E352: JD Vance’s Co-Founder on Space Defense, Hard Tech, and the Biggest Opportunities Ahead

What if the best venture returns come from avoiding trends—not chasing them? In this episode, I sit down with Colin, Co-Founder of Narya, to discuss how he approaches investing in frontier sectors without falling into mimetic behavior. Colin explains why the best opportunities are often “hidden in plain sight,” how mission-driven investing can still generate venture-scale returns, and why concentration, not diversification, drives outcomes in venture. We also explore defense, space, and advanced manufacturing, and how timing, business model innovation, and founder quality ultimately determine success.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  So you started Naria with J.D. Vance in 2019. What was it like working with a vice president in a business context?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Before we started Naria, we'd been working together since 2014, really. And what always made J.D. a great investor was, I think, he was the very first principles-type investor in that he was excellent at thinking about what the state of the world was today and seeing around corners as to what it might look like five to seven years from now. And then taking that lens and thinking about how to build investment theses around that. And so he also was, I would say, very mission-driven and enthusiastic about themes around what could venture dollars do to help our country, our government specifically, help our citizens? How could we improve the quality lives of most Americans with advances in science and technology?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  And how could we also serve founders in off-the-bean-path geographies? And when you sort of put that all together, you sort of had this interesting investor who was both first-principles-driven but also mission-driven. And when you combine that, it gets very interesting. And we were able to look at all sorts of companies across a myriad of sectors, including biotech, defense, advanced manufacturing. And it was really all about this idea of returning venture dollars to backing founders addressing what we see as the need to solve problems in our country. Almost like this idea of to be progressive in the asset class, you need to be regressive and return the asset class to sort of its inception. What did venture really start out to do? And it was to help our government. It was to help our companies create real GDP growth at scale. And it was to help our citizens.

• 1:32David Weisburd?

  Many people believe that there's a trade-off between investing in really innovative companies and getting venture-like returns with limited risk. Do you believe that there are strategies where you could invest on a risk-adjusted basis in a superior way and make some real bets?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I do. I think one of the traps, and you have to be really careful when you're thinking about some of these categories where, as an American, you really want these things to work. You really want us to control our own destiny and all the different themes in onshoring, whether that's tied to pharmaceutical, whether it's tied to defense, whether it's tied to job creation. And so you want these things to work. And as an investor, you need to be very careful that the mission actually matches with a potential return for your cost of capital. And as a venture investor, the way we think about our cost of capital is we want to invest in companies that, if they scale and things go well along the way, and probably some serendipity as well, they can On a net basis, return our fund and ideally even multiples of that.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And so as we delve into some of these categories that are, I'd say, bits and atoms businesses where there's real hardware, there's, there's a lot of opportunity, but, but the business model innovation is the key. And so you need to find founders who not only, sort of on this continuum, not only understand how to build tech and how to convert that into product, but then how to create a real business around it where you can get venture style returns at scale, you can have real, real gross margins. And it's a subset of these businesses. And so whether you think about defense, whether you think about advanced manufacturing, whether you think about pharmaceutical, whether you think about energy, it's like one of these areas where I'm very bullish on the categories and the CAGR of these, these industries, but there's very few companies that actually get the tech right and translate that into

• 3:17Speaker 01

  business, business model innovation. And so that's sort of where we focus our energy.

• 3:20David Weisburd?

  There's a lot of nuance to this. Can you make a lot of money in innovation? There's a couple of ways I think about it. The only truly innovative mainstream firm that I think of is Vinod Khosla. And one of the things that he says, he tells this to LPs openly, and he's even written about it, is that he wants to have really good returns, he wants to have top quartile returns, but he's not optimizing on returns, he's opting, optimizing on impact. So there he's making this inherent trade off. And it's interesting, and also self-selects a certain type of LP. Thankfully, he's had great returns as well. But I think there's some rules to how to invest into very innovative companies. Unlike as a founder, so if you're Elon Musk and you say, I want to build a Dyson swarm around Sun, one of the advantages of doing it within the context of a company versus a fund is that now you could amalgamate talent. Now, the world's best thinkers and doers

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:05David Weisburd?

