Our Thesis
What we invest in, at what stage, and what has to be true before we write a cheque. Published openly so founders can hold us to it.
Stage and shape
Pre-seed and seed. First institutional money, or close to it — the round where the evidence is a person and a prototype rather than a cohort chart.
We are generalist by sector and deliberately international: the founders we are built to judge are not concentrated in one city, and the assessment we run does not depend on being in the same room.
What has to be true
A market that can carry a large outcome, a wedge that a small team can actually reach, and a founder whose account of their own failures is specific. Vague failure stories are the single most reliable warning sign we have found.
We also want the founder to be able to say what would make them stop. Someone who cannot describe a disconfirming result is not running an experiment; they are defending a position.
Concentration, and why
Venture returns follow a power law: a small number of positions carry the fund, and the median investment returns close to nothing. That is not a market anomaly to be smoothed away — it is the shape of the asset class, and a portfolio built to avoid it also avoids the outcome that pays.
So the portfolio is small enough that every position is one we can defend individually, and every founder gets real time rather than a quarterly check-in.
What we do not do
We do not take a board seat as a condition. We do not require a founder to move. We do not make the second instrument a filter — no founder is rejected because of what the Soul-Map says, and any investor who tells you they can rank people that precisely is selling something.
And we do not promise returns. This page is a description of how we work, not an offer.