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Howard Morgan

Co-founder of First Round Capital, First Round Capital

Search every verified Howard Morgan interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Howard Morgan, co-founder of First Round Capital and chairman of B Capital, spoke at the A5X Ascent Series hosted by NUS Enterprise on April 17, 2026. During the session, he shared his perspective on venture capital investment in deep technology. Morgan stated that while entrepreneurs are important, "the most important thing is a giant market," and that "great science does not automatically give you a venture company," emphasizing that technology push requires a market pull to address an urgent customer problem. He also highlighted the importance of unit cost economics and defensible intellectual property, noting that a startup needs an "order of magnitude improvement over the alternatives" to be fundable. Morgan discussed his firm's investment in the quantum computing company EROQ, describing a process of milestone-based funding that began in 2022 after years of observing the team's persistence. He predicted that humanoid robots "will be a trillion dollar business" and that "we will see robots in our homes in the next 10 years."

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Notable quotes

“We pulled back from China because the geopolitical winds are just making it very difficult even though it's still a great market; she has gone too far into state control and state-owned enterprises have never worked. We are finding India to be extremely business friendly now and Modi over the last decade has really changed the climate for doing business.”

“The venture capital [at Renaissance] is now a top decile venture firm, it's 25% IRR but it takes years to make it liquid and we now have the quant trading to be 38% IRR and if I want to go home tomorrow I can just cash out all the positions and go home, so we took the venture out of Renaissance at that point.”

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