  will come to you. With a VC, you don't have that leverage. You can't, and you can't hire these 100x investment analysts that'll just outanalyze everybody else. So you're kind of fixed in your, your constraint from a team standpoint. But the main constraint that I see there is the answer to the question of can you invest in very innovative companies and make a lot of money is yes, but it must be in something that's not too bleeding edge. It needs to be frontier, but it can't be five to 10 years away because then you won't have the following gap.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think so. We take a lot of pride in having been ahead of the curve on a lot of themes that are now in areas that I would call very busy. Defense is a good example. There are all these founders building defense companies right now, and there's a lot of very, a lot of very sector-focused VC funds, it's only defense, or it's only advanced manufacturing. And our view on that, again, back to the sort of the high CAGR in the category, but being very bearish on most of the opportunities that we see, is that you, a lot of those companies needed to be built like five years ago before, before the problem had surfaced, and before our government really needed to sort of change its procurement cycles and change how it thinks about working with tech companies to, to solve a lot of, a lot of its issues and the ability to scale. So you have, so

• 5:14Speaker 01

  you have this behavior where there's this sort of memetic behavior where, where people and, and firms tend to sort of all sort of flock to these same ideas after they've become a little bit more mainstream because they were historically contrarian, so they think of them as contrarian ideas, but they no longer are. And so, we try to stay away from that. But I think your point is an interesting one, because we also think, there's a lot of groups that say, no, no, no, we're, we're not memetic, we are going, we are thinking about the future we are going to solve, or the future, the way we see it is going to evolve, it's almost impossible. And so, when you have investors and you don't have an evergreen fund, I think that that's just, just a very hard investment to make. And the tech risk is, in our minds, is too high. Like, we prefer going after these sort of hidden in plain sight problems. And so, when everyone moves into defense, we move a little bit away from there, and we go back into healthcare, which has been bottomed out, and

• 5:58Speaker 01

  a lot of investors have real scar tissue from touching healthcare, but now with advances, with advances in AI, there's a lot of stuff one can do that you couldn't do five years ago. So we try to be very nimble and curious, and I think there's, there's this barometer where you, you know, you can't go too far into the future, but, but you need to be prescient enough to be ahead of, ahead of these market trends. And that's, that's, I think, there's a couple of ways one can do that really effectively. To your point on coastlets, you need to have aligned LPs that are really comfortable in your strategy. And part of our strategy is having a very, very concentrated portfolio, so 12 companies per fund. And then you sort of double and triple down into your best company. So it's really only like three to four big bets per fund. And so that gives us a lot of time to do research, to collaborate with folks in our network. And we have a lot of strategic LPs that have very experienced engineers and scientists on their payroll who help

• 6:42Speaker 01

  us with, with answering some of these hard questions. And so you sort of have this, this mesh network of aligned folks that can, that are optimistic about the future, but, but doing it in a, in a way that is informed, research-driven, and cynical enough that you're, you're not going to chase stuff when everyone else is going into it.

• 6:58David Weisburd?

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• 7:41David Weisburd?

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• 8:24David Weisburd?

  alongside filings, broker research, news, and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts, turning raw conversations into comparable, auditable insight. Take advantage of AlphaSense AI-led expert calls now. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alpha-sense.com/HowIInvest. I had Roger Vincent, who came from the Cornell Endowment, and he talked about this LP mistake that a lot of LPs make, which is double diversification. Sometimes you could argue triple diversification. They're diversified, they need every portfolio company to work, then they need every fund to work, and then they need the whole category to work. Where some of the smartest LPs, they love these concentrated positions in specific funds because they know they're building a basket of funds.

• 9:06David Weisburd?

  They're not investing only in 12 companies, in the case of NARIA, or 12 or 15. They're actually investing into the best ideas from each manager.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Most of our LPs, the discussion has always been, okay, we're backing you for Fund One, but we see this as a long-term bet. We understand you're trying to build a platform for the next, say, quarter century if things continue to go well. And can't promise we'll be with you that whole time.

• 9:25David Weisburd?

  Is that how they're underwriting it, in that they're betting on, call it, 40 companies versus just on the fund? Is that how they're getting their mind around it, in that we expect one super power-law outcome in those 40 companies?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  It depends on the archetype of an investor. I think the more, the larger institutions tend to think that way. But based on our performance, they would, we have some pretty big winners in our first fund and expect to have in our second fund as well. And so hopefully, that can be showcased every five years or so. But I think that's right, yes.

