Founder · Investor · Occasional Essayist
Marcus
Vane
I build and back companies that make slow industries fast.
Conviction
The boring trillion
The best returns of the next twenty years will not come from inventing new desires. They will come from removing forty years of friction from industries everyone depends on and nobody wants to touch.
Freight brokerage, title insurance, industrial procurement, municipal permitting — markets measured in trillions, run on fax-machine logic. The founders who win here are rarely the loudest people in the room. They are the ones willing to spend three years earning the trust of an industry before the curve bends.
That is who I work with. I write early checks, take the 2 a.m. calls, and stay through the unglamorous middle — because I have lived it three times, and the middle is where the company is actually built.
— M.V.
Ventures
Companies I have built
Three foundings, two exits, one still compounding. Each began as a spreadsheet nobody else wanted to open.
Ledgerline
Reconciliation infrastructure for mid-market freight. Grew to clearing $4B in annual settlements across 900 carriers.
Started as a spreadsheet macro for one Ohio brokerage. The lesson that stuck: in freight, trust is the product — software is just how you deliver it. Sold to the industry's largest clearing network in 2017.
Acquired 2017 · 11x on first capital
Permitto
Turned municipal permitting from a 90-day paper chase into a same-week API for builders in 140 cities.
We spent the first eighteen months embedded inside three city permitting offices before writing a line of product code. Every wedge we later won traced back to those desks.
Acquired 2022 · team of 6 → 210
Quarry OS
An operating system for aggregate mining logistics — the least glamorous supply chain on Earth, and the one every road is made of.
Aggregate moves 20 billion tons a year on handshakes and whiteboards. Quarry OS now schedules haul-outs for 60 pits across four states; the whiteboards are staying, but they finally agree with the ledger.
Series B · compounding
Vane Holdings
The umbrella for my long-horizon positions — permanent capital, no fund clock, no forced exits.
Structured deliberately dull: no LPs to please quarterly, no artificial exit windows. Companies join the holding when the founders want a shareholder who measures in decades.
Horizon · 20 years
Investments
Where the checks went
Twenty-seven positions, pre-seed through Series A. A selection the founders let me name in public.
Speaking & Press
On the record
The Boring Trillion
Why the dullest markets produce the most durable companies — the talk the thesis grew out of.
Three Foundings, One Lesson
Two hours on the unglamorous middle: hiring badly, firing late, and surviving both.
Permanent Capital, Patient Founders
The case against the fund clock, and what stewardship looks like at a twenty-year horizon.
Contact
Building something
unfashionable?
I read every note from founders working on slow industries. Tell me what the incumbents are missing — two paragraphs is plenty.
Write to medesk@marcusvane.co