Part I: An ode to entrepreneurship and venture capital

Part II: what’s next and what’s important?

Recently I've started to realize why I've been so fascinated by and attracted to venture capital. It's not really the #1 career choice for 20yo kids that don't know what to do with their life, and yet, having barely heard it mentioned a few times, I already knew it was what I wanted to do when I'd grow up.

The reason, as I believe it today, is that venture capital is one of the most important activities of man kind: the choice of how to allocate resources.

That choice, now almost fully monopolized (as most everything else) by nation states governments (and more and more supranational entities), is also practiced at small but very very effective scale by small players around the world: angel investors, venture firms, accelerators, etc. They all have a bit of a say in what gets built by founders.

I believe practicing venture comes with an ethical, moral responsibility to all of your fellow humans on top of your limited partners for what you decide to invest in. Some people decide to invest in the next deployment of scooters around towns or the next 10 minute delivery app, and I think those people are failing all of us.

Would you rather come back home to your kid at home and say: "hey! today I've invested in a company that has a slightly better SaaS sales outreach technology" (or whatever) or "today I met with a founder that might solve humanity's quest for infinite energy (proteins, plastics, etc.)"?

I'm not a very ambitious person, and I think I can often keep my ego fairly in check (although that's not super easy all of the time), but I do like to make sure that what I do has some sort of importance, for me, my family and ideally for a larger number of people.

And I believe that in our era, venture and entrepreneurship are the most impactful things you could do with your time on this Earth.

In previous historic periods, the biggest impact you could have on the world was to become a general, go out on massive campaigns and conquer new regions for your empire, thus advancing the quality of life of all of the people on your side (cause you'd be enslaving the others or extracting value out of their regions anyways)

After a few centuries, this has transferred to becoming a career politician, or worse working in one of the shadowy agencies in charge of many a coup. There was nowhere else to have the outsized impact you could have while taking decisions for millions of people. Deciding on their economic activities, rights, bodies, religious and sexual freedoms but also on large scale wars and resource appropriation.

As nation states finish their dominance cycle and are all essentially bankrupt all around the world, indebted like some of the worst commercial paper you could find and absolutely impossibilitated in investing in new technology nor deploying new technologies in a fast way (read Patrick Collison's thoughts on the costs and timelines of new large scale projects) it's all in the hands of the ingenuity of private individuals and groups.

I would stipulate that as of today, it's entrepreneurs and early stage investors that have the largest impact on the world. And this will be the case for a few centuries.

Some people would push back on this view pointing out that people are building some pretty useless stuff all around the world for a quick buck, and that investors are giving them money to do it. That's undeniable, and probably part of the deal, but I feel we're at a very clear crossroad at the moment.

The younger generations are infinitely more aware of the shitty situation our planet and population find themselves in, and will more and more only justify working on important topics.

I've still got a lot of optimism left, and hope to keep it as I grow older. The bet here is that ingenious and crafty individuals will fill the gaps left by the old school institutions and show us and everyone else the way.

They'll rally people to follow them on their crazy journey, and figure out how the 8 billions of us can coexist peacefully and sustainably on this planet.

Like Cal Rodgers, which in 1911 completed the first coast to coast flight from New York to Pasadena. It took him 49 days!!

He crashed 16 times and broke multiple bones. He broke every possible part of the airplane, and yet he kept on going. When he got there, he said that he believed he'd see the day when it'd only take 3 days to cover the journey.

Now, there are two type of people in the world I believe, the ones that thought that this was absolutely crazy and the ones that were able to see where this was leading to. Even if there were no airports, it was incredibly dangerous, there was no navigation equipment (he was following the train tracks!), it was ridiculously expensive, it could only carry one person and the train only took seven days at a time in a much safer, much more comfortable ride.

Cal Rodgers was able to see the future we have today, where we can cross the world in less than 24 hours, and tried his best to make it happen (he unfortunately, but quite predictably I'd say, died in a plane accident a few days after his trip was over).

That is a pretty unruly founder and the perfect prototype of the founders I would love to meet every day.

My day to day is an ode to entrepreneurs, thanks for all that you do, for dedicating your lives to showing us a potential future that is better than what we'd get otherwise.

Us on the investing side are nothing like Cal Rodgers obviously, but we're like the people that would assemble at each of his landings. We'll be here on the sidelines, in a much more comfortable ride no doubt, but in awe and cheering from the bottom of our hearts for you.

---

Answer these two questions, and it's my belief you'll do well for yourself and for others in life.

I didn't know those two questions were the ones driving me, but I was feeling a nudge to explore early stage investing since I was in college in Italy (where the word "startup" truly had to yet enter the lexicon).

When I got a job in a small VC, I was appalled by the speed and the triteness of the companies being presented to us, until one day one deal came across the desk, with a 19 year old entrepreneur (easily half of the median age), and after convincing the firm to invest, I invested 50% of my then absolutely minimal bank account balance in it.

A lot of people thought we were nuts for giving money to a kid with basically no product working on a minuscule area of the internet. And yet, a few months ago that deal returned the fund.

The same happened when talking about Bitcoin in 2009/2010 and when investing in the Ethereum sale in 2014.

As I pass 10 years of investing in some form or another, I've thought long and hard: why was I able to make money? Is it that with everything going up, any monkey throwing darts would have performed well (which most likely is the case), or if I do actually have an edge, what is it?

It's not helping the companies grow like some mega ex-operator, that's for sure.