• 9:50David Weisburd?

  Hopefully, you don't have to weigh three funds?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  No, exactly. And then there's sort of the long tail of investors, founders we've worked with, and other more individual LPs, where it's a different calculus.

• 9:59David Weisburd?

  NARIA, your fund was famously backed by Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt of Google. Why would they back a VC fund? Maybe you could explain the rationale.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  With the Peter example, we had been working with him for a long time, so there was a good relationship there. Both thought about a lot of things in similar ways and a good record of investing together. I think the broader network of, the reason we were able to raise a first fund, which is always really hard, but also do it with high-quality investors that actually could be really helpful to us, was that I think we were very clear about what we were trying to do. JD and I had been living in the Bay, and we understood the behavior, but we were surprised that so many funds were going all-in on enterprise software and consumer internet. We understood the short-term financial rationale for it, but the way we looked at the opportunity, we had some cynicism about that, and we wanted, going back to this idea of being mission-driven

• 10:54Speaker 01

  and investing in things that are real and actually can have real impact at scale, we just saw very few funds doing that. Of course, there are some exceptions. And combining that with this...

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Not requirement, but comfort that there were world-class founders capable of building transformational businesses outside of the Bay, outside of California, outside of Boston, New York, all these hubs, because we had seen it and invested in it historically. Putting that, those two things together, combined with some strategic LP relationships that we had already surfaced to, to folks like Peter and Mark and Eric and some other well-known people, that really resonated with them. And we were very clear that we weren't going to be chasing trends. We, we weren't going to do crypto, we weren't going to do NFTs, and we weren't going to do these, these things that we would almost always have FOMO around, but we would never invest if we, when everyone started chasing something new that came up. General AI right now is another example of that. A lot of our companies, I would consider AI companies, but they're, they're not these

• 11:51Speaker 01

  sort of large language model platforms or things. And putting that all together, I think that really resonated with, with investors who have great pattern recognition. They said, okay, this is actually a unique approach. And we weren't shy about saying, look, we're not, we're not saying consumer tech is bad, and we might do a consumer tech business, and we have a great company in consumer, in the religion space, but that's not the focus. It's being nimble and curious and taking like a macro view to what problems are. You can't be all in on defense, you can't be all in advanced manufacturing, because there's only going to be one or two companies that are really special per cycle. And so if you miss Anduril or an equivalent, maybe, maybe defense isn't the right place to play. Maybe you should be thinking about defense or terrestrial defense, maybe it's space defense. You know, and so, so we had a lot of really interesting ideas around that, and that was, that was how these folks got in. And it also didn't compete with what they were doing.

• 12:34David Weisburd?

  And typically, these category definers, the Andurils, the SpaceXs, they're there before the category exists. They create the category. In other words, you can't be chasing momentum and capture these opportunities, at least not at their least.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  We get pitched a lot by founders who are trying to build the next Palantir, the next Anduril. And I think perhaps the next Anduril is Anduril, right? And that being said, there are, there's always white space in these categories. But, and so we just, we just invested in a company a couple of months ago that has a very different theory of the case of where there's opportunity within defense, which really resonated with us. And so the thesis was, you've got Andurils, and these big companies going after the big-ticket government programs that are with very complex technology, very capital-intensive business rate, and you need to raise billions and billions of dollars. And a lot of those companies already exist that are able to win those bids. That being said, all these arms of the US government have all these shorter term needs

• 13:27Speaker 01

  in what I would call most micro projects that they're not interesting enough to be like sexy for some all-star founder to go after. They're not big enough outcomes on their own where you're going to get $10 billion plus outcome, and so venture investors tend to shy away from them. But this founder, Julie Bush, who's ex-Pallanier, she said, well, if you do this as a whole co-model, again, back to turning tech to product to business model innovation, if you have business model innovation around this where you can sort of have this hub and spoke structure where you're sharing resources across these product companies and going after these much sort of more micro problems at scale, that gets really interesting. And so that was a very unique idea in what I would say is a crowded category. And so we're not sort of off investing in defense, it's just got to be really special.

• 14:08David Weisburd?

