There was a very defining time in my life. I think everyone has one or more. Mine happened to be in 2009, when an acquaintance of mine suggested I check out the Bitcoin paper.

I had always had a hard time with non-earned authority but that's clearly the day I started to see the world in a very different lens. To the risk of sounding cringy, it was a bit like being able to see the Matrix for the first time. I was liberated and could now see "a world without you, a world without rules or controls, a world where anything is possible".

As I dove more into figuring out "how deep the rabbit hole goes", my complete worldview changed and things started to make sense once more.

The world around me was not setup how I wanted it to be, and there were ways to actually change it and mold it to my (and hopefully, almost everyone else's) pleasing.

I am, sadly, not nearly smart enough to invent solutions like Bitcoin (or Ethereum, or others) but I feel proud about having been able to recognize their importance.

The next best alternative therefore is to invest in these solutions and support the people that are smart enough to come up with them.

That's what happened in the following years.

Ethereum showed up on the radar, pre launch, with a random team of 10 cofounders or something, with a completely new fundraising mechanism, no product, but one of the most powerful visions I had ever heard before.

Bitcoin had decentralized monetary power.

Ethereum had decentralized computing and software development power.

The first truly new democratizing technologies after the actual invention of the parliament.

The first proper visions for a more democratic world after the American revolution.

And the rabbit hole was indeed deep.

The next step was to decentralize corporations. I was immediately attracted to the Aragon founders, who had one of the most potent visions for that, and decided to join in on the effort. That was, as every other new vision, very very hard to realize and sadly we're not there yet. But there are little doubts that the future of corporations is decentralized, on-chain, permissionless, free and democratic. We will get there, maybe in our lifetime, maybe not.

And so, it's now been almost 15 years that I've had this decentralization topic living in my brain and molding how I see the world.

And, while running Unruly, it has popped up here and again helping me recognize one trend that is now very clear to me and the team: the decentralization of the real world.

While decentralizing money, computing and all sorts of online bits is a very worthwhile mission, and the reason I co-founded Semantic Ventures to do just that, our world is atom-based.

Balaji wants to decentralize real-world governance with the Network state, and that's fascinating and very important work.

But we still have to live in a world made of sand, clay and rocks. And we still have to transform them into bricks, buildings and wires.

And so we need someone to push for the decentralization of the real world.

That is the next step, and it is happening. We, our kids, or their kids, will live in a world where everything is decentralized.

Food will be produced on your rooftop.

Energy will be produced right next to it.

Objects will be printed on demand, as needed and in your garage (or close by).

We will reduce our materials use.

We will reuse everything we can.

We will recycle everything else.

We won't rely on centralized powers determining what can be built and where.

We won't rely on government incentives and massive corporations deciding what we should eat. Fiat food is over.

There is, in my mind, very little question about this happening or not. The question is who will make it happen, how, and when.

And at Unruly it is our mission to figure this out.

How we got here

History seems to be a continuous struggle between decentralization and centralization. This is true in politics with empires, in business with mega corporations and at lower levels of other systems such as computer software, supply chains and manufacturing (there might additionally be a parallel here between bundling and unbundling cycles in tech, which we might touch upon later).

Centralization is a powerful force, and it seems that all systems at some point tend to become centralized.

At the same time, it’s also true that when systems become too centralized, and too big, there is very little chance for them to remain relevant in the long term.

The benefits of centralization are clear: more control, more efficiency, faster communication, and so on. (Another side of that medal: if a centralized system is governed by malevolent players, that control and efficiency translates into controlled and efficient tyranny, or monopoly should we talk in business terms.)

There comes a point though, when centralized entities lose that control, efficiency and communication advantage. The point when empires become too big and can’t control all lands in their territory. The point in which a corporation becomes too big, and can’t innovate anymore.

That’s the point in time when small independent actors regain the advantage. They can now move faster. They can try out new ideas with little cost of failing.

They don’t have a big apparatus to maintain, a big bureaucracy to pay, a million VPs to please, and so on.

Once you see this dichotomy, you start seeing it everywhere.

Politics

Centralization is most often discussed in political terms, and has rarely been explored in terms of other systems (there isn’t a single book out there that’s focused on this topic specifically).

The discussion here is almost too easy, with infinite examples.

Europe is the most obvious for us. The Roman empire was the first big centralizing force, removing decentralized systems of Greek origin (and Etruscan, etc.,) and forming one of the largest centralized polities ever seen. Then came the age of decentralization, of sovereign cities that thanks to a changing world order and new technologies could take over substantial power, while still being checked by all the others.

But during the 15th and 17th centuries, we saw a very similar scenario where royals began the process of centralizing their governments. Louis XIV of France, Peter the Great of Russia, and Ferdinand and Isabella of Castille and Aragon, all centralized the power of their governments to make their kingdoms stronger.

We then had other centralizing forces, most notably Napoleon, the English empire, and so on, but the most fascinating thing is to look at where we are again today, comparing the map of our present day situation, where our current political and economic zone is strikingly similar to the first image, and it still seems ever enlarging.

It’s the same in other areas of the world, with the US and China dominating everyone else because of their scale, and arguably creating a world made of only two large blocks.

