He had the exit, the money, and the itch that none of it scratched. Then he moved to Spain.

Josh Payne built and sold a company, started a VC fund, bootstrapped a new business to $30M ARR, and relocated his family to Mallorca. He joined the FOC community to talk about what none of it fixed — and what finally did.

From our FOC monthly community call  ·  Featuring Josh Payne, Founder of Onward & General Partner at his consumer fund

Josh Payne spent 10 years grinding as a founder. Nights, weekends, skipped his honeymoon. He made the money. He had the exit. And then, sitting with all of it, he realized the itch he'd been trying to scratch the whole time was still there.

That honesty set the tone for the whole call. Josh isn't the kind of founder who performs success. He's the kind who tells you what the scoreboard doesn't show — and what he did about it.

What Onward actually is

Most brands already absorb the cost of bad customer experiences — lost packages, damaged orders, returns. They fund it quietly and hope it doesn't get too expensive. Onward flips that model.

Instead of traditional shipping protection that benefits carriers, Onward is a customer experience product. Customers opt in and get something meaningful in return: 10% store credit on their next purchase, free return shipping labels, and a 90-day satisfaction guarantee — including refunds on consumables if they don't like the taste, the flavor, or the efficacy. The brand gets funded coverage for those experiences. The customer gets real value and an incentive to come back.

Josh bootstrapped it in 2023. It's now doing $30 million ARR, profitable, and working with brands like Plunge, Bubs, Equinox, Breeze, and Pop Water. He wasn't sharing those numbers publicly at the time of the call — but he shared them with this community because that's what this community is for.

Building the second time is a completely different sport

Josh described the early days of Onward as the least stressed he'd ever been building something. He had the VC fund as cover, some financial runway, and — crucially — no existential pressure riding on whether it worked.

That's not a luxury available to most first-time founders, and Josh was clear about that. He's not prescribing his path. He's describing it honestly. The relationships, the credibility, the ability to call up people he'd worked with for years and bring them along — all of that is accumulated over decades, not downloaded at the start.

His message to the first-timers in the room: you're building toward that version of yourself right now. The experience compounds whether or not the exit comes. The second time will be different because of everything you're learning doing it this way first.

Work-life integration, not balance

A year ago Josh moved his family to Mallorca, Spain. Nine hours ahead of LA, six ahead of New York, which means his evenings disappear into calls while his kids finish dinner without him. It's not perfect. He said so plainly.

But the mornings are free. The kids are thriving. They're meeting children from across Europe, picking up languages, eating new food, building a kind of worldview you can't manufacture in a suburb. And Josh gets to keep building — just differently than before.

The shift he described wasn't geographic. It was internal. He stopped treating 100-hour weeks as the proof of commitment and started asking what it would look like to build something sustainable and meaningful at the same time. Mallorca was the expression of that answer, not the cause of it.

What the fund looks for

Josh runs a consumer-focused fund writing checks of $100K to $300K, always as a follow-on investor. His sweet spot is brands doing $1M to $10M in revenue with high subscription rates and strong margins. Here's what he's actually looking at:

The Grüns miss — and what it taught him

Josh had a shot at Grüns at a $10M cap in their pre-seed. He passed. His reasoning at the time was rational: it was 2022, brand valuations were falling, gummies weren't really a proven category yet, and the product required eating five sugary chews to get a meaningful dose of greens.

Grüns went on to do $300M in revenue in 24 months.

His honest takeaway: he was evaluating the product when he should have been evaluating the founder. Chad's ability to raise, execute, and build a marketing machine was the signal — not whether the gummy format made rational sense in 2022. That reframe has changed how he approaches diligence at the fund.

What we took away

• —The money doesn't scratch the itch. Figure out what the itch actually is before you run yourself into the ground chasing the exit.
• —Work-life integration beats work-life balance. Don't hide the building from the people who matter. Bring them into it.
• —The second time is a different sport. Everything you're doing now is building toward that version of yourself.
• —Pre-revenue investing is effectively dead at the fund level. Prove it first, then raise.
• —Your go-to-market edge matters more than your product. What makes you the specific right person to win in your channel?
• —Give your first investors better terms. Crack the social proof problem early and the rest of the round gets easier.
• —Evaluate founders, not just products. The Grüns miss was a product evaluation masquerading as a diligence process.

Josh closed the way he opened — honestly. Building Onward while living in Mallorca, raising a fund, and trying to show his kids what it looks like to build something you actually love. Not the version of founder life that looks good on a deck. The version that actually holds up over 20 years.

This recap is from our FOC monthly community call. Josh Payne is the founder of Onward and a General Partner at his consumer-focused fund. You can find Onward at getonward.com.