  Maybe let's double click on one of your companies, True Anomaly. How did you go about picking that company and explain how that fits your thesis?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  So at Prior Funds, I had been a somewhat prolific investor in space and defense. One of the things we were observing was that this concept of what was sort of theater for defense was changing quite a bit. And we had all these capabilities at a terrestrial level, and we were starting to see more companies do stuff at a maritime level. But we sort of felt that space had evolved from this kind of this prospective area that was just going to do stuff that was very futuristic, like go to Mars or minaquifers on the moon or whatever like we were talking about before, to then, but then all of a sudden it got really boring with just like this basic infrastructure. But we saw like in between that, what was really happening was that space was going

• 15:00Speaker 01

  to become this next contested domain for, you know, a fight for sort of what does it mean to be sovereign in space? How do we, our most critical assets were all our communication systems and our military systems are now in orbit. How do we protect those assets? How do we understand if others are trying to? impede our progress there and we through our network we had met Evan who is the founder of True Anomaly and he just had this really interesting theory of how space was going to be the the next contested domain, how China was already advancing much faster than we were in developing capabilities both for I guess offensive defense and offensive offense and we just didn't have that and they were ex-space force, ex-military, ex

• 15:42Speaker 01

  sort of prime sort of DNA, putting all these interesting founders together and so they had sort of had this unfair advantage where they had built these essentially built the playbook for how this was going to work and how the government was going to actually be able to solve these issues and then they but the government and the primes were too slow to actually be able to build for this next this next modality of of you know potential warfare and and all these tech both hardware and software enabled capabilities that we need to have and so they said well we need to do this as a private company and work very closely with the government so they built it in the public sphere and then they went out in the private sphere to go and and that that sort of pattern recognition for us is like really important and if you've looked where they are now we were in at the pre-seed they're you know they're very far along and they just won scope in Golden Dome

• 16:25Speaker 01

  both for hardware and software there's no other startup that got that and so this idea of SDA space domain awareness is evolving into also space-based interceptors and all these other capabilities that we hopefully will never need to use but we need to have at least from a deterrent standpoint and I think space is sort of this next operating system for like for modern power and we you know Evan and this team was was there ahead of that.

• 16:46David Weisburd?

  The way I like to explain it is it's another form of air rights if you think about recently in the war with Iran US and Israel now control the air rights so they had domain air domain over the country they could go and bomb whatever whatever targets in Iran same thing now the new air rights is space where you could basically take lasers and and reflect them off in space and then basically hit any target in in the world so obviously that's the next frontier.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  It's the next frontier and it's a very interesting

• 17:17Speaker 01

  I guess what was an academic discussion that's now going to become quite real about like what we used to have this with our oceans and our skies as well and now it's going up into an orbital level like what you know what does it mean to be sovereign in space how do we create systems around that that actually work with our allies how do we who has rights to do what on the moon how there's going to be all these like really complicated decisions one's going to need to make and being able to have capabilities to protect our assets as we as we sort of delve into these complicated questions and you know hopefully lowercase b battles I think is going to be really important.

• 17:46David Weisburd?

  Perhaps this is a dumb question I'm investor in SpaceX and Varda but I've never really thought about what was the catalyst for space tech as a space was it just SpaceX and psychologically taking away the boundary of creating space companies or was there something technological?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  SpaceX is a big part of it but there were I mean there are lots of other companies that way back historically as early as 2012 that were you know the cost tech allowed for costs to get down to to sort of get a payload into space and some of these ride sharing models obviously SpaceX is a big player there but there were other companies as well the the quality of imagery technology to allow you to do the earth observation then all of a sudden you sort of had this proliferation of these small set constellations that were able to to do well and you sort of slowly got more and more infrastructure into space and then you could start evolving from okay well we can we can get rockets into space satellites work and now it's like okay well what are what are some other things what are some other things we can do and obviously like the with with the rise of the internet

• 18:44Speaker 01

  and our need for better communications and all the all the advances that are going on in the telecom space it's a lot it's required us to to go up for to be able to sort clope the planet in better better comms.

• 18:55David Weisburd?

