TBPN · Sep 28, 2026 · 32m · 22m saved
With Lo Toney, Founding and Managing Partner of Plexo Capital
Lo Toney set a goal for his firm in late 2023: get AI to do the work of one junior analyst. He now says it can do the work of a whole team.
Most venture firms grow by hiring. Plexo Capital backs small, first-time venture funds, and Toney said AI arrived just as a firm of his size needed leverage it could not pay people for.
"It's amazing how much leverage I can actually get from AI, which is great because you're a limited budget when you're a startup firm."
Lo Toney, Founding and Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, on TBPN, started the firm inside GV, Google's venture arm, and spun it out in 2018 with Alphabet as the anchor investor in its first fund.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 32 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
The best new venture managers are much more technical than they were 10 years ago, Toney said
Small funds are losing their ownership stakes because rounds grow so fast and big firms invest earlier
Plexo's first SPV was Anthropic's Series D at an $18B valuation, the most expensive deal it had ever seen
AI now does the work of a whole team at a small venture firm, not one junior analyst
Some managers focus on vice categories because little capital chases them and valuations stay reasonable
Peptides are one area where he sees the rules loosening, with GLP-1 drugs as the example
1. Plexo Began Inside GV
Toney was a partner at GV focused on marketplaces and mobile. GV backed small first-time funds that invested at the earliest stage, and helped them raise money in return for access to their deals.
"So I founded Plexo Capital while I was at GV, Google Ventures." — Lo Toney
"So we invested into about five funds that were emerging managers with unique perspectives and access to deal flow. And it worked for us and I looked at it and said, hey, I think I can build a strategy around this." — Lo Toney
He dated that to about 2016, when he moved into an entrepreneur-in-residence role to build the strategy.
"Spun out in the spring of twenty eighteen, brought on Alphabet as our anchor investor for our fund one, and also brought on some other big tech companies, Intel, Cisco, brought on some financial institutions like the Royal Bank of Canada, and some traditional institutional LPs like Ford Foundation and Mass Mutual." — Lo Toney
