This weekend I competed at and won the IBJJF No-Gi European Championships! Had 4 fights with 3 finishes and 0 points scored against me. Overall, very happy with the performance and more importantly with how I felt on the mats Next step: World Championships in December!

A counterintuitive heuristic from @IanRountree: if you find yourself wanting to hang out with a founder too much, they might not be good to invest in. The very best founders are slightly off. They're often intense to an uncomfortable degree. The qualities that change the world are rarely positive social adaptations.

Everyone says "back exceptional founders." Very few can tell you what that actually means. Cantos scores every founder on 6 attributes: velocity, talent gravity, narrative building, growth mindset, financial mindedness, and encyclopedic knowledge of their industry. @IanRountree breaks down each one:

Kevin is one of the top early stage solo GPs I’ve come across. He’s also a genuinely good person who is consistently positive sum rather than PvP Proud to be an LP in Belief and excited to host him on the Emerging Manager podcast soon!

50-70% of a humanoid robot's cost is motors. The West doesn't make cheap motors. "Sometimes you'll meet a defense tech startup that's got a little drone. Go look at the motor. I guarantee you it will say made in China." @IanRountree on the dependency that decides who wins physical AI:

Momentum investing is a hot topic in venture right now. Purists say it's a ticking time bomb, a strategy that always looks great near tops. But it's undeniable that the momentum crowd has been winning: if you'd closed your eyes and backed every Elon, Palmer Luckey or Bezos company of the last few years, you'd have outperformed most venture investors. @IanRountree on why he can't figure out whether the strategy is rational or just a mind virus:

Very excited for Kevin's next step at @codos_ai Kevin was our COO at Labs for 5 years and is one of the best operators I've worked with, as well as one of the biggest AI power users I know. He was already productive before AI, now it's kind of absurd. Combine that with 15 years running enterprise transformation and Codos is the obvious place for him to land

Counterintuitive data point from @IanRountree: according to AngelList's data, entry valuation in venture is positively correlated with performance. The expensive deals are expensive for a reason. "My biggest misses were saying no when I liked everything except the price." Same, tbh.

We first met Ryan and Sean a year and a half ago — we showed up late to a round they were nearly done raising. My partner Sarah *literally* stuck her foot in the door, just to get them to spend another hour with us. For the next two months, Ryan and I went on a walk every Friday to debug the business. What I remember most is that, every following week, he’d tried the solutions we’d brainstormed before and had explicit results: “you were wrong, the root cause wasn’t that” or “it worked, I also learned something else.” They iterate faster than anyone I know. Ryan and Sean are both obsessed with being great. Young as they are, they really see Watney as their life’s work. They’re obsessive about who works there (Ryan spends more time on recruiting than any founder I know) and about preserving the culture they’ve built so far. It’s a special, intense group. Watney’s goal is to enable ambition in the physical world. They think that the clearest marker of that is being able to deploy robots to solve real problems, in an economically self-sustaining way. The foundation model companies present steadily climbing evals on constructed tasks but a) the real world is much messier and b) 95% solved is 0% deployed. Watney knows what actual deploys take and on some of the hardest tasks with the most sophisticated customers — since 2025, they’ve been helping the largest hyperscalers accelerate their compute deployments, with four nines of reliability. Today, they run the largest fleet of dexterous robots, running 24/7/365. If we are serious about building things in America, it will happen because of teams like Watney —an automation-first mindset and gritty full-stack problem solving. We @conviction are lucky and proud to work with Ryan, Sean & the whole team at Watney. For those of you who want to enable ambition in the physical world and care about having work that works outside a lab, we’d love if you’d join them.

The best example of @IanRountree's Cantos thesis, that the biggest opportunity in venture is applying technology to boring industries: Lumber mills pay top dollar for trees up to a certain size, then the price drops. Why? The big trees don't fit in the saws. Only two companies make the saws, and that's the biggest they come. With TLM, a team of SpaceX and Blue Origin engineers asked a simple question: can we build a bigger saw and reinvent this industry?