  So another way you need the cost to get into space the launch costs to be in order of magnitude lower to turn these theoretical projects into reality and until it got to a certain level it was all just theory it was theoretically possible but not practical.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  It'd be a government project and it'd be public you know public sector dollars to go try to do this or that and now you've got private companies that are gonna it's easy to get in space and they are It's easy, the reentries, issues are being solved and so they can go test, they can test science, they can test power, they can test all these things in space and then you get all these side businesses where now you have all this stuff in space, now you have to worry about collision and so you need technology for that. And now that satellites are in orbit much longer, you need to think about repositioning them and so you have space tugs and that's a new subcategory. And then you need to think about refueling and so you have all these sort of businesses that layer on top of each other. But I think a lot of those businesses in and of themselves are like somewhat incremental, somewhat, if they aren't already, will be somewhat commoditized. And so like versus like what a true anomaly is doing because what they're doing, you're

• 19:52Speaker 01

  going to have these autonomous vehicles in orbit that need advanced compute to handle all sorts of complex repositioning, maneuverability and awareness. And there's only be a very short list of companies that are really special doing that. And that's, that's why we, we are sort of bearish as investors on space techs, on space tech, except for a couple of companies, but very bullish on the space economy.

• 20:15David Weisburd?

  I just finished The Book of Elon, recently came out, and the author wants to create a million new Elons and wants to inspire the next generation. You're in a very unique vantage point in that you're investing in very frontier and deep tech at an early stage. You're seeing these founders before their household names. What are the common traits behind these deep tech founders that truly want to change the world and want to risk their entire careers on this?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  The really good ones are, look, they're all mission driven. They see a problem and all they care about is fixing it. And to be mission driven, you don't have to be necessarily an expert in a category like you've been, you've been building in the sector for 10 years. Some of our best founders actually see something from the outside, then they come in. And there's, there's lots of different archetypes of founders that can work in that regard. This is their life's work and the passion is there. And so that's the first thing. And I think if the question's really about how do you get more of them? I think you need to encourage people to have independent thought. For a subset of them, they just know this is a problem and they want to go address it.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  And they're able to sort of self-start and kind of keep reinforcing that with their learning and building the toolsets they need to go do this. And they just somehow know how to do it. And it's like they're training themselves and they're using the best technology and the best networks to go figure that out. And they just won't say no. That's like the biggest thing.

• 21:39David Weisburd?

  Do most of them have some kind of financial success? Maybe we talked about aqua hires or a couple of million bucks before they go on these grant visions? Or are they just staking everything, including their livelihood on this?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I mean, our founders, many of our founders are a little bit, a little bit older because we tend to like folks that, well, we think it's really important to have some sort of industrial acumen when you're going after these historically intractable problems. Because understanding how to build a tooling and die company is not something that your average graduate of Stanford or Berkeley is going to know how to do, or probably not even care about if you're in the Bay. It's someone who's sort of maybe seen that, living in Detroit, whether they did it or their families did it. There's sort of that, that sort of insider knowledge that I think is important. And oftentimes, that is from being in the industry. And so, these founders aren't 16 or 22 or 25, they're maybe in their early 30s. So that's, I think, a piece of it.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Some of them have, it's a whole mix. I mean, do they have capital? We have some repeat founders, but many of them, no, they're bootstrapped. They're living in geographies where it's a little bit easier to live to. They're not living in New York or San Francisco where it's really expensive.

• 22:44David Weisburd?

  I was just listening to an interview by an early Tesla engineer. And he was begging Elon to raise more cash to have on the balance sheet. And Elon was essentially starving the balance sheet to create the sense of urgency in the company. Tell me about that.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, so I've been doing this about 15 years now. I'm trying to, I'm not even sure I can give you an example of where a company's just sat on a ton of cash. You know, you say, oh, you ask a founder, why are you raising more capital? Oh, it's a war chest, I need to save it in case the economy shifts, or we have these skunk word projects, and in case one of them really materializes. It always sounds like a good idea, but the reality is, when you have the capital, like, it's just too hard not to use it. And so, it's sitting there, and so you've got to do something with it. And so... You either hire more people, you chase more kind of shiny objects like, okay, we're really focused on this product, but this is like adjacent, but not too adjacent, so

• 23:41Speaker 01

  we should build that too. And then you get, you sort of get all this distraction and...

• 23:44David Weisburd?

  Is this coming from the board? Is this from the founder? Who creates this pressure when you have capital to become scatterbrained?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Hopefully, my boards and my companies don't have too much capital, but I think it actually is, I mean, a lot of it's from the bottom up of sort of employees saying, hey, well, we should try this too.

