Chris Farmer designed SignalFire from scratch as a quant-style VC firm where engineers, data scientists, and portfolio support staff have equal standing with investing partners—everyone gets carry with no deal attribution, inverting the typical model where deal partners are heroes and data teams work in the background. He personally bootstrapped this data-heavy platform by running corporate advisory projects to pay AWS bills that exceeded management fees on the first fund, and built Beacon as a full-stack system across sourcing, picking, winning, portfolio support, and portfolio construction rather than just a deal-sourcing tool. Chris Farmer designed SignalFire from scratch as a quant-style VC firm where engineers, data scientists, and portfolio support staff have equal standing with investing partners—everyone gets carry with no deal attribution, inverting the typical model where deal partners are heroes and data teams work in the background. He personally bootstrapped this data-heavy platform by running corporate advisory projects to pay AWS bills that exceeded management fees on the first fund, and built Beacon as a full-stack system across sourcing, picking, winning, portfolio support, and portfolio construction rather than just a deal-sourcing tool.