Venture capital loves to talk about returns, but what happens when the returns stop coming? Johnny, a venture investor who has deployed capital inside a $20 billion corporate fund, a top-quartile independent fund, and now a first-time fund backed by a $500 million Kansas City real estate platform, has seen the industry from every angle. And he’s not afraid to say the quiet part out loud: many fund vintages aren’t returning capital to their investors, and “you can’t eat IRR.”

In this conversation, Johnny breaks down why he’s betting on pre-seed startups instead of chasing the mega-rounds making headlines, how AI is compressing the cost and time it takes to build a company, and why he thinks the venture industry’s own structure: more funds, more capital, more competition, may be working against it. He also gets candid about what founders get wrong when raising money, why rejection from an investor is rarely personal, and why “not all money is good money.”

This episode blends hard-won portfolio strategy with a bigger question about what’s broken in how startups get funded and what a more grounded, founder-first model could look like, built not from Silicon Valley, but from Kansas City.