Build what others won’t
The queue for the obvious idea is long and expensive. The one nobody is standing in is neither.
Thesis
We are not looking for a category that is about to be hot. We are looking for a job that thousands of people already do badly, expensively, on paper, every single day — and that somebody is already paying for.
The underlying bet
Odds measure consensus, not potential. Every defining company, market and breakthrough started as a crazy bet some lunatic made.
Low odds don’t mean low outcomes — they mean low competition.
Where we look
01
Open source
Maintainers doing serious work after hours because nobody will pay for the thing everybody depends on.
02
Regulated sectors
Legal, compliance, health, finance. Slow, unglamorous, and the reason half the portfolio lives there.
03
Overlooked markets
Places and founder archetypes that never fit the pattern, so the pattern-matchers never showed up.
We go looking for
We pass on
Convictions
The whole list. We disagree with parts of it roughly once a quarter and keep it anyway.
The queue for the obvious idea is long and expensive. The one nobody is standing in is neither.
By the time a category is hot, the interesting part of it has already been priced in.
If four other funds already agree with you, you are not early. You are on time, which is late.
It flows to the same cities, the same founder archetype, the same ideas everyone agrees are safe.
The pattern describes what already worked. It is a poor description of what will.
A ten-year fund life is an accounting decision. It is not how long a good company takes.
If it was never going to change anything, succeeding at it wasn’t worth the years either.
Every defining company started as a crazy bet some lunatic made against the numbers.
The question is never how big it is. It is what has to be true for it to become big.
A single good company in a thin market stays a single good company.
Low odds don’t mean low outcomes. They mean low competition.
Currently hunting
These are open briefs, not secrets. If one of them is the problem that has been annoying you for three years, we should talk.
Suppliers who are profitable on paper and broke in practice, because everyone pays late.
FintechThe distance between a harvest and a buyer, measured in the percentage that spoils.
AgritechSmall private clinics running on a paper diary and a WhatsApp group. There are thousands.
HealthThe filings every company must do, that every company still does by hand, badly.
RegtechAfrica holds more human genetic variation than the rest of the world put together, and almost none of it sits in the reference data that drugs are designed against. A therapy validated on European genomes is a coin toss here. The science is not the hard part any more — the sequencing, the consent, and the ownership of what comes out of it are.
BiotechMost of what actually happens here never lands in a dataset anyone can query — informal trade, real prices, how goods move, what clinics see. The global corpora are missing it, so every model built on them is confidently wrong about a billion people. Whoever captures it properly, and on terms the people in it would accept, owns the layer underneath everything else.
DataWhat we mean by “a wedge”
The smallest thing you can build in six months that somebody will pay for on its own merits — not because of the roadmap behind it. If explaining the value needs the second slide, it isn’t a wedge yet.
Rolling intake, no application form. A photo of the drawing is genuinely enough.