The best VCs are closing deals on the mat now, and if you think that's about Jiu-Jitsu, you're missing the point.

The Summary

  • The Information profiled 15 rising VC partners poised to become general partners, revealing how deal-making has fundamentally changed
  • Emergence Capital's Yazan El-Baba closed a Series A by rolling on the mat with a founder after discovering shared martial arts passion
  • The real signal: relationship velocity and creative engagement now matter more than term sheets and pedigree

The Signal

This isn't a heartwarming story about finding common ground. It's about what happens when AI agents start handling due diligence and every VC firm has access to the same data rooms, the same financial models, the same market intelligence within minutes of a founder opening their round.

When information asymmetry collapses, relationships become the last defensible moat. El-Baba's Jiu-Jitsu sessions aren't cute founder relations theater. They're pattern recognition for how humans choose partners when the robots have already done the math. The founder he was courting could pull comps from three AI analysts before breakfast. What they couldn't automate was trust at speed.

The timing matters. We're watching the last generation of purely human-driven venture deals. In 18 months, every emerging GP will have agent co-pilots running parallel diligence, surfacing competitive intelligence, drafting terms. The ones who win will be the ones who figured out how to build conviction faster than their software can build spreadsheets.

This is the venture capital version of what's happening everywhere. As agents compress the information-gathering phase of every professional transaction, the remaining human steps get more important and more compressed. You don't get three meetings and a deck review. You get one conversation and a sparring session.

The Implication

If you're building something and taking VC money, watch how quickly your potential partners move from first contact to conviction. Slow means they're checking boxes. Fast means they've already decided and they're just making sure you want to work with them. The winners in the agent economy won't be the best analyzers. They'll be the best deciders.

For investors: your edge isn't your network or your pattern matching anymore. It's how fast you can build authentic relationships when everyone else has the same information you do.

Source: The Information