The firm's thesis focuses on a rare founder type: a technical expert who also deeply understands how new technologies shift human behavior. This avoids the common pitfall of building technology in search of a problem, leading to products with innate market pull.

During Ethic's long build phase before traction, the founder found it crucial to ignore external validation signals like other companies' funding announcements. The key to surviving this lonely period is a relentless daily focus on execution and solving customer problems, not chasing industry hype.

Duolingo's first investors admitted they didn't believe in the education market, which they considered a bad business. They invested solely because founder Luis von Ahn had a previous successful exit to Google, demonstrating that a founder's track record can be more persuasive to early VCs than the business idea itself.

To identify non-consensus ideas, analyze the founder's motivation. A founder with a deep, personal reason for starting their company is more likely on a unique path. Conversely, founders who "whiteboarded" their way to an idea are often chasing mimetic, competitive trends.

Large, contrarian investments feel like career risk to partners in a traditional VC firm, leading to bureaucracy and diluted conviction. Founder-led firms with small, centralized decision-making teams can operate with more decisiveness, enabling them to make the bold, potentially firm-defining bets that consensus-driven partnerships would avoid.

Kyle Samani is "intellectually short" Bitcoin because he sees it as an unproductive asset. He argues platforms like Ethereum and Solana offer the same core benefits—a fixed, code-defined supply—while also being economically productive. This makes them a superior long-term asset class from a first-principles perspective, despite his firm holding some Bitcoin financially.

In a fast-moving category like AI coding, platform features are fleeting. The more durable factor is the founding team's vision and ability to execute. Users should follow the founders of these companies, as choosing a tool is ultimately a long-term bet on a person's leadership and trajectory.

When evaluating revolutionary ideas, traditional Total Addressable Market (TAM) analysis is useless. VCs should instead bet on founders with a "world-bending vision" capable of inducing a new market, not just capturing an existing one. Have the humility to admit you can't predict market size and instead back the visionary founder.

Drawing from Verkada's decision to build its own hardware, the strategy is to intentionally tackle difficult, foundational challenges early on. While this requires more upfront investment and delays initial traction, it creates an immense competitive barrier that latecomers will struggle to overcome.