• 24:03David Weisburd?

  It becomes harder to say no. What do you mean no? We have a hundred million dollars. Why can't I do the product?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  There's not, there's not one good answer for it. I think it's sometimes even the best founders, I think they, they often sort of overestimate their ability to do multiple, multiple things at once. If they like, we always talk about, you know, find a small market you can win and dominate, you know, create a healthy monopoly durable franchise there. And then, and then you can expand out. And there's a, there's a sequencing where yes, you want to start eye dating on some of this stuff before, before you're too far into sort of this high class problem, like Monopoly Land. But, but you need to do that leanly because once you start, also the other problem is like, it's not, people think about, you know, sunk costs or whatnot. It's like, once you start putting capital into it, it's like, oh, well, we're already into this for 10 million. We got to keep going. And it just becomes this, this sort of...

• 24:46David Weisburd?

  It's hard to write the quote.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this like negative flywheel that just spins faster and faster. And then it's like, we just, all of a sudden, we wasted all this time or this, and I, and I, and then you, and then you sort of just, you just get all this feature creep, you get all this, you confuse the team as to, okay, well, I thought we were doing that, but now we're doing this. Do we pivot? Do we not? And so lean, lean is really good.

• 25:05David Weisburd?

  How do you know when, when to go into your second product?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  It's really hard question to answer because it's so bespoke for each, not only for each company, but each, you know, each, what is the senior leadership dynamic at that company? What category? And what, what's going on at a macro level at that moment in time? What's going on? What do we think's going to happen three years from now? Once we actually, this product is going to be live? Whether I'm on the board or having these conversations, sort of just directly with founders, I always say, if you don't ever build this product and you're really successful at what your core business is... Are you satisfied with the impact you will have on whatever you're trying to do? And the answer always for our companies is almost always yes. And so I sort of, the way I try to frame it with them is like, you haven't completed that mission yet. So only start on this when you know that by the time, based on your modeling and your

• 25:53Speaker 01

  sense of the future, that product two will be in market sort of around when you've more or less completed this mission. And completing the mission doesn't mean, doesn't mean you're done with that. It just means, you know, I guess what I think of is like market saturation, like, and that's like really, really, really hard to do. And so I just like, if you're, if you're on this like, is this this massive uphill battle? And then all of a sudden, you're like, you're kind of going downhill a little bit towards like being like a category defining company. It's like, yeah, that's, we should all be high fiving that you're there, but you're not done yet. And so just be very cautious before, before you get distracted. And so it's really hard, but the, I mean, but I mean, product.

• 26:32David Weisburd?

  The rewards are there.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Rewards, look, you change, you can change the outcome of your company by an order of magnitude. You turn a $10 billion company to a $100 billion company or go up from there. And so I like it, but it just needs to be done in a measured way with the right amount of resources to go back to like this idea. If you're, you don't want to be starved for capital and you don't want to be starved for, lean team is good, but you can, you can have a few people working on this stuff.

• 26:53David Weisburd?

  There's a golden ratio where you want to make sure that you're not worried about whether you're taking an Uber from the airport or the bus, but also you don't want to be, have so much cash that you're not worried, you don't even think about it, or you're not focused, you're not hyper focused on the mission.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  I would argue you need the buy-in from, from leadership, but you don't want to have, if it's product two, you want designated people focusing on product two. Whether they're existing employees or you hire new people, it depends on the specifics of what you're doing. But when you start having like really good people focus on product one and product two at the same time, that's where it goes sideways.

• 27:22David Weisburd?

  So sometimes instead of fighting these impulses, if we could find ways to align with these human needs, I think certainly you have more firepower to go longer and deeper and continue compounding your advantages.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  I think, I think that's right. I think it's, one of the things we take pride in doing is we try to really help with what I call like founder blind spots. And, and I think that condition you're talking about is very real. We all have experienced and will continue to and really feel it. And so it's like, how do you, how do you stay the course, but also scratch that itch to continue to be innovative? And maybe it's. Innovation around how you iterate on your core business. Maybe it's lowercase i innovation around like some limited testing to see if there's real traction with a designated team that you oversee. And there's lots of different ways to do it. But I think there's always like a slightly contradictory element to anything when one thinks about adventure because it's also unique and bespoke and the world's changing every day.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And so it's really, really hard to get it right. The other danger is you sort of just, you know, you stay in your lane for too long and you're not innovative enough because and you get complacent and then like the competition comes or you, you know. And so a lot of people try to solve that to your point through M and A. I think buying versus building is usually not the right answer. And if you have to buy, if you feel like you really have to buy, maybe that means you're in the wrong business anyway because hopefully you can build something that is more innovative and you should be more creative and get the right, the right team. And maybe it's, maybe it's a new hiring initiative. And so I, so I see that a lot when I don't like M and A sprees for sure. My best founders look at it and they say, they said, look, we went and looked, here's

