Why I Fly to Alaska for an Operator's Kid's Birthday Party

By Drew Haney · Founder, Rooster Capital · May 2, 2026

If a funder treats you like a transaction, expect transactional results. The relationships I have with my best operators don't look anything like a vendor agreement. They look like the relationships I have with my closest friends.

The line that gets me weird looks at industry events

I told this story on the REtipster Podcast and the room got quiet for a second:

"I'm the only funder I know of that flies to Alaska to visit an operator's kid's birthday party. I drove to Canada to hang out with operators. I spent a week with them and I'm going to the hockey beer league. I saw his — he had a hat trick, he shot three goals." — Drew, on REtipster Podcast (Jan 2026)

That's not a flex. It's not even a "look how committed I am" line. It's the actual operating model of Rooster Capital, and I'll explain why it pays off.

What you learn at the kitchen table that you can't learn from a deal package

When I show up at an operator's house, I learn what their actual life looks like. How they treat their spouse. How they parent. How they handle pressure when the kids are losing it during dinner. Whether the systems they describe on a Zoom actually exist in real life.

None of that goes in a credit memo. All of it determines whether I'm going to be writing them checks five years from now.

The transactional alternative — why it kills funders

The funder who treats every deal as a one-off invoice eventually runs into one of these failure modes:

• They fund someone who looked great on paper and turned out to be a chronic excuse-maker.
• They get burned on a problem deal because the operator stopped communicating — the relationship was too thin to survive friction.
• They lose their best operators to competing funders who are faster, cheaper, or warmer.

The relationships I've built mean that when something goes sideways — and on an 848+-deal track record, plenty of things have gone sideways — the operator picks up the phone, tells me the truth, and we figure it out together.

The cost is a flight. The math is not even close.

People do the napkin math on this one wrong. They look at the cost of a flight to Alaska and say it's a luxury that doesn't pencil. The actual math is:

• One trip to visit an operator — a few hundred dollars and a weekend.
• That operator does 30+ deals with me over the next three years.
• The blended profit per deal far exceeds what a transactional funder ever sees on the same operator, because we trust each other enough to move fast and split risk fairly.

It's not a charity expense. It's the highest-yielding deployment of weekend time I've ever found.

What this looks like from the operator's side

If you're an operator deciding which funder to build a long relationship with: notice the ones whose response time stays fast even after the first deal closes. Notice the ones who ask about your family without it sounding like a sales tactic. Notice the ones who would notice if your tone shifted on a phone call.

That's not soft stuff. It's the hard signal that the relationship is durable.