Originally published here.

noa is Europe’s largest “solo” GP firm. The question I get asked more than any other is not about our portfolio. It is not about our thesis. It is not about our track record. It is this: “Greg, what happens if you get hit by a truck tomorrow?”

The interesting part is that 99% of the people who ask me are total outsiders to noa. They are not LPs. They are not founders. They are not team members. Because if you know our firm, you would never ask this question.

But I have learned to appreciate it. Not because it is a good question. Because of what it reveals about the assumption underneath. The assumption that a solo GP firm is one person. That if that person disappears, the firm disappears with it. That behind the name and the AUM and the track record there is, ultimately, just one human being trying to do too many things at once.

That assumption is wrong. And explaining why matters because the solo GP model is one of the most misunderstood structures in venture. At a moment when the industry is being forced to rebuild itself, when too many firms have become too slow, too political, too top-heavy to function as genuine venture investors rather than asset managers, the model that gets dismissed as fragile is the one quietly outperforming in a growing number of cases. I want to name that clearly. I want to build the argument properly. Because if the misconception persists, it will keep capital and talent from finding the structures that actually deserve them. To be clear: this is not to say a multi-partner firm cannot be great. Many are. It is simply a different route. To each their own.

Call it the accountability paradox: the more concentrated the accountability at the top, the more distributed the ownership can be throughout. Solo GP is not about one person holding everything. It is about one person holding responsibility in the early days, so that everyone else can be empowered to thrive, grow, be accountable, and organically progress. That is particularly relevant in an industry that suffers from a democratisation and accessibility problem, and that still, despite real progress, struggles with diversity in who gets to build and own firms.

When I started noa, as clichéd as it may sound, my goal was to play a role in changing people’s lives. Not only through the founders we back, but through the people who build this firm alongside me. Building from scratch, without any legacy, without inherited politics or inherited hierarchies, gives you a rare freedom: the freedom to bring the best out of people, without ceiling and without compromise. And change their lives. That is what I set out to build. And it is what the model makes possible.

Let me be precise about what solo GP actually means, because the term is misused too often.

Solo GP does not mean one-man band. They are categorically different things. A one-man band is a person who does everything alone. One voice. One pair of hands. One point of failure. Solo GP means one decision-maker at the top of the GP structure. One person accountable to LPs for the fund thesis, the firm direction, the culture. One name. It does not mean one mind. On the contrary. It means building a structure that actively promotes intellectual honesty, removes politics, and creates empowerment without the bureaucratic drag that usually accompanies it.

People mistake these two things constantly. The label does most aspiring solo GPs, early in their endeavour, no favours. But the conflation is wrong and costly because it leads investors to apply the wrong framework when they evaluate the structure.

There is also a significant gap in understanding between Europe and the US. In the US, solo GPs have built firms at genuine scale and earned institutional respect. Elad Gil closed his third fund at over $1bn. Josh Buckley raised a $337m fund. Brad Gerstner has approximately $20 billion in AUM at Altimeter, where he is still the only GP (or at least was until recently). They are category-defining proof points that the model works at scale.

In Europe, there remains an implicit ceiling on ambition: a quiet assumption that one person can only manage so much, that beyond a certain AUM the structure must change, that the solo GP is a transitional phase on the way to becoming a real partnership. This ceiling is not structural. It is cultural. The data makes that plain. Solo GP-led funds in Europe now anchor 27% of pre-seed rounds, up from 12% in 2021. The model is not a transitional phase. It is a maturing category. The ceiling was always imaginary. I work hard to push the boundaries of it every day.

What we have built at noa, Europe’s largest solo GP firm with over €500m in AUM, is evidence that the ceiling was always imaginary. And there is so much more to come.

The firm I lead has twelve people. Every single person who works here has carry. Not token carry. Real carry. Our carry structure is two to three times the industry standard, at every level of the firm. This was not a compromise or a retention mechanism. It was a deliberate design choice, because I believe the only way to build a great firm is to build it with people who feel and behave like owners. Employees work for the firm. Owners build it, live for it, and die by it.

This is why the question of GP title is almost entirely irrelevant to the people who work here. There is zero value in the GP today. The GP will be worth something meaningful in fund four, five, six, seven. What matters today is carry: real economics, real alignment, real skin in the game at every level of the firm. The question of who owns the GP entity is a rounding error next to who participates in the returns generated by the firm. And every single person here participates. The GP is a burden more than anything else, and at noa, one person carries that burden so that the rest of the team can grow, learn, and excel without the weight of it. The rest is performative optics.

That is what makes noa a firm, and what makes it a small act of disruption in an industry that has historically reserved ownership for the few who were already in the room.

