Chapter One's Jeff Morris Jr. promotes Jameson Sadel to GP and bets on London AI talent and IP-backed incubations

Summary

Jeff Morris Jr. is promoting Jameson Sadel to general partner at Chapter One, the early-stage venture firm he founded in 2019 as a solo GP. The move closes a chapter Morris says he saw coming by 2021, roughly a year and a half into running the fund alone. He chose to promote from within rather than recruit an external name, drawing the analogy to a head coaching search where the internal candidate already knows the players, the system, and the culture.

Sadel is based in London, and Morris frames that as a deliberate geographic bet. The thesis is that elite AI talent is clustering around Cambridge and Oxford, and that London-based founders — including people from Anthropic, DeepMind, and Granola — represent underpriced assets that will ultimately build companies in or migrate to the US. Chapter One sees itself as an early entry point into that pipeline rather than a European-market play.

Series B risk

Morris is candid about the hardest part of the 2019 and 2021 vintages: follow-on decisions. With AI companies now regularly hitting Series A rounds at $100 million, and those rounds often supported by $10–20 million in real revenue, the calculus for seed managers defending ownership has gotten harder, not easier. His read is that Series B risk in 2025 is roughly on par with the 2021 vintage — a period now widely viewed as a bubble — given the pace of competitive change and round pricing.

He sees the growth-fund strategy for seed managers as effectively dead. SPVs have picked up volume, and LP co-investment demand has grown meaningfully since 2019, though Morris advises against overshooting on any single deal.

IP-backed incubations

The other thread Morris previews is incubations. Chapter One is working on at least one, structured around licensing a globally recognized IP property to build a consumer or enterprise application on top of it. Morris declines to name the IP holder but frames the logic clearly: take a commoditized software category, attach a well-known brand to it, and use the IP as a distribution and differentiation lever. He plans to announce it within roughly three months.

Crypto and AI

Morris is skeptical of the AI-crypto intersection as currently framed. The one use case he finds credible is using crypto rails to monetize open-source AI developers — people who build models and tools but currently have no obvious path to capturing value from their work. Beyond that, he says the worlds remain largely separate: the best AI researchers in the Bay Area have little interest in crypto, and he's comfortable with that.