Most venture stories are supposed to start in the same few places: Sand Hill Road, a boardroom in New York, a founder’s cramped apartment in San Francisco.
This one starts on a beach path in Vancouver.
It is a beautiful Friday at the end of May, and I am walking with Boris Wertz along Kitsilano Beach. Across the water, downtown rises behind the marina. To the north, the North Shore mountains are still capped with snow. People are walking dogs, pushing strollers, drinking coffee, running along the seawall, and playing beach volleyball.
By conventional venture logic, this is not where the story should begin.
Not with one of the best-performing early-stage investors of his generation. Not with a firm that has backed Jobber, Clio, Ada, Coinbase, Uniswap, Dapper Labs, Shippo, Outreach, Headout, Moment Energy, Patch, EtherFi, and others. Not with a fund franchise whose earliest vehicles have produced the kind of returns most seed investors spend their careers chasing.
That is the strange thing about Version One, the firm Boris built and later shaped with Angela Tran. It has become one of the more remarkable small-fund franchises in venture while remaining unusually human-scale. Most of its funds have performed in the top quartile of their peers, with some in the top 10 percent. Coinbase alone returned 1.7 times the size of Version One’s second fund. The firm now manages more than US$300 million across its funds.
And yet the core investing team is Boris and Angela. There is back-office support behind the scenes, including CFO Leah Gosbee, who has worked with the firm for more than a decade and formally joined in 2021. It is still a no-frills team, but much of what Boris and Angela do is made possible by the work happening quietly behind them.
That contrast is the story.
At a time when many venture firms have become asset managers, platforms, content machines, and multi-stage institutions, Version One has stayed small. Its edge has not come from scale. It has come from judgment, proximity, and the ability to understand founders before the market understands their companies.
Version One calls itself an “underdog for underdogs.” It is a phrase that only really makes sense once you look closely at the work. The underdog, for Boris and Angela, is not the weak founder. It is the founder whose strength is not yet obvious to the market.
Walking along Kitsilano, that idea feels less like a slogan than the through-line of Boris’s career. Before he became an investor in overlooked founders, he had to build from outside Silicon Valley himself.