It's not by fighting to get into the most competitive deals like former investment bankers flying CEOs in their jet at 3am to a Vegas party (true story btw, a few VCs got on their jets in the US to wine and dine a portfolio founder in Paris, just for one evening).

But could it be just spending time at the fringes, sitting and asking yourself: what's next? I believe it can be.

A rising tide lifts all boats, so a lot of your mistakes can be forgiven, but you have to guess where the tide will actually be.

It also turns out that answering this question is the most intellectually fascinating journey one could embark on.

For this reason, I've decided to formally commit to doing this for a much longer time, by starting Unruly Capital, in which I'll be one of the largest LPs.

Unruly is a spirit, it's the spirit you find in the most interesting and successful people in history, and surely in the most successful entrepreneurs.

You can't build anything meaningful by complying to the status quo and social rules of your times, you must instead dare to challenge yourself in finding the hidden truth if you want to bend and shape the direction of history.

Unruly is thus a spirit that is at the core of the firm.

My previous firms have been named Mission and Market, and Semantic.

Mission and Market represents the two big streets in San Francisco where a lot of the startup activity was happening, but more importantely it also represents two core parts of a startup's focus: a strong mission to align and rally employees and a large market to support a large company.

Semantic to stress the meaningful, the important.

I'm not here to make a quick buck on the latest fad. Not because I wouldn't like it, but because, aside from not adding too much to the world, I find it too hard. It's by definition a hard strategy, where you have to guess which new speculation will be going on and find the right entry and exit points.

Focusing on the meaningful, I've found it to be a much more sustainable long term investment strategy. Meaningful companies attract the best people, and in turn create the most value. It might take a little bit more than the new fad, but the probability is much higher.

I like to think we already know what the core areas of focus and growth in the future will be, there is just a lack of guts to invest in them when it's not yet 100% guaranteed (some people tell me instead that  it's too hard to know what the world will look like and where the growth will come from, but then again I guess that's why they're not into VC and I like so much).

At Unruly I want to combine this ethos and vision.

Unruly will focus on important companies, with a strong mission and desire to shape the world for the better, building meaningful and important products in what will end up being large markets. It means trying to find what is unruly and crazy today, and will become normal tomorrow.

But there are no rules, no investment mandates in specific topics, just current areas of interest and conviction.

Unruly is built answering the question: what does a 100y investment institution look like?

And in formulating the answer, I came to the conclusion that by being long "real", useful and important innovation in any cycle it feels really hard to lose money.

It's hard to find ways to describe in a word what unruly will be focusing on but, if I had to choose one, it would be the frontier.

In history the frontier is where the most interesting, exciting and rewarding things happened. Either in the physical frontier of the new unexplored lands, like the pioneering settlers of the new world with their thirst for adventure and growth, or the frontiers of intellectual thought.

Both frontiers are full of danger, from unknown snake bites or a new tropical disease in the unknown territories, to the very real risk of being hanged or burned at the spike in the "civilized" world, so entrenched in its old ways.

Today it's hard to find unexplored lands (aside from new planets that is) but capitalism, and venture capital specifically, can remain a frontier way of life. A way to intellectually stimulate yourself to think about what is next, or, better, what should be next, and strategize about how to make that happen. Which companies, which entrepreneurs, which sectors, which geographies to focus on in order to create the new world you want.

So which are those frontiers?

The easiest heuristic I could find for something to be classified in that way is noticing if a lot of people are scared of it, and at the same time some of the smartest people you know spend all of their time thinking about it.

As of today, the things that fascinate me the most, while scaring a vast amount of people, remain hard deeptech focused on climate; genetic engineering; artificial intelligence; space technology; decentralized computing, finance and governance; anything built in and for Africa, synthetic biology; precision fermentation; new materials discovery; psychedelics and a longer tail of areas I'm not fully versed in yet.

But identifying the areas and trends is obviously not enough, then it becomes a question of finding what the meaningful things (ideas, products, companies) in each area will be.

That's a much more subjective topic, but at this period in time it seems pretty clear that implementing nature based solutions and new technologies to avoid a climate catastrophe is core to our species survival. At the same time, decentralizing and localizing production of energy, food, materials, etc. and trying to give back control of data and money to people instead of nation states or centralized institutions is a very important thing to work on.

On the other hand, it's very easy to define Unruly by what it won't be focusing on. Figuring out which new SaaS software large enterprises will start using, which new consumer app will have us glued to the screen for more time, or which new bored ape or game will explode in popularity do not fit the bill for me, and therefore will not be part of the investment activity.

As I sit here looking at the results of the previous firms, with Mission and Market Fund I fully returned almost two times over to LPs in 6 years (while keeping most of the winners still in the portfolio, including absolute rocketships like Replit, Atomwise and The Every Company); Semantic with massive winners like Nexus Mutual, Dune, Lido Arweave and more; and a personal blended angel portfolio return I couldn't ever dream about enabling me to not work anymore (including planet-changing companies like Twelve, Seaborg and Heart Aerospace), I'm confident this can also be a most rewarding journey.

But the confidence doesn't erase the risks, which I'm very well aware of. The frontier is full of them.

In this case, the dangers include obviously losing all of my (and my LPs') money, but also being made to look like an absolute idiot for believing in some crazy new obscure technology that will never work or some new belief that would make most want to imprison you.

But what is the fun in life in playing by the rules of your time?

Why join the navy if you can be a pirate? 🏴

Find us at unrulycap.com / @unrulyvc / Sifted

subscribe://