The part that surprises people most is the investment committee.

Our ICs run on majority. The people who vote have skin in the game, intellectual honesty, and genuine curiosity. The debate is real. Arguments get challenged. Assumptions get stress-tested. Nobody defers because of rank, because there is no rank that matters in that room.

What happens at an IC at noa is not a presentation followed by a decision. It is a genuine reckoning. Does this founder have what it takes when the company hits the wall, which every company does? Does the thesis hold when you strip away the narrative and look only at the evidence? Is the team ready to go to the mat for this company, because that is what being an investor actually means? The decision has to be one we can defend, not just on day one, but in the hardest moment, two years from now, when the easy thing would be to walk away. If we cannot say yes to all of that, we should not be writing the cheque.

What this creates is a firm built on intellectual honesty rather than hierarchy. On hunger, passion, and ambition, with no legacy to protect. When there are no senior partners whose prior bets need defending, decisions emerge from the analysis and not from politics. Nobody is deferring to seniority when the data points somewhere different. We are a flat organisation, despite having one founder.

Compare this to the governance reality of a multi-partner firm. A senior partner who championed a deal that is underperforming has strong incentives to defend it, to minimise its difficulties in LP updates, and to resist the IC’s scepticism in follow-on discussions, because the failure reflects on their judgment in a way that is visible to every colleague in the room. A partner whose personal relationship sourced a deal has a conflict of interest every time that company comes back to the table. These are not character failures. They are structural ones. The architecture of the multi-partner firm creates political gravity that is invisible at inception and becomes impossible to remove over time.

Beyond the investment quality argument, there is an LP protection argument that rarely gets made. Multi-partner firms fracture. Over carry disputes. Over strategy. Over ego. It is one of the most common LP nightmares: a fund where the partnership table breaks down mid-cycle, leaving the portfolio without coherent stewardship. A solo GP firm has team turnover risk, but that risk is substantially lower when the team is flat, empowered, and genuinely invested in the outcome. What it does not have is existential governance risk. The structure that looks more fragile is, in this specific and important way, more durable.

At noa, every decision starts from the current evidence. The only thing that carries weight is the quality of the argument and the quality of the founder.

Back to the truck.

I want to answer it properly because the conventional answer is incomplete. The conventional answer is: we have key man provisions in the LPA. If I am no longer there for whatever reason, it qualifies as a termination event and LPs can decide whether to continue or wind down. That is correct. It is in the LPA. It is transparent. It is deliberate.

But there is a better answer. And it starts with a different question.

If you invest in a fund with three partners, the standard termination event is two of them leaving. Not one. Two. Which means that if the main partner, the one whose judgment you actually invested behind, if that person leaves but the other two stay, you do not have a termination event. You are just stuck. Stuck with two partners you like but do not love. Stuck in a fund whose direction is no longer what you signed up for. With no exit. And no way to hold anyone clearly accountable for what went wrong.

With us it is very clear. It is me. If I am gone, you know. You can decide as an LP whether you think the team is what you expect to carry it forward. You get full optionality. In a counterintuitive way, the transparency of the solo GP structure is actually better for LPs than the ambiguity of a multi-partner structure where the key man can walk without triggering anything.

And beyond the mechanics: there are people in this firm who are substantially smarter than I am, and they will carry noa’s mission forward the day I am either too old or under a truck at last. I say that without false modesty. I built this firm with the explicit intention that it should outlast me. This firm is about making a difference in the world. We do that by backing extraordinary people and creating an environment in which they can thrive and be the best version of themselves. It starts with our founders. And it starts equally with our people. That requires building leaders who can carry it forward, not building processes that depend on one person. noa will only be truly successful upon achieving this. And we are well on track.

The GP is not closed. On the contrary. It is more open than most firms. But I do not announce it as a promise. And here is why.

When I started the fund, I set it up alone, raised the first fund, built the team person by person. Every person who has joined this firm has, in my view, the potential to lead it and be its face after me. Our strong bias is to open the GP from inside: from people who have gone up through the ranks, who have been part of the journey, who have earned it, who live and breathe for what we do and for the founders we partner with. The people who build noa deserve to own noa. That is the default, and it is a strong one. We thrive on being different, standing out, being opinionated, anti-consensus. At the risk of looking wrong for a long time. Until we do not. And that is entirely fine.

Nobody here was promoted to partner to keep them from leaving, or to appease a co-founder, or for any reason other than merit. The team is built for fit and depth, not for optics or internal politics. We do not care about title or optics. We care about substance.

Bringing someone in from outside to share the GP presents material risks, and our bias is to open it from within first, as the people who built noa deserve to own noa. The bar for anyone joining the GP from outside would be exceptional, someone who adds a dimension the firm genuinely does not have, who earns the trust of the team that built this, and who fits without fracturing what we have created. That is a high bar. It should be.

The intention is clear and it is not conditional on a fund number or an AUM figure. It is conditional on the people who earn it. And the people I have built this firm with are on that path. I want nothing more than for every single person in this firm to succeed and change their life through the opportunity we have built together.

It is highly entrepreneurial. It is not for everyone. There is no micromanagement. There is no tap on the shoulder. At noa, we reward colleagues with more trust, more empowerment, more accountability, and more autonomy. It is not performative. It is real, meaningful, and it is what matters. And that also means we have sometimes made hiring mistakes. Our model makes that obvious very quickly. And that is fine.

The solo GP structure has a competitive edge that is often underestimated, particularly in early-stage venture where timing of conviction matters more than speed of process.

The best deals are rarely obvious to a committee. The founders building the hardest things, the ones who chose problems that look wrong until the moment they look inevitable, are the ones most consistently filtered out by firms where a deal has to survive three partner meetings before a term sheet goes out. By the time the third meeting happens, the opportunity is often gone. Or worse, it has been diluted into a version safe enough to approve but not interesting enough to matter.

Speed of conviction is not the same as speed of process. We do not move fast because we skip the work. We move fast because the structure removes the friction that slows firms down without improving the decision. There are no partners to schedule around. No political groundwork to lay before the IC. No internal negotiation about whose deal this is and who gets credit. By the time we reach IC, the analytical work has been done, the thesis has been challenged, the team has formed a view. What happens next is a decision, not a performance. There is no gap between our time to conviction and our time to action. And it’s not because we skipped the work. It is because the structure does not penalise speed the way politics of a top-heavy firm do.

There is a related advantage that rarely gets discussed: the legibility of the brand. Founders know exactly who they are calling and why. The track record at noa is not averaged across partners or obscured by the question of who actually championed a deal. It is a team effort, with one clear point of accountability. That legibility compounds. Every fund, every investment, every outcome builds a cleaner signal. The GP’s conviction is legible, and the team amplifies deal flow and deepens relationships without diluting the identity of the firm.

We each play a very different role in the process itself. Some members of our team bring analytical depth and systems thinking that is, honestly, humbling when I sit in the room with them. I focus more on the bigger picture, the human dimension, the conviction about direction. We are united by deep trust, no ego, no hierarchy, and a shared sense of mission. We come from very different walks of life and find ourselves aligned in what we have dedicated ourselves to. That diversity of perspective is purpose built, one person at a time, since day one.

The data is confirming this. Solo GPs are growing as a category precisely because the model works. Nimble, focused, conviction-driven. And in a growing number of cases outperforming traditional structures that carry more political weight, more process, and more history to protect.

Nobody talks about what it actually feels like to do this alone. And I want to, because our industry suffers too much from posturing. From the curated highlight reel. From the pretence that conviction is a permanent state rather than something you have to rebuild, sometimes daily. Being a solo GP is not glamorous. I want to be clear about that, because the version that gets described publicly is incomplete in a way that I think does real harm to the people who are considering this path.

Not the structural alone. Not the “I am the sole decision-maker” alone. The other kind. The kind that arrives at two in the morning when a founder you believe in with everything you have is running out of road and you are the only person in the world carrying the full weight of that moment. The kind that shows up after a fund close, when the congratulations fade and you are suddenly holding the responsibility for other people’s capital, other people’s trust, other people’s futures, with no partner to lean on when the room goes quiet. The kind that does not care that you chose this deliberately, that you would choose it again, that the model is working. It arrives anyway.

Venture capital has one of the longest feedback loops of any profession on earth. You make a decision today that you will not be able to fully evaluate for seven, eight, ten years. You live with that uncertainty every single day, in silence, because the job requires you to project conviction even when what you are actually doing is holding doubt. And you do hold doubt. Deep doubt. About specific bets, about the direction of the firm, about whether the things you cannot yet see will eventually become visible or whether you were simply wrong. Earlier in this piece I wrote that I carry the weight so that my colleagues can thrive, grow, and be the best version of themselves. That is true. And it is worth being honest about what that weight actually feels like from the inside, because it belongs entirely to the person who signed the LP agreements, who made the promises, who put their name on everything. It cannot be distributed without being transferred. And transferring it would not be fair to the people I built this firm to protect.

I have had moments of genuine spiralling. Periods where the solitude of the role collapsed inward and became something harder to name. Imposter syndrome is too clean a word for it. It is more like a sustained, private interrogation: who told you that you could do this, and what happens to everyone who trusted you if the answer turns out to be wrong? Those moments do not announce themselves. They accumulate quietly, and then they are suddenly very loud.

