a reflection on 10 years in vc at 28
Things have finally lined up
Today marks my first decade in venture completed, and I still can’t grow a beard. Unlike the first five years, I’ve now been able to walk into essentially any room in venture without my age coming under question. However, that’s been replaced by race. Everything has been about demographics rather than the quality of ideas. Age was easy because it was a waiting game, race is different because it doesn’t really change — only attitudes around it change. Fortunately, many high-quality thinkers have called this out, and SCOTUS has acted on this too. Now that we’re back to an industry based on ability and idea meritocracy, here are some of mine.
The world is going through a reformation…
Retrospectives like this are always strange. In my five-year review, I said that the number of service companies that transition into funds will increase sharply, that many more VCs will enter the field, especially around consumer tech, AR, social, and crypto, and that it was time to get my own fund set up. I stand by all of these points, but it frustrates me that they still aren’t obvious to most of the venture industry and society more broadly.
23-year-old me knew that a lot of society’s core infrastructure was broken. Venture, academia, media — the list goes on. However, I didn’t know much about how they worked on a first principles basis. I had seen some early success with some of my independent research, Reverse ICOs especially, but I still had a long way to go. On the practitioner side, I was in the wilderness somewhat, overqualified to be an associate and underqualified to be a partner. Recruiters still don’t know quite what to do with theorist-practitioners, let alone independent ones.
…underpinned by venture capital…
I’ve spent the past five years in monk mode — without the dopamine fasting. Essentially, my outlook on venture became so widely removed from the loudest voices in the space that I was forced to dig deeper and deeper into fundamentals to keep myself sane. My own personal ‘valley of despair’ (à la Roelof). I spent a lot of time thinking about how to pay for UBI, and how to drive infrastructural improvements in the venture space — both without any form of racialisation. It became clear that Wealth-Derived Tax is a much better solution than affirmative action, and that Simplify is a much better solution than the racialised scout programmes, angel programmes, funds and fund investments that flood venture. Generalised policy with targeted apology is always best.
I like the SEALs’ analogy “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”. My crypto experience gave me the practical insight that the world is built on incentive engineering, and in exploring that independently I internalised some core tenets:
People don’t think.
Raise when your narrative is strongest.
Deep tech = tech, ‘old’ tech = tech-enabled.
Academic readiness ≠ political readiness.
Europe is an emerging (venture) market.
Institutional family offices are society’s backbone.
There is no such thing as inclusion through exclusion.
People don’t understand probability and stats, especially confounding factors.
It’s not about what you say, it’s about what you do.
There’s nothing worse than a wealthy, influential and opinionated person who is provably wrong.
Health has three components: mental, physical, and aesthetic — fix them in that order.
Only three questions matter: what have you invented? what have you built? what have you done that’s uniquely difficult?
Take a ‘concentric ikigai’ approach — find what you’re passionate about, within that find what you’re good at, within that find what society needs, within that find what pays.
…which itself is going through an inflection
I think that society has traditionally held three core false intersubjective beliefs. Prioritising normalcy over health, making it easier to build wealth through marriage and inheritance than through hard work and invention, and not delineating between what is real and what merely exists. These lead to problems like the broken education system, the fallible DEI ‘industry’, and demographic propaganda (e.g. anti-trans) more broadly. If we learn to prioritise health, reward foundational progress, and understand healthy classification, then we’ll be on a path to great things.
I like to play at points of inception (creating new things), inflection (maximising an entity’s full potential), and inversion (starting from an exciting point in the future and working backwards). I split my work up between five core conceptual vehicles to do so.
WarwickTECH, seeding idea-stage companies out of Warwick University (inception).
Simplify, seeding wildcard venture cards globally (inception).
Transcendence, backing planetary-scale companies and protocols with research and policy risk (inflection).
Rotas, exploring the practical applications of technology in society (inversion).
Finally, Inversion Holdings, my single-family office (current net worth: $0), ties everything together and covers anything that the other four vehicles can’t.
I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Protestant Reformation and comparing it to our situation today. I believe that we are in for the greatest transformation in global society for at least 500 years — and I’m ready for the ride.
I sense that crypto natives are bounded by a sense of broken trust. At some point in our lives, an authority who was supposed to nurture and protect us made our well-being worse, not better. I am no exception. This has led me down a path of independence where all purpose and meaning are found from within. If nihilism and metamodernism are the new norms, our institutions will reengineer themselves around this new reality. Let’s see how we fare 10 years from now, where hopefully neither my age nor my race will matter.
