Jamie Gull / Wave Function Ventures

Jamie Gull is the Founder and Solo GP of Wave Function Ventures, a freshly announced $15M Fund I writing $250K-$500K checks into pre-seed and seed across aerospace, defense, energy, manufacturing, and robotics.

Jamie’s background is in hardware. At 24, fresh out of Stanford with dual degrees in aerospace engineering, he headed to the Mojave Desert to Scaled Composites. Two years in, he made a call to split the tail on what became Stratolaunch, the world’s largest aircraft. His decision survived a $100M development program and flew a decade later.

Then SpaceX. Five years on Falcon 9, designing the thermal shield that lets the rocket survive reentry and land vertically. World’s first for a hypersonic orbital rocket program. The foundation of SpaceX’s reusable launch business.

Our conversation gets into his transition from operator to investor. Near the end of SpaceX, Jamie started angel investing. His first check: Boom Supersonic. Then he became a founder himself, starting Talyn Air, an electric VTOL company that went through YC Winter 2020. Eight government contracts, including US Air Force. Eventually acquired by Ampaire in 2023.

This is what founders get when they take Jamie’s money. Someone who’s lived the capital intensity, the regulatory friction, the government contracts. When he sits down with founders, he’s workshopping engineering models in Excel. Weight, cost, performance, sensitivities.

His rubric is simple: founding team matters, but unlike software, you can’t stumble around finding product-market fit in deep tech. The problem set needs to be nailed. The founder has to be technical. Non-negotiable.

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts