Unruly Q1'26 LP Letter

Peter Thiel concluded his lectures in Rome verbatim: "This is a time not for balance, quietude or mere contemplation, it is a time for action." As always, it sounded extreme in the moment, but I believe it will come to be seen as a fundamental call to action for people to wake up from what has been a collective stupor that has lasted for way too long.

I want to lay out what we see, how we think about it, and what it means for where we deploy capital.

Waking up from a 60-year stupor

For the past 60 years, we have delegated virtually everything to a single, all-powerful entity: the nation state. Technological development, education, healthcare, security, money, and oftentimes thinking itself. We outsourced all of it with the internalized belief that we could stop thinking about it, and we could now take it for granted as it would keep working. Well, it's not working anymore. Nation states are now drowning in liabilities they will never be able to pay off, running on infrastructure they can no longer maintain, and regulating technologies they fundamentally do not understand. This letter is about people: people noticing this even if in a subconscious way, and waking up (in very different ways).

On one end of the spectrum, normal people are realizing the ground is shifting and they are getting both scared and angry. We fully expect the general population to become massively adversarial to fundamental technologies like AI, robotics and genetic engineering. As an industry, I'm afraid we are 1) not taking this seriously enough and 2) not developing good enough answers to the very reasonable concerns that people have. Most people care first about their own welfare in the short term, with the global advancement of technology being very low on their list of priorities (contrary to yours truly, as here we believe the two things are very much correlated).

We posit that the political consequences of this reaction are not priced in. Governments will try to arouse and leverage this fear to engineer even more state control, precisely as their ability to deliver on promises evaporates.

They will instigate the Butlerian Jihad of the 2000s, and the world will be very much different based on its outcome.

But on the very opposite end, and our end if we must say, something much more exciting is happening: a real, tangible awakening. People are starting to realize the limits of the nation state's ability to be the best and cheapest provider of all these services, and they are concluding that they might have to take them on themselves if we want to keep the quality of life we've grown accustomed to. We see young founders everywhere (US, EU, India, China, Japan, Korea) embracing a completely new way of building companies, one defined by a set of words that has so far completely eluded the tech sector: greatness, audacity, urgency and consequence.

Gone is the time of the quick app to make a quick buck. It is the time of founders building companies because the world would be intolerable without them and it would be a waste of their lives not to build them. Because no one is coming to help. And the state certainly won't have the power, the incentives, the will nor the ability to do so. The State was not designed to face great challenges. It's a “state” of administrators, middle managers, policy redactors and implementers. There are no creators, no visionaries, no makers.The failures of modern megabureaucracies are a feature, not a bug. They were meant to put down genius to make society work together, they are normalization machines engineered to subdue the daring, humiliate the exception, shame the one who transcends.

This is making founders rebel and rediscover the all-too-important virtues of volitions and agency. Two of our very favorites at Unruly. But we might be getting into overused territory with these terms, which actually don’t even capture the full meaning of what we’re seeing: entelechy. Entelechy is the life force that is needed to bring something to its most blessed state. It is what moves us, what guides, the driving force of people and organizations.

We’re collectively rediscovering the striving to tap into the entelechy that is in us.

Ensuring entelechy has now become humanity’s sovereign imperative, and we’re here for it.

An energy-bound world

The world has always been energy-bound.

Everything we have today, we only have because we found a viscous, sticky black substance in the ground, and it completely changed our lives. Without oil, we'd still be in the Industrial Revolution era (which was in turn enabled by coal). As AI and robotics bring the cost of labor and intelligence down dramatically, the cost of products and services will finally trend towards their actual energy cost (plus real estate costs, especially in food and mining).

As a concrete example of the world in a few decades we can think of say your water boiler breaking. Today you pay for a plumber's time, expertise, travel, the parts, and obviously their profit. Tomorrow, a robot would be dispatched, take a scan, 3D print the replacement part, fix it, test it, and would then return to base.

The cost of the whole thing would be limited to the energy needed by that robot to operate and travel, plus the raw materials. What remains is energy. This is the transition we are investing through: from a labor-bound and intelligence-bound economy to an energy-bound and materials-bound economy. The main goal of the world will be to bring down the cost of energy. Progress is reducing the overheads of the physical world to an asymptote of the cost of energy.

