What Stays Human
How Supercruise built Flight Deck to automate everything that can be systematized, and protect everything that cannot
A note from Morgan: this is the first Afterburner post written by my best friend and someone I’ve admired for over 20 years, Chris Martin. You’ll see his name more often going forward. As many of you know, Chris is my co-founder at Supercruise. An experienced investor himself, Chris is my co-pilot in building Supercruise with a focus on our operational foundation, systems, processes, and administration. He built Flight Deck from scratch, and it is the reason our sourcing and research infrastructure works the way it does.
“If I was starting a venture capital firm today from scratch, there are only three things I would be focused on the humans in the firm doing.” - Fred Wilson, USV
Fred Wilson said this in an interview recently (linked below). In his view, those three things are thesis development, relationships with founders inside that thesis, and supporting founders after investment. Everything else goes to agents. He wrote a memo outlining this vision to his partners a year ago and they are starting to execute on it now.
When Morgan and I designed Supercruise, we made a deliberate choice to build a lean, focused firm. In our view, a smaller operation with the right approach can move faster, stay more selective, and think more clearly than a larger one carrying more overhead. However, staying lean also forces a sobering question: where does the real competitive edge come from? In the kind of investing we do - best characterized as targeted and conviction-driven - the answer comes back to preparation and credibility. We earn the right to back the best founders by showing up to every conversation more informed about their market, their competitive position, and their business than any outside observer. Knowing that context going into a first meeting (rather than after a multi-week get-to-know-you process) is the kind of edge that immediately builds credibility, trust, and compounds over time. The challenge is that generating that level of preparation takes an enormous amount of work and, at a firm our size, that workload either reduces the time we spend with founders or it does not get done at all. Of course, neither outcome is acceptable to us, so we custom-built a solution: Flight Deck.
Flight Deck is Supercruise’s proprietary, AI-driven research suite, built from scratch on a custom research architecture, governed by a core principle: We compress the most time-intensive parts of our research and sourcing funnel to focus our efforts most sharply on winning with the best founders.
Within Flight Deck, Overwatch handles our market research. When we are evaluating a new sector or tracking a space we already know, Overwatch produces a structured report covering competitive landscape, market dynamics, comparable companies, and emerging signals, among other topics. It does in minutes what used to take our junior selves days or weeks to compile (though we had less gray hair then).
Pathfinder connects directly to our primary sourcing database and surfaces companies matching our thesis criteria in real time. Bootstrapped, profitable, B2B software, the ARR range we target, the ownership profile we want. The output is not a raw list to wade through but instead a parameterized, pre-qualified set of candidates that already fit the model before we have spent hours sifting through noise. That distinction matters because it means we are not using our time to triage, but instead to keenly evaluate. It also augments our fuller suite of sourcing channels, like network relationships and events.
Radar Sweep handles batch screening across large company sets. It runs each company through a defined criteria stack critical to our target buy-box. The tool does this at roughly ten times the speed a team member could manage manually, and every company goes through the same checks in the same order.
Designator is the final tool we use before any first engagement with a founder. Once we have approved a target via Radar Sweep, Designator produces a structured deep-dive report covering the target’s business model, revenue signals, competitive positioning, and founder background, all organized around the specific questions we need answered before deciding whether to move forward. All within minutes. This is not a generic company summary you could pull from a database. It is purpose-built research structured around our criteria, designed to put us in an informed position before we ever get on a call.
Before any first call with a founder, we know the market, the company, and the competitive landscape in a way that used to require weeks of work and a team to produce. Yet, the real benefit of Flight Deck is what it allows us to do instead: Have the time and headspace to find the right founders, deeply learn their businesses, and build high-touch, credible relationships at a senior level. While we love the efficiency, this is all designed to improve the founder experience.
However, none of that works without being equally intentional about where Flight Deck’s job ends. Getting that right required building a rules-based architecture explicitly into each tool with a simple constraint: Flight Deck informs, the team decides, and we never outsource our critical thinking to AI. Nothing in this system makes a judgment call, renders an opinion on a founder, or substitutes algorithmic output for human conviction. Every tool is purpose-built to surface only data and facts, compress information, and present context. We know there is a version of AI-assisted investing that outsources judgment to the tools and calls it “efficiency,” but we deliberately built the opposite. Our research is faster, the screening is broader, the prep is deeper - and that’s great - but the thinking is still ours, and we take that seriously.
When I watched the Wilson interview, I was struck by how cleanly his framework for what stays human maps onto what we have built with Flight Deck. We believe that convergence tends to mean something.
Fundraising as an emerging manager requires a particular kind of endurance. We push ahead because we believe in what we are building, all the while staying alert to signals that the building is going in the right direction. Watching an investor of Wilson’s standing independently converge on our operating model, to us, feels like one of those signals.
We are building Supercruise for founders who want a firm that has done the work, and for LPs who want to back a team that has spent the time to build and formalize an edge. If that sounds like you, let’s talk.
Watch the full interview: