People Over Logos
People over logos. This has been the way of sports for a while. Growing up in Southern California, I was all about the Lakers. Partially for the team, but really for the legendary duo of Kobe and Shaq who dominated the early 2000s with three straight championships.
More recently, we’re seeing this in AI. I have a ton of respect for the big labs, but AI discourse has become about the players, not the teams. I’ve watched all of Andrej Karpathy’s 2+ hour YouTube videos. I’ve listened to every interview Ilya Sutskever has given. These individuals are more important to me than the companies they are (or were) a part of.
The same shift is happening in venture. The rise of the solo GP. Elad Gil running a multibillion-dollar fund essentially as a one-man show. Investors like Hemant Taneja at General Catalyst or Shaun Maguire at Sequoia who’ve built personal brands that transcend their firms. Even at the mega-funds, it’s increasingly about specific partners, not logos.
Founders should also be paying attention to this.
Investors don’t invest in companies. They invest in the people heading the company. What makes them uniquely suited to start this business?
When I look back on the investments I’ve made over the last year, almost all of them have been founders who were deep in their craft. PhDs who’d spent years on a specific technical problem. Builders with a decade in a particular industry who finally saw the opening to build what they’d always wanted.
I recently read Jack Cheng’s essay “What Becomes Valuable When AI Makes Creative Work Easy” in Every, and one sentence named what I’d been trying to articulate: “Rather than a creativity of newness, or even difficulty, it’s a creativity of aptness.”
That usually comes from going so deep in a domain that you fork from consensus. You stop focusing on the obvious opportunities like “AI for legal” or “AI for finance” and start seeing the second and third-order problems that only reveal themselves after you’ve lived with them. Not the things you notice on a guided tour, but the things that have been bothering you for years. The inefficiencies that seem too niche to matter until you realize they’re everywhere. The workflows so broken and frustrating that insiders have just accepted them as reality.
The best founder-market fit isn’t “I researched this space and found a gap.” It’s “I’ve been obsessed with this problem and finally the technology is ready.”
One founder we backed spent years doing HVAC takeoffs by hand before building software to automate it. Another came out of a photonics PhD and saw that the compute bottleneck is GPU communication and that could be solved with light. These aren’t opportunities you find on a market map. They’re problems you carry with you until you can finally solve them.
The founders who win won’t be chasing what’s new or what’s hard. They’ll be building what’s apt because they’re the only ones who could.
J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844
