Founders Fund partner Sam Blond has left the firm

• Sam Blond has left Founders Fund after 17 months with the firm.
• The former Brex executive said he's returning to life as an operator on X.

Sam Blond, the Founders Fund partner who brought sales expertise from his years at Brex and Zenefits, has left the firm, he announced on X. He's the second partner to depart Founders Fund this year after Keith Rabois made a return to Khosla Ventures in January.

"Full time investing / being a VC isn't the right fit for me and I've decided to go back to operating. More on what's next for me later," Blond wrote on X.

Blond was chief revenue officer and an early employee at Brex, the fintech that's raised billions in capital in its efforts to corner the market for credit cards for startups. He helped grow the business from less than $100 in sales to several hundred million dollars of annualized revenue, he told Forbes in 2022. While there, Blond caught the attention of partners at Founders Fund.

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Rabois told Forbes that Blond's decision to join Brex, Zenefits, and EchoSign as a very early employee, showed sharp powers of judgment. "Voting with your feet is even better than voting with your money," Rabois told Forbes.

Blond became a partner at Founders Fund in the second half of 2022, as big losses for tech stocks started to bleed into the private markets. Institutional investors pulled back from allocating money to venture capital and, in doing so, choked off access to easy capital for startups.

Since then, Founders Fund has tapped the breaks on fundraising. In March of 2022, it announced a close on $1.9 billion in capital commitments for its eighth early-stage fund. But a year later, Axios reported the firm shrunk the fund to about $900 million and would roll the additional $1 billion into a ninth fund.

The firm also slowed its pace of investing during that stretch, according to Crunchbase data. In 2022, Founders Fund took part in 84 rounds that totaled about $6.6 billion. Last year, it participated in about half the number of rounds with 45 deals. However, the cash raised in those rounds grew to $8 billion because it contributed to a gargantuan $6.5 billion Series I for the fintech Stripe.

Blond's departure quickly follows that of Rabois, whose own exit from the firm has sparked rumors of tensions among the partners. Rabois is rejoining Khosla Ventures after five years at Founders Fund.