MANIFESTO FOR INVESTING
I think risk takers are the engine of human progress, and I believe my purpose in life is to back these people. But risk capital, frankly, is abundant. The scarce thing now is believing in founders and ideas that have not been validated by someone else. So, I define my job as being willing to underwrite something that does not have any true comps; I don’t care who said yes or no to you, I want to learn what you’re made of and how you think.
Why do I feel this strongly about taking bets on people? Three people took a risk on me and it decided the trajectory of my life-- so i understand the power of your first believers.
Email me if people think you are too obsessed with one idea, if you are allergic to authority, if writing helps you think clearly, if you care more about what people do than what they say, if you have a stubborn sense of what’s right and wrong, if you’d rather be alone than managed, if what you are building refuses to be classified, if you play to win, and if you are an absolutist when it comes to your field of expertise but radically humble when it doesn’t.
Areas I think a lot about:
Me →
I grew up in Texas (Cowboys forever) and spent my teen years playing lacrosse and trying to figure out why people are the way they are. I was obsessed with the show House MD...it was the first time I noticed that what makes someone great is usually the thing that everyone wants them to fix.
I wanted to keep pulling at the tension between what’s in our control and what isn’t, so I studied neuroscience and philosophy. Researching the mechanisms behind anxiety disorders and teaching philosophy in prison taught me two things: our personalities are more fixed that we think, but our state of mind is more in our control than we realize. I still think about both when I meet founders.
Later, I spent a few years doing computational neuroscience and clinical trials. What stuck with me the most was how well the brain makes good decisions with bad information. A figure skater can land a triple axel on a sliver steel even though her eyes, inner years, and muscles are sending her imprecise, slightly delayed, sometimes contradictory reports about where her body is. The brain doesn’t wait for certainty, and I have never wanted to either.
- Psychology
- Religion
- Brazilian Jiu Jitsu & Chess
- Neuroscience
- Psychedelics & Meditation
- Art & Design & Rap
- Secret History by Donna Tartt
- The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
- Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
- Evidence for cognitive impairment in patients with vestibular disorders
- How peripheral vestibular damage affects velocity storage: a causative explanation
- Vestibular dysfunction in NF2–related schwannomatosis
- Aberrant three-dimensional estimates of head motion and orientation are generated by the brain when the vestibular periphery is damaged
-
Gene therapy
-
Batteries
-
Satellites
-
Frontier AI models
-
AI for neuroscience
- Consumer Hardware