Articles from Brett Calhoun

COLUMBIA, MO / ACCESS Newswire / October 28, 2026 / Brett Calhoun, Managing General Partner of the pre-seed firm Redbud VC, has spent four years building a process designed to do something most venture investors say is impossible: evaluate a founder at the earliest stage without using their background as a proxy. Redbud writes first checks of $250,000 to $500,000, has backed 43 founding teams across more than twenty cities, and reports being the first institutional investor in more than sixty percent of its portfolio. At that stage there is rarely a product, almost never revenue, and nothing much to diligence except the people. Brett Calhoun's position is that the industry's default response to that uncertainty, leaning on where a founder went to school and who they worked for, is not rigor. It is a shortcut that quietly selects for a narrow kind of person.

COLUMBIA, MO / ACCESS Newswire / October 28, 2026 / Brett Calhoun is the Managing General Partner of Redbud VC, a pre-seed venture firm that writes first checks into outsider founders wherever they are building. In March 2026 Redbud closed a $25 million second fund, five times the size of its first, and added a further $10 million for an Opportunity Fund in August. The firm has now backed 43 founding teams across more than twenty cities in North America. Brett Calhoun argues that this is not a regional strategy or a charitable one. It is a pricing argument: that talent is distributed far more evenly across the country than capital is, and that the gap between those two facts is where the returns sit.