Chapter One Is Launching a New Kind of Scout Program

What did your experience with Index teach you about how scout programs actually work?

Getting into a scout program is just the starting point. It gives you capital, but it does not give you an edge.

The real work is finding exceptional founders early and winning allocation. That comes down to taste, relationships, and how useful you are to founders. I leaned into my operator background, especially around growth and monetization, and earned my way onto cap tables by helping companies ship and scale.

It was also my first experience managing a defined pool of external capital with a clear mandate. It changed my perspective on the economics of venture returns and portfolio construction, which was a level up from personal angel checks. I treated the scout fund as the first chapter of a real venture career, spending hours every day hunting for deals rather than investing casually in my immediate network or founder friends. I believed that if I invested well, I would earn the chance to raise my own fund.

That fund delivered strong results, yet you had to operate almost entirely behind the scenes. How did that contrast shape your thinking?

That experience fundamentally changed how I thought about scout programs. It gave me the idea that scout programs should have a clear ladder of progression, real rewards, a scoreboard, and a feedback loop that helps scouts get sharper over time.

We want to put our scouts in the spotlight. We’re going to give them beautiful public profiles where they can be discovered, share updates on their investments with the broader industry, and if they do great work and want to pursue venture full-time - help them get there.

Too much access in venture depends on opaque networks and receiving stamps of approval from people already in the flow. GPs typically treat scouting as one of many dealflow channels - and scouts don’t get much attention unless they’re already seen as connected. Meanwhile, there are deeply networked operators who don’t spend time in GP circles and remain undiscovered.

I want Scout Program to be a fantastic training ground for future investors and fund founders. So this is heavy on the mentoring element. If scouting is meant to be a proving ground for a real venture career, then learning from people who have built enduring firms and generational portfolios should be core to the experience.

We’ve assembled a mentor group that reflects a wide range of best-in-class perspectives across venture and capital allocation, including:

• Mamoon Hamid, Partner at Kleiner Perkins
• Keith Rabois, Managing Director at Khosla Ventures
• Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures
• Kyle Samani, Founder at Multicoin Capital
• Roger Ehrenberg, Managing Partner at Game Changers
• Gokul Rajaram, Founding Partner at Marathon
• Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures
• Ashton Kutcher, General Partner at Sound Ventures
• Laura Andron, Managing Director at Pathstone
• Kelli Fontaine, Partner at Cendana Capital

For me, this group represents the kind of judgment and pattern recognition that actually accelerates learning. It is not about prestige. It is about giving scouts real feedback from people who have spent years doing the work.

At some point, you realized the real bottleneck in venture was not capital, but talent discovery. What made that click?

I believe there are hundreds, if not thousands, of exceptional early-stage investors waiting to be discovered. We want to be the discovery engine for these people. I take a lot of inspiration from the Thiel Fellows program and their track record of surfacing original thinkers before they were legible to the venture ecosystem. My goal is to take the same approach, but for investors, with Scout Program.

If you have an original thesis and a unique network, you should have a path into investing full-time. Unfortunately, too much access in venture still depends on closed networks and hiring from the inside. Most scout programs require a tap on the shoulder from a GP just to get in. We wanted to take a creative approach by putting out an open casting call, so that anyone can apply.

Scout Program is open to anyone with a genuine passion for the craft, whether or not they want to become a full-time VC.

Traditional scout programs are mostly private and firm-led. What did you want to design differently with Chapter One?

Investing has become part of pop culture. Everyday people invest across more asset classes than ever, and the products enabling that - Polymarket, Robinhood, Kalshi - are built with real consumer-grade design. We wanted to create something that feels just as well-crafted, but for private investing, and specifically for rising investors and star operators who want to prove they’re great. A lot of people say they want to become investors. Very few are willing to put their work out in the open. We wanted to give them a platform to do that.

I have a product mindset, so my instinct was that scouting should feel like a fun, gamified product, designed with clear incentives and measurable outcomes. We’re going to celebrate great performance publicly, create light friendly competition, and give the ultimate reward of reputation building.

You’ve described Scout Program as “YC energy meets fantasy sports mechanics.” What does that look like in practice?

On the YC side, it's a close-knit community built around scout-to-scout helpfulness, a nexus for emerging talent, and mentorship from some of the best investors in the industry. On the fantasy sports side, it's season-based, and gamified with leaderboards and "player cards” that showcase scouts’ stats and wins for the world to see.

But the fantasy sports analogy goes deeper than aesthetics. Scouts are effectively drafting their dream roster of founders and going to bat for underdogs and early-stage talent that others have not recognized yet.

For Season One, we are selecting ten scouts and giving each $100K of capital to deploy over the year. The structure is high-autonomy by design, built to make the scouting experience as valuable as possible for the scouts themselves. They’ll create a firm name and logo, and determine their own check size, deployment cadence, and sector focus with few constraints. We’ll spotlight the top few scouts at any time on the leaderboard based on thesis clarity, sourcing quality, founder trust, and disciplined portfolio construction. We’re bringing a real-time feel to the long-term game of early-stage investing - rather than incentivising quick markups, we’re basing our leaderboard on the fundamental traits that make investors great.

We think one of the most unique things about Scout Program is how we’re giving scouts the option of participating solo, or as an investing pair that manages the $100K allocation jointly. Some of the most exceptional operators and investors we know are one half of a trusted duo, with a track record of working together and combining complementary strengths.

Radical transparency is a bold choice in venture. Why make everything public?

Venture has become overly focused on access and the prestige of saying you were in certain logos. But what actually matters now is who was early and who had conviction first, especially amidst growing liquidity in secondaries and general frothiness in the private markets. And that’s exactly why we’ve made everything public.

Scout Program makes each scout’s thesis and investment decisions visible to the industry. When someone connects dots early or earns a founder’s trust before a round becomes competitive, that work deserves to be seen.

My goal is to help great investors break through the noise and get credit for doing the work. Ultimately, I want to find the world’s best pickers and let them prove it in a single season.

What does “winning” at Chapter One unlock long-term?

Winning makes great operators legible as investors.

It gives you credibility with founders and other investors, better economics, mentorship, and a real track record you can build on. Scout Program compresses years of quietly proving yourself into one visible season and a public body of work. And you’re in a much stronger position to raise your own fund, if that’s the path you want.

Winning changes how rooms treat you. Founders call you first. You get introduced to world-class people. Scout Program is designed to help people compete on skill and earn that moment.

Five years from now, what do you hope Chapter One changes about who gets to call themselves an investor?

I hope “investor” stops being treated as a title and starts being recognized as a skill that doesn’t require network permission to practice. An investor is someone who can consistently find and back outlier founders and help them win.

I want to surface operators, ex-founders, engineers, and product leaders, especially those embedded in niche corners of the internet or deep offline networks that traditional venture doesn’t touch. Many of them are already investing with their time or capital. Scout Program is simply giving them a platform to do that work in the open.

Conclusion

Chapter One’s Scout Program is an attempt to make early-stage investing more merit-driven and more legible, while treating the craft of investing with the same rigor, incentives, and intentional design as the best internet products.

Think you're a great picker? Applications are open now and reviewed on a rolling basis. Apply at scoutprogram.com - Season One kicks off March 16.

Launching the program on AngelList was a natural choice for Jeff. It is where he ran his first syndicates, built early LP relationships, and learned the mechanics of investing. With AngelList focused on the back office and fund administration, Chapter One can focus entirely on discovering and developing investing talent.

If you are interested in launching a scout program or fund on AngelList, learn more here.