by Jordan Fulghum, July 2026
In my career, I've been at the center of product, design, and engineering. I've helped start software companies, led product teams, written code, designed interfaces, scaled teams, and generally felt most useful somewhere near the middle of software.
More recently, my work has pulled me closer to the physical world. I've been supporting mid-market companies, many of them old-school manufacturers and operators in the Midwest, as they figure out how to use AI, software, and better systems to unlock growth, reduce operational costs, and modernize/automate workflows.
This recent work changed my view of where the opportunity is. I already had high conviction in AI from a technical perspective but what surprised me was the pace of adoption. These companies get it. They are in a hurry to quote faster, schedule better, automate back-office work, improve customer operations, connect broken systems, and make better decisions with the data they already have. They know they need it. They need the know-how.
When you see the technology stack holding together real businesses in the real economy, it becomes very clear how much leverage is still waiting to be applied.
I'm also drawn to the people at 81. I first worked with Vijen a dozen+ years ago and, as an LP in the fund myself, I've had the opportunity to stay close to the team and portfolio companies over the past few years. It's hard to do meaningful work without trust, shared standards, and a group of decent people willing to stay close to the details.
81 invests in the part of the economy that most of venture capital was not built to understand: services, manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, trades, and the physical world. Businesses that are often too operationally complex for VC and too early for private equity. Businesses with cash flow, employees, customers. They've generally found product/market fit.
For a long time, software felt like the center of the world. If you wanted leverage, you built software. The last couple of years have complicated that for me.
Software still matters, probably more than ever. However, I am less convinced that the best opportunities are pure software plays. I think the more interesting work now is applying software and AI inside durable, necessary businesses that have figured out the hard parts, often very manually, and are ready to scale without a corresponding growth in headcount and OpEx.
A manufacturer doesn't need a full-time CTO. A healthcare services business probably shouldn't raise traditional VC funding. Instead, in addition to a capital partner, they need guidance in finding leverage through new technology and people who can sit with the employees, understand the workflow, find the bottleneck, build the tool, connect the systems, and make the company better in the actual operation. The big opportunity is to bring software leverage directly into the existing operating model.
That's the work I'm excited to do at 81: working with our portfolio companies, side by side, sleeves up, across product, design, engineering, AI, systems, data, internal tools, and whatever else helps these companies scale without losing what made them good in the first place.
For years, these businesses were called boring. I think that was a category error.
Boring kinda means durable, or necessary. It means the customer actually needs the thing. Boring means the work probably still matters when the market turns. With AI, boring businesses may actually have more technical upside than anyone realizes.
I'm joining 81 because I believe the next great technology story is not just about inventing more software companies, but about bringing modern tech leverage to the serious, boring businesses that already hold the country together.
Get in touch if you'd like to learn more about our approach.
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