• 29:00Speaker 01

  the six reasons why this would make sense, but the tech isn't good enough. The culture is going to get messed up. Those are the two biggest things I think from an M and A standpoint, why you don't do it. And it's also going to be distracting because you've got this whole, this whole legal process and everything to go do it. And so I, I like, I like your framing of it of just, there's sort of these micro changes one can make and, you know, doing it at the junior employee level, doing it at the board level, there's doing it at the industry level. There's lots of other ways you can, it's like, how do you become a thought leader now that you're moved, now that you're really far along? You don't have to do M and A. Just help, help educate the industry, help educate the government on why what you're doing is important. Turn them into a customer. They're, they're open for business right now. Maybe they weren't, weren't a customer before. People are trying to be creative and, you know, not just at a federal level and a bunch of states too. Like there's all this stuff you can do that is net accretive to your, your core business.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And that's what we try to help with.

• 29:46David Weisburd?

  There's a lot of polarization in this country happening. A lot of it is driven by social media and incentives behind social media. What changes, whether structural, philosophical, regulatory could be changed in order to depolarize the country?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  I think it's ultimately sort of a business model question. If you're incentivizing with clicks and sort of these feedback loops for information that the people require and allowing folks to best monetize off of that, you're going to have this, this.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  These cycles where people are just getting fed the information they want to see and you get this confirmation bias and then that sort of at scale turns into you get these different camps and so if your confirmation bias is this, you'll go to this site and if it's the opposite, you go somewhere else. And so I think you just need to, the systems and the infrastructure around that need to change. I'm not sure I have a great answer. We've seen a bunch of companies that claim to have an approach to it. And so it's not, for me, it's not like an investable thesis or it's not a thesis that I'm actively pursuing. But what's really important to me, both just for me, Colin, as well as also what I think

• 31:03Speaker 01

  is a good business, is that I'm, you know, anything that we think is going to further polarize the country is not interesting to us. So there's this concept of the parallel economy. I don't really like it, I don't believe in it, like I don't think it makes a good business. Because I think people can overestimate the importance of ideology in a business context. The best founders who I know, like, are not political at all. They are, I mean, they might be political in the sense that they're pro-business or something like that and they're pro-capitalism and so they have maybe some libertarian tendencies or whatnot. But what they really care about is, you know, they don't care if you're red, if you're blue, if you're purple, if you're nothing. They are just busy building amazing product and hiring the best people they can to build

• 31:48Speaker 01

  that product, to come up with business model innovation around that product, to create something that is useful for everyone. And that's, I think if everyone just focuses on that and you sort of kind of keep the ideology out, like, I just, that's where the good businesses are being built. And I think mistakes have been made historically where you try to be, you're too aligned to whether it's a party or a specific issue. And I think if you're, if you just really think about first principles and solving, using tech and science to solve something that is real and that, that's what's going to help sort of get us away from this because you're going to, you know, you're going to solve an energy problem that...

• 32:30Speaker 01

  You know, brings down the cost of living for lots of Americans. You're going to cure a disease that lets us live longer. You're going to change this education system so our children can figure out how to engage with AI socially in a healthy way and all these apps. But also like figure out what the livelihood track is for them going forward instead of sort of this doom scrolling stuff. And I don't believe that like we should over regulate it or anything. But I that's just that's like my lane and where I can help.

• 32:55David Weisburd?

