisis. Stop before you read this next sentence: 40% of U.S. teens struggle with their mental health. This is an existential threat to the future of our society, and we’re just getting started solving it. My personal mission to build the worlds best teen mental health product because our young people deserve better, and this fundraise is primarily about building this team to execute on our ambitious mission. We're hiring across Product, Engineering, Design, Ops, and Commercial so comment your email below if you're interested in learning more about joining us on this mission. You can check out the article by Axios here: https://lnkd.in/evSMdAWT A huge thank you to our investors: George Petrocheilos, Niko Bonatsos & Candace Richardson, Jordan Nof & John Hooie and the so many others who’ve supported us along the way. And an even bigger shoutout to the Somethings team which none of this would be possible without: Nicolas Podesta, Nicole Lederman, LCSW, Nicholas Gattuso, Leslie Courtney, Melanie Tabroff, Olle Ström, Evelyn C., Drew E., Andrea Elmore, MBA, Jereme Ayers, Nick Nissen, MD, Ashley Marie Robillard, Serena Arness and all of the rest of the Somethings team :)