And this is also why software, while it will obviously still exist, won't be capturing value the way it has for the past two decades. The scarcity of software engineers is what enabled gargantuan profits in tech: there were only so many firms that could organize themselves to create useful products while paying engineers $100k+ on the low end. As the ability to create software is being fully democratized by AI, the scarcity premium that enabled large profit machines disappears.

So where does the value flow?

Glad you asked! This is the question we spend the most time on.

• Energy. Whoever will be able to produce it, store it and transport it cheaply and abundantly will win. You could call it the new oil race, except one gram of uranium embeds the energy of 15 barrels of oil, the sun sends us 113 billion-equivalent energy every day, and then it all runs at 200000 km/s

• Hard, physical industries. The collective stupor wakeup is also a wakeup from the sweet embrace of easy software. But all that’s easy is destined for doom. As Tolkien has Elron say: “The westward road seems easiest. Therefore it must be shunned, for it will be watched. Now at this last we must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be. To walk into peril.”

• Robotics and the full robotics supply chain. We need to build, deploy, finance, maintain, sell and power billions of robots. The entire stack, from actuators to autonomy software to fleet management to robotics-as-a-service financing, is wide open. The opportunity before us is rebuilding the entire labor stack from first principles: “what is most useful, more efficient and more effective where”.

• Bio and health technology of all kinds. Health is still at the basis of Maslow’s HON, and one we haven’t been great at addressing over the stupor. Synthetic biology, cellular engineering, longevity, fertility tech, AI-driven drug discovery-testing-approving-deploying: biology is now clearly the next great engineering platform where founders are going all in.

• Relationship-heavy networks. If intelligence and labor are really to be fully commoditized, we need to spend a whole lot of time focusing on what we believe will remain scarce. That is likely around relationships and the ability to coordinate humans. We look out for platforms and institutions that are fundamentally built on human trust, therefore holding their value in this post-AI world that awaits us.

• New sovereigns. Someone will have to step in and provide technology-based services (currencies, identity, healthcare, infrastructure, security, education) directly to consumers in ways the state will never match. We strongly believe that the coming decades will yield dozens of new sovereigns, as we wrote extensively in our piece and it’s where we spend a whole lot of our time.

Europe can't afford one more minute

As a European, the past decade has been particularly worrying. We’ve all seen Germany turning off all of its nuclear power in what will be remembered as the biggest self-sovereign sabotage in recent history. But we also had to endure seeing ABB selling its robotics arm to Japan, right at the brink of the robotics revolution, as a repeat of Kuka being sold off to China. And the demographic numbers keep getting worse, with Italy printing a 1.13 fertility rate and most of the continent not far behind.

And then, maybe even more worryingly, Ursula Von der Leyen continues saying, in this very year of the Lord 2026, that the cheapest energy is the energy we don't use. We won’t comment on Christine Lagarde.

While the US and China are focused on building the future, Europe is actively selling its productive capacity to its competitors and pretending that conservation is a strategy. We believe (and physics agrees) that conservation is the language of decline. There is no stillness, there is either progress or regress, and that is in a world without competition. If your competitors are pulling ahead on an exponential the speed of the perceived collapse is just so much faster. 

The really good news is that we can clearly see founders noticing. They are waking up. It will take private initiative to build energetic sovereignty, it will take our own agency to rebuild crumbling infrastructure, and it will be the task of the people to design new, better institutions, as the ones we have are failing us.

Finding the fire

In the most uncertain era the world has ever encountered, with most people genuinely believing their prospects are grimmer than their parents' (higher prices, lower salaries, worthless expensive education, insecure cities, wars looming), the natural impulse of many is to cling to the state as the only salvation.

But a growing number of people are starting to realize what is plainly evident to anyone paying attention: that their situation is directly connected to the state being too pervasive in the economy and that now is the time for action, to avoid obsolescence. The only way forward is to support the people who are making it their life's mission to actually push things forward, fight entropy and find entelechy.

At Unruly, we are specifically looking for these founders. You can recognize them immediately. They have a fire that is impossible to fake, because they are driven by something much more powerful than making money: they want to rebuild and reshape the world, and they refuse to accept the status quo.

We have a renewed drive, ambition and clarity of vision that makes us feel like we're at the very beginning of the most important work we'll ever do. The future of abundance is within our grasp. Now is the time for action.