  The best take I've heard on this and the most optimistic take is that there's somewhere really only one to 3% of the population is radicalized. So what you see online is actually a very, very, very small minority of people. And if you're just to do a thought experiment, if you were just to walk up to somebody on the street, the odds of them being radicalized either on the right or on the left is very low. But the perception is that basically everybody's either for you or against you because of the feeds and everything. So I don't have a solution for that either. But it's good to remember that social media is not reality. And it doesn't just mean people jumping on private chats. That's not what they're doing. It also means politically and from a polarization, social media just incentivizes the loudest, the most extreme views. But it's not actually representative of reality.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Even as an investor, like I always say, like be very cautious of loud founders. Like signal to noise is not measured by how loud you are. And that's usually like a bad thing. And also if like a founder is spending a lot of time on X or any other platform they're not building and maybe that's not a good use of time. There's times to say things and there's time not to say things, whether they're political or otherwise. But the best founders tend to be less active there. Think about what our government's trying to do right now with advances in technology, sort of on the energy side, on space policy side, on all the onshoring around pharma, advanced manufacturing. If you're a startup founder building in those categories, this is just like a we're in the super cycle. It's like net accretive to what you're doing.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  And maybe you disagree on other issues that are some of the hot button issues, but you can get business done. You can collaborate in ways that are really productive, not just for you, your company and downstream, all your employees and their families and your livelihood. That's interesting. And then that starts to create GDP growth. You can scale a company. But I also think what happens is then you realize that we're getting stuff done together. And even if we're very different on these one or two issues. And then all of a sudden. You get back to this world where you can be aligned. It's okay to be aligned, not in every single way and disagree on things. And so that's that's sort of what I what I kind of try to do.

• 34:53David Weisburd?

  I like to do that in business. When I'm negotiating with somebody, I'll point out, here's the 10% where it's zero sum.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:58David Weisburd?

  Let's talk about that. Let's call it out.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:01David Weisburd?

  Here's the 90% where we're not. Let's focus on the 90% and then we could butt heads after we're happier. Or maybe I guess eventually you could start with the 10%. But you don't have to be 100% aligned with everybody to find that area for alignment. Colin, if you could go back to the beginning of your career, you've lived this kind of remarkable career, both as investor, but also some of the most prolific founders and investors of our time. What is one piece of advice you'd give a younger Colin that would have either accelerated your career or helped you avoid cost of mistakes?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  And Peter's talked about this with his career. I think going back, I spent too much time sort of chasing status and what in my mind appeared to be prestigious or important. But it was really kind of stuff that in retrospect looked impressive on the marquee, but it wasn't what I was passionate about. It wasn't what I really cared about. And so I guess if I were to go back, I would say, you know, focus more on the long-term trajectory of like, what are the right, what networks can you build? What people can you have around you who inspire you? Focus on sort of going lockstep based on what everyone else is doing.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  But also like, easier to say now and looking back, but this stuff takes time and like, let it let it marinate, let it compound. You don't you don't need to have the answers all at once. And I think if I had had, I'm not sure I would have taken it at that age, but like if I had had that advice, maybe, I mean, I absolutely love what I do. And I think I would have gotten here much faster had I just been a little more introspective on what was really important to me and sort of. Staying away from maybe what society was saying should be important.

• 36:39David Weisburd?

  I think about reputation as this compounding asset. It takes so many years to compound reputation. I've seen it in every walk of life. And then, once it's actually compounded, it's so valuable.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. It's, I mean, what we do is all about reputation. It's, do founders want to work with us? Do they want to share their visions of the future with us? And, and reputation is not just reputation of being helpful to them and having successful outcomes with them. It's being open, it's being communicative, it's being human with them. And, and sort of having that, that level of compassion and genuine interest, even if it's not a fit. That, that, all of that ties into reputation in a way that I think allows you to, to sort of endure, not just with, for one cycle, but for a much longer period of time.

• 37:23David Weisburd?

  Well, Colin, going back to 2015, when I made my very first venture investment with Eric Anderson, my mentor, he came to me and he said, you want to become a venture capitalist? I'm like, yes. He's like, let's put together an SVB to invest into Compass Therapeutics. And I asked him, what's an SVB? And he explained it to me. And we reached out to Alapiz, who were one of those people that said, yes. Thankfully, the company went public. But thanks so much for supporting me throughout my career and congratulations on everything.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  You know, it's great to circle back with, I can't believe all that time's elapsed, but you're doing a wonderful job. And it's, as is Eric, and it's, it's fun to see our friends thriving. Thank you.

• 37:52David Weisburd?

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