Over the past 13+ years, we’ve written a lot on this blog — investment announcements, portfolio recaps, year-in-reviews. But a handful of posts have captured something deeper: the ideas and convictions that actually guide how we invest. If you’re a founder trying to understand what makes us tick, or just curious about how our thinking has evolved, these five posts are the best place to start.

1. An Update on Version One’s Thesis: Backing Mission-Driven Founders Who Are Early in New Areas

This is the post that says it all. When we first formalized our thesis in 2020, it was “backing mission-driven founders at the earliest stages.” That still holds, but we realized it was missing something important: timing. So we updated it to “backing mission-driven founders who are early in new areas.”

The distinction matters. We’re not looking for founders building in established categories where the terminology is already branded and VCs are lining up. We’re looking for the founders creating categories that don’t exist yet — the ones building something the market hasn’t imagined. If it feels fringy, emerging, even a little crazy, that’s usually a sign we should pay attention. When you’re early into a large wave, there are no natural competitors and you have a chance to define and lead the category.

Looking back, this pattern shows up in our best investments: Vertical SaaS in 2012–2014, crypto in 2016–2020, climate in 2020–2021. Each time, we were investing before the wave had a name.

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2. What We’ve Learned From Investing in Deep Tech

For most of our history, we were a software-focused fund. This post marks the moment we publicly said: that’s changed. Deep tech — technology that touches atoms, not just bits — is now a core focus, and it’s reshaped how we think about defensibility.

We used to believe that even in hardware-adjacent companies, the real value had to live in the software or data layer. We’ve abandoned that view. We’re now comfortable with the idea that hardware doesn’t get commoditized over time the way conventional wisdom suggests. In fact, hardware defensibility works in reverse compared to software: it’s hard to start up and scale, but once you do, you’ve built something very difficult to replicate. Software is the opposite — easy to start, hard to defend.

This post also lays out practical lessons: the founding team matters even more in deep tech because development timelines are so long; commercialization focus beats technology-in-search-of-a-problem; and thanks to AI and 3D printing, the friction to get a first product off the ground is lower than ever. Eight of our nine investments in 2025 had a hardware component.

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3. Three Years of ChatGPT: Where We Are With AI Today

Amid the AI hype cycle, this post offers a measured view of where things actually stand. Three years after ChatGPT launched, super-intelligence is arriving more slowly than the most optimistic predictions suggested, and LLMs may be nearing the ceiling of what the current paradigm can achieve.

We see this as good news for founders. No single model will dominate everything. Instead, the landscape will likely resemble the internet: winner-take-all dynamics in some consumer areas, winner-take-most in certain enterprise verticals, but ultimately fragmented and diverse. The most powerful disruptions will come when technology shifts align with new business models — the way ad-supported internet or SaaS subscriptions replaced perpetual licenses.

For startups, the biggest opportunities right now are at the two extremes: close to the metal (chips and infrastructure) and close to the customer (products with sticky adoption and deep workflow integration). The bottlenecks to solve — prompting, verification, and novel business models — are where founding teams can carve out real differentiation.

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4. The Version One Anti-Portfolio

Every VC has an anti-portfolio, but few publish theirs. We think it’s one of the most important things we’ve ever shared, because it captures a fundamental truth about early-stage investing: we are wrong more often than we are right.

We passed on Shopify at a $100M Series B valuation — it’s now worth $135B. We passed on Instacart because we were too focused on how operationally tough it would be to build a delivery network. We passed on Scale AI because we couldn’t wrap our heads around scaling a data-labeling business. We missed Honey, Carta, and Wealthsimple for reasons that felt perfectly defensible at the time.

The lesson isn’t that we should have known better. It’s that a “no” from any investor should mean absolutely nothing to a founder about the future of their company. Early-stage investors are more wrong than right. That humility shapes how we try to evaluate opportunities today — staying open-minded, fighting the creeping cynicism that comes with pattern recognition, and always asking what a venture could become if everything goes right.

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5. A Reflection on a Decade: 10 Lessons After 10 Years in VC

Angela wrote this post on her tenth anniversary in venture capital, and it’s become one of the most personal and widely read things we’ve published. It captures the principles that guide how we work — not just what we invest in, but how we show up every day.

A few highlights that resonate across everything we do: build your tribe, because VC is intellectual work and you need diversity of thought; pay it forward in a genuine, non-transactional way, because the ROI in this business is measured in years and decades; be a generalist on the inside but signal your specific interests on the outside; and invest in mission-driven founders, because the startup journey is never a straight line — some of our best-performing companies are pivots, which is exactly why founder conviction matters more than any initial idea.

The post also makes an important point about staying curious and open-minded as you gain experience. The longer you’re a VC, the more cynical and pattern-matching you can become. Fighting that instinct — staying optimistic, staying weird, staying genuinely interested in new areas — is what keeps you from becoming a mediocre investor who passes on the next Shopify.

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These five posts span nearly a decade of writing, but they share a common thread: the best opportunities come from backing extraordinary people who are building in places most investors aren’t looking yet. That conviction has guided us from our earliest days investing in vertical SaaS to where we are today — investing in robotics, deep tech, AI, crypto, India, and beyond. We hope these posts give you a window into how we think, and we’re always excited to meet founders who are building the future before anyone else sees it coming.