Fuori di Testa… we do better with out-of-your-mind ambition. 

Hard-won expertise is rendered useless in a matter of years. Across cycles, adaptability is key. VC arbitrage works so fast, that what you gain in deepest domain expertise, you might also lose by being stuck in the wrong part of the woods. Recipes of yesterday and too much focus on technicalities. It’s very simple: the best companies win because they get the best talent and culture. That’s where you need the conversation to be. Mediocre talent and too large funding rounds kill companies. Hard to articulate, you need VCs who dare to talk about what matters most, benchmarked on world-class success proven across verticals, niches or geographies. We reinvent ourselves faster than others, building investment theses in new spaces as we are looking for the next founder.

The best athletes win the mental game. Our contrarian line of questioning unearths the potential we are seeking in unprecedented ways. We nailed the pattern recognition on how to spot the entrepreneurs who will build category defining businesses in any given industry. We need an insane sense of urgency. We want proof that founders are unreasonable. We need founders who filter out 95% of what well-intentioned VCs bring to the table. A sort of founder missed by other VCs. Hummingbird founders. 

We don’t get in the way. VCs never face the consequence of a bad decision the way a founder does. Founders shouldn’t put up with VCs who promised value-add to win deals. We fight formulaic VC influencing. We focus instead on assisting in non-traditional ways and helping founders upgrade to the best talent pools. Outside of board rooms, we excelled a few times with brutal honesty, but always with founders in control over their ship. Given how personal the journey is for founders, we had a great founder returning years later saying “they first punched me in the face with the truths I didn’t want to face, but then they were the only ones to come back and they gave me the capital to survive”.

We only invest a few times a year, partnering with deep and unwavering conviction. We once put 25% of a fund in one company. Only a few stories can truly change industries: Large portfolios mean backing pseudo-innovation. We believe that portfolio construction and diversification is for people who don’t know what they are doing. We go from doubling down to tripling down. 

We believe outliers can be found anywhere in the world. We are a nomadic team, constantly on the move to meet teams where they are. A local support network of VCs is amazing for startups but it can lead to bubble think, provincialism, even in the Valley, and not seeing opportunities with a fresh, global perspective. Our best investments can be found on Market Street in SF, all the way to the outskirts of Bangalore. 

We experienced zero-to-100M ebitda. We experienced nasty glass ceilings on the way to 100M users. We experienced near-death-experiences as a normal byproduct of legendary outcomes. We experienced founders not fitting in, not giving VCs what they wanted. Founders don’t need network or parental guidance, they need VCs who dare to concentrate, just like founders do and double down and aim for 10B+ outcomes.