On top of the frameworks, @IanRountree has one test for exceptional founders: do they bend spacetime? Is their energy density so intense that it pulls you toward them? "If there's not some small part of us that wants to quit and join this company, they don't have it."

Aug 2023: @IanRountree's Cantos writes the first check into a high school dropout building drones in his parents' backyard. 2 weeks later: a prototype doing 130mph in that same backyard. 2 months later: he's in Kyiv meeting the Ministry of Defense. Under 3 years later: Neros is America's highest-volume drone maker at 1,000 drones a week. This is what it looks like when a founder is moving at hyper-speed

Jose questions whether crypto’s latest rally is actually attracting new money. “I think most of this money is probably, like, people who were sidelined but had crypto at some point just, like, buying back in versus new money.”

Cantos founder and managing partner @IanRountree explains why exceptional founders are not always the easiest people to connect with. “A lot of the qualities that allow you to change the world are not necessarily positive social adaptations.”

A Pentagon official to a VC: "Let's play a game. You tell me what you think I want, and I'll tell you how wrong you are... We'd give a billion dollars to someone who could make a million of anything." A million of what? "A million of ANYTHING." @IanRountree on why scale is the entire game in defense:

A new episode of Hivemind is live! This week the team breaks down the growing altcoin rally, the rise of social trading, how tokenized stocks are creating an entirely new speculative playground, and more. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:30 Bitcoin Flat, Alts Ripping 00:06:00 Is New Money Entering Crypto? 00:10:10 The Alt-Picker’s Market 00:13:20 Tokenized Stocks & the New On-Chain Meta 00:21:00 Can the On-Chain Mania Last? 00:43:15 ETH, HYPE & the Tokenization Trade 00:51:20 Taking Profits & Managing the Bull Market 01:07:30 What Could Kill the Rally? 01:16:30 VVV, OpenAI & Private Inference

Cantos founder and managing partner @IanRountree explains why a technological breakthrough does not automatically justify a massive valuation. “What happens if you have two fusion energy companies succeed? … Why are you both going to be worth $10 trillion? You’re going to be in a price war, potentially.”

10 years of lessons in less than two hours. Had fun in this wide-ranging conversation with my friend and LP @ZeMariaMacedo.

New Emerging Managers episode with @IanRountree is live! Ian founded @cantos 10 years ago and has been investing in hard tech since before it was cool. He's an early investor in companies like Neros (now America's highest-volume drone maker), Soulgen, Radiant, Castelion, and many more The Cantos thesis is one of my favourites in venture. As they see it, software was just the first industry technology ate; the real prize is the other 90% of the economy, the boring physical industries tech hasn't yet touched. Within these industries, they're looking for startups that are going full-stack to become the new incumbent, instead of selling technology to the old one. TLM builds automated sawmills and sells the lumber. Shinkei's robots process fish on the boat, seconds after the catch, and the company sells the fish. Earth AI predicts where mineral deposits sit, drills them itself, and owns what it finds We get into why the Howard Marks consensus framework doesn't apply to pre-seed, the data showing expensive deals actually outperform, his test for exceptional founders, and why the biggest returns come from vertically integrating tech rather than selling to incumbents. Enjoy! Listen on YouTube: piped.video/pAIrREY_Umk Or Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/61U…

It's September 2026 and I still hear ppl say things like "AI isn't that useful, it makes too many mistakes, it's only good for certain things". At this point this is just cope from ppl who don't know how to use the tools and are too lazy to learn There is no cognitive task where you can't vastly improve your performance using AI. It takes some effort to figure out how (still iterating on mine tbh), but if you skip it you'll be outcompeted by someone who didn't

Did a few SPVs last year. Recently found out one of them never deployed most of the capital into the company. Meanwhile, that company is up 4x and I'm waiting on a refund. I had the docs, confirmation, etc. Paperwork is unfortunately not proof. Legion was built to fix this.