What I have built around myself over the years, slowly and not without cost, is the infrastructure that the role does not provide automatically. A small number of peers who carry similar weight and with whom honesty is possible. Relationships outside the firm and outside the industry, where I am not a GP or a founder or a thesis, just a person. The discipline to recognise when the internal voice has stopped being useful and started being corrosive, and to do something about it before it becomes structural. The capacity to have incredible conviction and at the same time sit with uncertainty without being consumed by it is not a failure of nerve. It is part of the job, and one of the most important things to learn to manage. None of this came naturally. All of it had to be built, deliberately, the same way you build anything that matters: through repetition, through failure, through learning what actually works rather than what sounds like it should. That process of building, of maturing into the weight of the role, is ongoing. I do not expect it to stop.

But there is a difference between carrying the weight and letting someone see what the weight looks like. The first belongs to one person. The second is something you can offer.

What I have also started to do, and this feels like one of the more meaningful things I have learned, is to selectively and carefully share glimpses of that weight with the people in the firm who are ready for it. Not to burden them. Not to transfer what belongs to me. But to begin socialising them with what leadership at this level actually looks like from the inside. The complexity of an LP relationship at a moment of difficulty. The texture of a decision where there is no clean answer. The feeling of holding conviction publicly while privately stress-testing everything. They do not need to carry it yet. But they deserve to see it, clearly and honestly, so that when the time comes, and it will come, the weight is not a surprise. That is not just succession planning. It is the most genuine form of mentorship I know how to offer.

I write this not because I have resolved it, but because I think the people who are considering this path deserve the full picture. The model is powerful. The structure works. The accountability paradox is real. And so is the solitude. The people who do this well are not the ones who feel it less. They are the ones who have been honest enough with themselves to build what they need to carry it, and humble enough to keep building as the weight grows.

Venture capital is one of the most structurally self-replicating industries in finance.

To start a fund, you have historically needed capital to launch it, existing GP relationships to buy into a stake, and personal GP commit to demonstrate alignment. These three requirements together produce a selection mechanism that reproduces the same investor class across generations. The people who become VCs are disproportionately the people who already have access to the exact ingredients that produce VCs.

The solo GP structure does not fix this automatically. But we do. We remove the constraints that make the traditional model so resistant to change. When carry is genuinely distributed to every level of the firm from day one, ownership is accessible to people who could not have bought into it through conventional GP structures. When the GP track is driven by contribution rather than tenure or pre-existing capital, the people who grow into ownership are the ones who earned it.

I committed to the entire GP commit myself, and I allow my colleagues to invest what they can, when they can, at whatever amount they can manage. There is no minimum. No pressure. No expectation of a lump sum. This creates a gradual entry into the economics of venture for people who would otherwise never have been in the room. It has proven to be an extraordinary vector for personal growth, for alignment, and for the kind of loyalty that does not come from a contract.

I started noa the same way I tell founders to start companies. Remove the scaffolding. See what the idea actually needs. Build exactly that. What the firm needed was not seven partners protecting their respective slices. It was a team of people who felt like owners, who made decisions on intellectual honesty rather than politics, with no ceiling on what they could achieve.

That is what we built. And it is what the industry needs more of.

The question is never really about the truck. The question is whether you are building something real.

Real means it does not depend on one person to function. Real means the IC is genuinely collective. Real means the carry is genuinely distributed. Real means the GP track is genuinely open to the people who build the firm. Real means the processes, the relationships, and the culture are institutional in the best sense: durable, consistent, and improving over time.

Those things take years to build. They are not visible from the outside, which is why the misconception persists. But they are what separate a solo GP firm built to last from a one-man band that happens to have some money behind it.

Our LPs initially backed a person on day one, and now they get a firm. The conviction of a known GP, the operational depth of an institution. Neither a committee that diffuses accountability nor a lone wolf who holds everything alone.

That is what we are. We never were anything else. The accountability was always concentrated in our DNA. The ownership was always distributed throughout.

That is the accountability paradox. And it is the most misunderstood thing about the model.

The best part of this journey, the part that gives me more satisfaction than any deal we have done, is watching the people who joined this firm grow into leaders who will shape it long after I have had my turn.

That is the firm. And today, the firm is a partner with some of the most consequential founders of the next decade; they understand who their partner is in noa, unequivocally.

And we are just getting started.

Onwards and upwards. Always.

Gregory

Gregory Dewerpe is Founder and Managing Partner at noa, where he oversees the firm’s strategy and vision while working closely with founders and portfolio companies across the investment journey.