Former Brex executive Sam Blond is already leaving Founders Fund just 18 months after joining

Sam Blond is leaving Founders Fund, as well as the profession of venture capitalist, just 18 months after joining the famous Silicon Valley company.

In a tweet on Monday, Blond expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to work at Peter Thiel’s VC firm and explained: “Full-time investing / being a VC is not for me and I’ve decided to go back to work. ” This likely means that he has either accepted/is about to accept a position at a startup or other tech company, or is in the process of founding one. When reached earlier today, Blond told TechCrunch that he had “no comment outside of the post at this time.”

Before joining the VC firm, Blond was best known as the former head of revenue at Brex. Brex is not a Founders Fund holding company, although Founders Fund is an investor in one of Brex’s biggest competitors: Ramp. So Blond’s jump to the VC firm raised some curious eyebrows, especially since at the time — September 2022 — Brex had reached decacorn status with a $300 million raise. This is a strange time for a top seller to bow out. Typically, startup workers run to the riches that will come through an IPO or other exit when their company experiences such success. Prior to that, he was VP of Sales at Zenefits, the once high profile and then troubled HR technology startup that was backed by Founders Fund. TriNet bought Zenefits in 2022.

Departure is public friendly. “Sam is a fantastic operator and has been a great resource for our founders. We hope to have the opportunity to work with him again,” Founders Fund spokeswoman Erin Gleason tells TechCrunch. And maybe there’s a hint that the VC firm might one day back whatever new Blond is doing — or at least listen to the pitch.

But this is the second disappointing departure of a Founders Fund partner in the past two months. Keith Rabois shocked the startup world when he left in January to return to his former company Khosla Ventures.

It’s fairly rare for senior partners to leave their money for other funds — especially prolific dealmakers like Rabois — because their earnings are tied to the results of their investments, and such investments can take years to mature. The situation makes for some solid golden handcuffs. It’s more common for those who come from a startup world, like Blond, and who have invested with their own money, to leave a VC role after a short time. Investing other people’s money is a very different skill.

And the Founders Fund is also a bit unusual in how it works. While all Silicon Valley companies talk about being founder and founder friendly (otherwise, no founder would sell them a piece of their company), Founders Fund has some stricter rules about it.

As Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens told TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos at the StrictlyVC LA event last week, “We are absolute founders,” he said. The company’s partners rarely take seats on the board of directors: “we always vote with founders. And at the point where a company no longer has a founder as CEO, we’re out. We don’t invest in unfounded companies.”

However, the company does not exclude its partners from being founders of their own startups at the same time. Thiel famously founded Palantir, for example. Rabois founded OpenStore and Stephens co-founded Anduril. Many other VC firms also have partners running startups at the same time. If being a founder and a VC aren’t automatically mutually exclusive, that means the desire to be an “operator” may not fully explain why Blond took his license.

Other than what he said publicly, we don’t know the other reasons. However, many VCs prefer to think of themselves as a “value-added” partner, meaning they want to be involved in helping the business they’re backing, and at Founders Fund such involvement is frowned upon.

“The more a VC says, ‘I’m going to add value,’ the more you should hear them say, ‘I’m going to annoy everything live out of you for the rest of my time at the cap table,'” Stephens told the StrictlyVC audience . “So I think our approach is more of, you know, we’re going to invest in the company because we think this founder or this group of founders are the people who are going to grow this business.”

And that means a VC’s career there depends on picking winners, while having very little say in how those picks work.