Our Investment in Rivet

I never thought I’d be taking a San Francisco-Bridgeport flight in my life.

Yet here I was on a chilly May Saturday morning dutifully trekking across the country to meet a founder I’d met for 30 minutes on Zoom the day before.

What had prompted me to make this last minute trip?

It wasn’t the delicious Connecticut pizza that Nick Abouzeid introduced me to later that day. Instead, it was him and the company he was building: Rivet, the modern AI-enabled corporate tax prep firm.

Silicon Valley has been deluged with foxes over the past few years. Startups have become cool and founding a mainstream option. Nick is a throwback to a previous era – founders who are genuinely obsessed with one thing and one thing only and building a compounding machine to support it.

Hedgehogs…obsessively measure and track everything about their business, and over time, they acquire deep, relevant knowledge and expertise. Their single minded approach may appear risky at times but they are conservative by nature. Hedgehogs don’t speculate or make foolish bets. If all their eggs are in that one proverbial basket, they follow Mark Twain’s advice – and watch that basket very carefully…

The thing with Hedgehogs is that they never give up. They keep at it – and they don’t ever get bored because they just love what they do – and they have a lot of fun along the way. They can even be downright silly at times. Picture for a moment – Sam Walton leading the Wal-Mart cheer, or Warren Buffett strumming his ukulele in front of large crowds while bellowing out his favorite tunes…

In the end, we agree with Jim Collins – that Hedgehogs are the ones who build great, lasting companies. As entrepreneurs, they are the rarest of breeds – those who can start something anew, make it work, stick with it, and build something special, and ultimately, inspire others along the way, with their determination, dedication and commitment. - Ho Nam, Altos

Ever since I became a venture capitalist, the hedgehog founder is one of the archetypes I’ve loved working with. Saif Khawaja from Shinkei is a canonical example in my mind– someone who knew more about the fishing industry than anyone I’d ever met, with a fifty-year vision for remaking it. After we invested in their seed, Founders Fund led their A last year, and they’ve continued to make incredible progress since.

Nick is the same breed of founder. No one is more customer-obsessed than he is. He thinks very carefully about what it takes to create a delightful experience for something that most companies view as a pain rather than a joy. Like most hedgehog founders, he actually cares about his employees and wants to build a company where people can work at for decades, not just until a vesting cliff.

This relentlessness and determination is why Rivet works with some of the leading AI companies in the world, from Cursor to Cognition and Chai Discovery. AI services is a core idea we believe in at Susa. We were fortunate to be the first investors in Hanover Park last year, and Rivet fits squarely into that thesis area.

It’s rare you meet someone and you know exactly what they’ll be doing in 20+ years– and that their business will still be compounding that far into the future. Long-term thinking is rare these days. Yet when I sat across from Nick in his Woodbury home, I could see the vision: he’ll still be building Rivet, and it’ll be the premier corporate accounting firm on the planet.

Compounding is the eighth wonder of the world, and we’re excited to be alongside this journey with our friends at XYZ who we co-led the round with, and Haystack, who also participated.

If you’re a founder looking to have white-glove service on your taxes, please reach out to nick [at] rivet [dot] tax or me directly at pratyush [at] susaventures [dot] com.