How generalist VCs demoralize technical founders

⁓ Is one of the key things that we try to impart to people like when you have made your bet and you're certain of something And you've brought all your obsessive crazy, you know out-of-market knowledge to bear on it. You're like, no, this is definitely it being confident in that regardless of The types of feedback that you get from people who aren't necessarily qualified to actually judge you there just happen to have control of the checkbook at some random fund is really important. Like people's confidence can get destroyed by like people who have no business destroying others confidence. It's something that we've seen again and again, and it's a weakness of traditional venture underwriting norms in 2026 across, I'll call it normative generalist platforms that try to underwrite on the basis of like, well, my associate can learn about any subject matter. My fund invests in these 14 themes, you know, like

Mm. Heh. Mm.

This idea that like, ⁓ it's mostly about SAS norms, especially like, you know, tastes, traction, moats, like products require product market fit. Somebody has to buy it in order for you to make money. applying SAS thinking to that is not necessarily the best way to win today. And yet there's lots of underwriters who don't know anything else because that's been their entire career. And so they try and, continuously, you know, fit a square peg into a round hole. What this does to founders who

Mm.

are very capable of wealth creation at the maximum scale, is it demoralizes them because instead of them being like, well, I'm right. They're like, well, the guy with the checkbook says they can't understand me. Maybe I'm wrong. And that's a, that's a big problem for people who, are building, especially in more technical disciplines. There's a company we underwrote called Cumulus. They, it's super technical, like inference runtime for very

Mm. Yes. Hmm.

specific types of chips and workloads. A thing that they ran into with a lot of funds was like, I just don't even know what you're talking about. So how am going to know if I can underwrite your lot? But they don't say that they say it's too early because they don't, you know, they don't want to say, uh, well, I just don't, I'm not smart enough to understand you exactly. How does that play to their LPs? Well, why didn't you underwrite this company? Well, I wasn't smart enough to underwrite them. Oh, okay. I'm never going to invest in you again. Um,

Lose face. and then...

So there's all of these games that get played around like, you know, face to your point, social status. It's a really bad habit I've seen of VCs who don't understand something to be like, I'm just curious. I'm just curious. I'm just curious. And they're not actually curious. They're framing, you know, deep skepticism as like, it's just curiosity. That's very demoralizing to founders who are right. But again, our right in a way that's not trivial to verify by being like, well, what school did you go to? Did you work for Palantir? How can I not actually evaluate you technically while pretending that I did? So I think there's like a lot of demoralization that founders face. I think when you tell them like, hey, this is a normal pattern, like, don't worry, it's not you, it's the market. There is a capital market for innovation of this type. You just have to like get to those people.