Ideas matter

TL;DR I will start investing in ambitious ideas that can take us to that future. Let me know if you want to invest with me.

I love big ideas. Big ambitious ideas are more than just ideas. They are narratives about the future. Without new ideas, nothing changes and there won’t be a future. We will be stuck in a zero-sum world where anything you gain will be away from someone else. New ideas matter a lot more than most of us realize.

Future is made of new ideas

The most ambitious ideas fall outside of what is currently culturally accepted or thought possible. Curing death, designer babies, inhabiting other planets, synthetic life, human-machine symbiosis, or the universal replicator. These ideas all fall outside of the Overton window. All of them also require new technology to be feasible. When you put the two together, you realize that the only thing that can bring about the future is technology that challenges our notion of what’s acceptable and reasonable. We tend to think technology gives us productivity gains, but technology is much more than that. Technology is the only thing that unlocks the future, but for that to happen we need to want it and invest in it.

The case of Vaire Computing

For the past three years, I have been working with a company that is building ‘reversible computing’ silicon chips that use 50 to 100 times less energy compared to classical architectures used by Nvidia, Intel, and all other chip makers. Vaire builds logic gates that work in both directions so the energy can be kept in the system versus turning it into heat as with the current chip designs.

This is a big and ambitious new idea, and goes against the accepted understanding of how semiconductors should work. At the same time, it’s badly needed as Moore’s Law is grinding to a halt because of the heat problem while at the same time compute loads are growing due to AI build-up. Last time I looked, data centers consume 18% of Ireland’s total metered electricity, and it’s only going up.

Vaire is lead by ☕️✨ Rodolfo Rosini , one of the best founders I know of with an idea for a global chip monopoly that makes Nvidia look small. Yet, nobody wanted to fund the company. In fact, nobody has wanted to fund reversible computing technology that was invented back in the 1970s. It was simply not a ‘category’ by venture capital standards. It was too different. I have invested in Vaire on three different occasions over the past three years, and only recently the idea moved within the Overton window for most venture funds. Thankfully the lack of investor appetite didn’t intimidate Rodolfo — he pitched to a lot of investors on both sides of the Atlantic to find the few who were not afraid to back the radical vision of the future that Vaire is building. Only now that Vaire has moved reversible computing within the Overton window for VCs, the rounds are consistently oversubscribed and the company is turning down investors according to Rosini.

We need more shots at goal

Unfortunately Vaire is not alone. There are many founders who can’t raise capital because their ideas don’t fit most venture funds’ rather conservative model. There is a lot of talk about ideas that are too small to fit the venture economics, but we should also talk about ideas that are too ambitious for most venture funds. Most venture capitalists have learned how to invest by looking at how others do it, and when they see something that does not fit the pattern, they don’t know how to think about it. Despite many claiming to make contrarian bets, most venture capital is very uniform. This is a big loss for all of us.

I will attempt to expand the Overton window by writing about these ambitious ideas that can take us to that future. I also will invest in them when they need the validation the most, and work together with the founders to craft a plan that makes them attractive for later-stage capital. Serious founders working on big ideas are rare, but they do exist.

Here are some features that such ideas tend to share, although the most interesting ideas break all the rules.

• These ideas tend to create whole new categories of products when they emerge.
• They bypass the incumbents altogether (vs. trying to sell them), and are often vertically integrated, or pure software with Internet distribution.
• They take more technology risk than market risk.
• They tend to sound a little crazy before it happens. As Arthur C. Clark adviced us, ‘the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible’.
• The idea contains a new definite version of the future that it creates when it succeeds.
• The idea makes a powerful story.
• The idea changes the way we live.

Importantly for an investment case, when they succeed, the category leading companies these ideas create tend to be valued in multiple billions.

Examples of the type of companies could include most companies Elon Musk has started including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and OpenAI. Despite his PayPal success, even Musk was not able to raise outside capital to start Tesla or SpaceX but financed the companies himself until he had enough traction to get venture funds interested. Most of Musk’s friends tried to talk him out of starting these companies since they were so far out of the Overton window. Apple was also such a company when it was founded even if today it feels obvious —in 1976 a computer that anyone could use was a wild idea. Bitcoin was also such an idea in 2008. It was a radically new and powerful idea of a particular future — a world with a distributed global currency that runs purely on software with a mathematical instead of a government backing.

Setting up an investment syndicate

I already write angel checks to the extent that I can afford, but I want to do more.

If you would also like to invest in big ambitious ideas, I’m putting together an angel syndicate where you can invest per company basis however much you feel comfortable. If you’d like to join the syndicate, send me an email at ville.vesterinen[at]gmail.com and I’ll add you to the group. I’ll send you interesting deals when they emerge but you don’t have an obligation to invest. I already put together one such SPV for Vaire’s latest round.

Similarly I’d love to help you if you’re working on a really big idea. I won’t pretend to know how to build it, but I might be able to figure out how to finance it.