Carmen Alfonso Rico / Cocoa Ventures

The formula came out of a pretty specific moment. End of 2020, Carmen was living in two worlds — writing €50k pre-seed angel checks into European companies, getting into anything she wanted, building cap tables with friends — and also writing €25M institutional checks, competing for 15-18% ownership at every turn. One world felt like collaboration. The other felt like combat. And combat meant less access. She asked herself how a fund works without optimizing for ownership stake, wrote the equation down where fund return equals fund size divided by ownership stake at exit, realized stake matters but is relative to fund size, and went out to build a fund around it.

Carmen Alfonso Rico spent a decade inside Europe's most established funds. First Felix Capital, where she joined before the office existed, then Blossom, where she watched Series As go from €4M rounds to €30M and the path to founder become the most coveted thing in the room. She walked away and built Cocoa, a now €23M Fund II writing €250-500k angel checks at pre-seed and seed across European founders. No board seats. Doesn't lead.

Our conversation gets into where the whole thing started. Carmen was a first check into Johnny Boufarhat's pre-launch events platform, built the entire early cap table through her own network, and watched Hopin go from nothing to $140M ARR and nearly $8B valuation in 24 months. She never sold. Made nothing. Yet her optimism sees it as one of the best things that ever happened to her — because it showed her the power of small to access the best companies and build trust with founders. We talk about "killer with a heart" as an investment thesis, and what it actually looks like in practice: the founder who slept at a Hamburg steel mill to work from 1am to 5am as electricity prices surged and all steel mills in Europe shut down; the founder who saw the future of inference coming and bet everything on it. We also get into the SF welcome committee she's quietly built for European founders making the migration west, and why she thinks the great pre-seed migration has already started.

Since we recorded, Cocoa's story with Killers with a Heart got a new chapter. Cocoa invested in AI hardware company Fractile in 2024, and Carmen just forward deployed herself into the company to lead execution. In her words: "the unimaginable became inevitable. Cocoa keeps going, with Carmen backing killers with a heart, now from inside the AI buildout."

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts