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@IanRountree
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I believe individuals can change the world and started @cantos to enable them.
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2009
When I started investing in hard-tech in 2016 it wasn't popular. I wasn't sure who'd do the next round or how they'd exit. A friend at a16z said "we don't do hardware". A mentor looked at me like I was crazy and said "That's a terrible idea!". But it always felt inevitable to me.
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Okay maybe Jake took "blood, sweat, & tears" a little too literally but we co-led his pre-seed round w/ @zalzally/@refactor because of that intoxicating mix of intensity and a space sorely in need of innovation. @pilgrimlabs has the opportunity to be the 1st biotech defense prime.
The military expects 50k casualties in the first 8 days of the next high-intensity peer conflict. That’s 20 years of losses from GWOT compressed into a single week. We’re building @pilgrimlabs to deploy medical technology designed for the operational realities of modern warfare.
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Astranis and .Boeing and.Northrop and .Viasat and.Intelsat.
Astranis is now a prime contractor for a @SpaceForceDoD Program of Record. We've been selected for Phase I of Protected Tactical Satcom-Global, an up to $4 billion program to launch small geo comms satellites on an aggressively fast timeline. That is what we do best. Game on.
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Oxide has been in my fantasy portfolio for years. I'd rant w/ Seth, @bcantrill, & @WillC_5 that people were sleeping on it. That's about to change. Big ups to USIT/@elizabethstein for seeing the opportunity here and full-sending!.
Venture was never supposed to be safe. @oxidecomputer took on the giants and built a full stack cloud computer from scratch. Customers love their solution and are scaling with it. Cloud computing will forever be changed. We are backing their $100 million Series B and betting.
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Sometimes we take an Observer seat at pre-seed but that’s mostly to help founders run their experiment and practice board meetings for when/if they become relevant.
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We mostly lead pre-seeds and haven’t taken a Director seat at that point. Boards are for companies. I tell founders that at pre-seed you shouldn’t pretend you have a company. What you have is a _hypothesis_. The important thing is to run an efficient experiment to test that.
If a pre-seed VC demands a board seat. 1) Run.
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Spot on. The other "Attention is all you need".
Good read from @FinnMurphy12 on understanding which game you are playing in venture capital. It's worth emphasizing, with so much focus on attention, that there are (basically) two paths: . 1) There are startups that are great at capturing our attention; hot technology,
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I low key love the crypto-deep tech collabs. Shout out to my degen friends, co-investors, & LPs. You know who you are.
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Jeff is one of my favorite founders outside of hardware (I invested personally), one of the deepest thinkers I know, and has an extremely strong moral compass. It would be awesome to work closely with him.
Chroma has grown to 17 people - all engineers . i’m hiring a head of operations- DM me! . role is in SF.
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Solid piece on (de)population from Greg Ip in WSJ summarizing Spears & Geruso's book "After The Spike". Here's a thread summarizing the summary. .
Humanity's existence is threatened not by plague or environmental catastrophe but by its own passive acceptance of decline. My column looks at the novel case two economists, Dean Spears & @MikeGeruso make against depopulation.
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100%. This is why I keep Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” on my desk, as a reminder to see SMEs’ input through the lens of their bias toward the status quo.
Regular reminder that expert diligence in a sector at seed will usually make you miss actually disruptive companies. it’s not ONLY about the founders - but it’s much more about them than about someone who’s giving you a cursory 30 minute view on why something will / won’t work.
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Big day for future pilots. And no that’s not a Tesla dashboard, that’s a cockpit with @skyryse!.
The @FAANews' MOSAIC final ruling is here – and it’s changing everything. The new MOSAIC rule recognizes simplified flight controls – like SkyOS™ – as a path to safer, faster, and more intuitive flying. Under MOSAIC, aircraft using SVO like SkyOS can require just 20 hours of
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Always impressed by the quality of this event. Can’t believe @ameekapadia runs this in her “spare” time. Proud for Cantos to be a founding sponsor!.
And that’s a wrap on the 3rd annual AIxBio Summit! h/t @ameekapadia on what’s become _the_ (un)conference at this intersection.
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My back yard made a brief cameo 🧐.
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