NFX

James Currier's journey to founding NFX began in rural New Hampshire, selling worms to fishermen for 50 cents each as a six-year-old—his first startup. Growing up on a dirt road a mile from pavement, with a music teacher mother and carpenter father, Currier was picked up off the ground in sixth grade after being beaten up. A friend, Lance Casey, suggested prep school as an escape. Though his family had no money, Exeter paid for his education, setting him on a trajectory through Princeton and Harvard Business School.

Currier became a founder four times before launching NFX as his fifth venture. Through his entrepreneurial experiences—including a gaming company that generated $120 million in revenue in year two—he developed deep expertise in what makes companies succeed. Most critically, he observed a pattern: the most valuable companies weren't built on better products alone, but on network effects. Over 20 years, Currier and his team studied this phenomenon obsessively, eventually identifying 17 distinct mathematical principles of network effects across companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Comcast.

NFX positioned itself as the world's leading expert on network effects, both as an investment thesis and as a framework for understanding business. The firm's blog became the second most popular VC website globally—despite having just 10 people compared to Andreessen Horowitz's 600—driven by viral content like "Your Life on Network Effects," which helped founders and investors understand how network dynamics apply to dating, real estate, hiring, and marriage.

Currier emphasizes that "savage founders"—those with exceptional speed, competitiveness, and emotional flexibility—succeed by abandoning their original ideas when necessary and pivoting toward what actually works. He highlights speed not as working 18-hour days, but as emotional flexibility to adapt. Examples include Mike Cassidy, who raised money in two days and hired teams in three, and the Poshmark CEO, who rebuilt his marketplace product repeatedly over 11 years before a multi-billion-dollar exit.

A critical insight Currier shares is the "technology window"—a predictable, finite period when new technology creates the conditions for dominant companies to emerge. The railroads had a 40-year window (1830-1870); consumer internet had roughly 20 years (1994-2014). AI's window opened around 2017, meaning the next 5-10 years are critical for founding the generational winners. Missing this window, as happened with automobile startups after 1928 (until Tesla reopened it with lithium batteries), means competing uphill against entrenched incumbents with network effects.

NFX manages close to $1.6 billion in assets and has become a leading voice on founder psychology, network effects, and technology cycles. Currier advises founders to think of themselves as "choosing a network" rather than choosing an industry, to embrace the discomfort of type-two-fun (suffering that you celebrate in retrospect), and to recognize emotional blockers—especially fear of getting answers "wrong"—as the real speed limiters. He argues that 85-90% of all tech returns have concentrated in the Bay Area not due to resources, but mindset: people there operate at a fundamentally different speed bar.