Uncorrelated Interests

Uncorrelated Interests

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Latest — 17 Sep 2025

Rethinking Theories of Value Creation

The venture capital ecosystem is one of the most sophisticated value creation architectures in modern economic history, generating trillions in value, enabling breakthrough innovations across every technology (and non-technology) sector, and providing the financial infrastructure that powers most contemporary technological advancement. From Google to Genentech, from Amazon to Airbnb, this

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Unleashing Human Potential Through Systematic Recombination

“Of its output, inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced” - Harold Arnold, Bell Labs Modern organizations systematically waste human potential. Despite the rhetorical emphasis on talent as the ultimate competitive advantage, conventional structures treat humans as standardized components to be slotted into

Maximizing Intellectual Capital through Systematic Combinatorial Discovery

“We are building a machine that can identify opportunities, adapt infrastructure, and roll out products at full speed” - Richard Fairbank, Capital One CEO It’s now common knowledge that 90% of venture-backed startups will fail to return capital to investors. We very often discuss this as a law of

How might we innovate

"To produce means to combine materials and forces within our reach... To produce other things, or the same things by a different method, means to combine these materials and forces differently" - W. Brian Arthur The AI-Driven Inflection Point Despite software having successfully eaten the world, we find

Innovation is a Worthy Cause

Humanity’s incredible progress in less than three centuries has been widely reported and yet still under-appreciated. It is neither opinion nor conjecture to assert that twenty-first century humanity is fundamentally privileged to a degree unimaginable at any prior century of our meager existence.Examples abound, like rates of the

Succeed by limiting errors

Predictably Bad Investments Despite its being littered with incredibly intelligent practitioners, venture capital is not an industry I would characterize as being particularly interested in scholarship. In many corners there’s a distinct allergy toward academic-leaning approaches — that in some way these commentaries are lesser because they originate from outside

Investing in Two-Sigma Youth

On Medici and Thiel I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel's special program to bribe people to drop out of college. ~ Larry Summers So begins Rohit Krishnan’s “On Medici and Thiel“, a formative piece of prose that helped clarify

The Opsimath Principle

Last week we briefly dipped our toes into a few basic characteristics of grants, one of the older forms of financial incentive that until relatively recently was less common within the tech industry. This is not at all to say that it is now absolutely common, but relative to past

The Underappreciated Utility of Grants

Sergey Brin Dylan Feld Vitalik Buterin Though we love to romanticize the indefatigable entrepreneur who overcomes the odds to build a massive business, humble beginnings are more common than we often credit. Each of the above founders has gone on to build large to gargantuan businesses, but the start of

The Business of Charity

One of the initial ideas we’re exploring within our nascent venture studio is in the charitable giving “industry”. Given the largely not-for-profit nature of donations, most do not consider this an industry at all, let alone one that should ever garner the gaze of a capitalist. I get it