The United States could very well follow similar patterns. From a fully decentralized founding, to an ever more present, powerful and seemingly indestructible federal government. Can you guess what’s likely to happen next?

Globalization and Business

Globalization can be seen as a centralizing and decentralizing force at the same time.

On the one hand, it obviously decentralizes commerce in the sense that producers and customers can now be in wildly different locations yet be part of the same commerce network.

On the other hand, it is a strongly centralizing force favoring large businesses which are the ones able to reap the biggest rewards from this new world order.

Centralization as a force is something that we see in business constantly in how corporations evolve. Startups find a large market, and grow into massive corporations, gobbling up competitors and making it almost impossible for anyone else to compete with them. Their centralized cost structure and scale enables them to outspend most and buy up everyone else.Until they get too big, and their advantages slowly erode, making space for new small startups to catch the next wave. And on and on the merry-go-round goes.

Software is probably the most unexpected, but most recent and explicative example. It’s been a constant battle between centralized, closed-source systems and decentralized, permissionless open-source systems.

And you can see the dichotomy even just thinking about what makes it possible for you to read this: likely the product of both extremely centralized systems (an Apple phone or laptop or an Android or Windows device) and extremely decentralized ones (the internet).

Markets are also one very fun and touchy topic: Hayek famously argued that free markets themselves are decentralized systems where outcomes are produced without explicit agreement or coordination by individuals who use prices as their guide. We believe decentralized markets are the absolute optimal method to create prosperity, and can argue that all free market limitations (from governments) are what creates all the problems (monopolies, mostly) usually suspected to be caused by free markets themselves and their centralization forces.

At the same time, advancing technology may allow decentralized, privatized and free market solutions for what have been public services, such utilities producing and/or delivering power, water, mail, telecommunications and services like consumer product safety, money and banking, medical licensing and detection and metering technologies for highways, parking, and auto emissions - the shift here is very hard for many to comprehend, imagine and accept.

Where are we now?

We find ourselves at a very interesting point in time.

The world seems to still be converging to full centralization in politics and business. But we are all starting to see cracks in the matrix.

The United States has now officially relinquished its role as the global empire superpower we all have always assumed it would forever be. They are not going to be patrolling the seas for the rest of the western block indefinitely - piracy, of all things, might be coming back in this decade.

In 2020 world trade was down to 51% of global GDP from a peak of 61% in 2008. It seems that globalization might have peaked.

The implications of both examples are staggering. All geopolitical entities and businesses now need to be more wary of their inter-dependencies, originating for the first time in decades a new force field with a rising decentralization tension. Local risks now seem much smaller than global risks.

While most people are sure we’re still living in a world very similar to the one they saw in the 80s and 90s, high on free fossil energy, untapped natural resources and young populations - the truth is that we are living in a completely new world: one were even with a staggering 10 billion people, we rarely have a full qualified and willing workforce, where we are running out of all the low-hanging ways to mine critical materials, where we produce prodigious amounts of waste, and where there isn’t a very clear 1st vs 3rd world dynamic anymore.

Visiting SE/E Asia or the Middle East today for the first time is a completely mind bending experience for most western people. Everyone assumes that the world is just really happening “here” and we’re just producing cheap widgets and palm oil “there”. But the reality is that we’re very much after the peak, and those other countries have a dynamism, excitement, momentum, energy and youth that will be extremely hard for us to replicate if we cling to our old model.

And this is something that some smart people in the VC landscape have already figured out. Just like when I wrote our initial Unruly Manifesto, I was inspired by Founders Fund and Bedrock and their own manifestos, this time around I can’t not mention Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism team and initiative.

I believe what led A16Z to create their American Dynamism thesis is the same realization that led us to this one. They chose to focus on defense and resiliency and are building a sector specific thesis. We aim to go one step deeper, and develop a horizontal sector-agnostic view.

Where do we go from here?

The main question to ask ourselves is then: what are the key levers that make the balance shift between centralization and decentralization.

Although it would probably take the better part of a lifetime to do the research necessary to have a strong viewpoint on this, we have a few hypotheses here.

At Unruly, we think that this force is now showing up in a much deeper and pervasive way: it is challenging the merits of the centralized production process, something that has now been going on for centuries.

The reasons are manifold, but a short list of them must include:

• Increasing shortage of low-cost qualified labor, especially in emerging economies

• Therefore, rise of automation in most sectors

• Therefore, drop in labor costs, the #1 driver for offshoring

• Extremely low communication and drastically dropping coordination costs

• Continued improvement of additive manufacturing and 3d printing

• Digitization of intellectual property

• Unstoppable electrification trend

Trying to tie it up altogether:

Extremely low communication costs coupled with the digitization of intellectual property in an environment with rising global wages and increased geopolitical risk, directly leads to decentralized, electrified and automated supply chains, often leveraging new materials.

Centralized systems are perfect when communication costs are high. The directive comes from the center, and goes all the way to all the different level subjects. No response is usually even required.

In a decentralized system, the flow of information is constant in all directions. It can only work when communication costs are extremely low. Feedback loops are vastly shortened and innovation massively accelerated.

We believe that the next centuries will be the decentralized production centuries.

A glimpse into the future

The fun part begins now, as investors and as curious people.

Predicting the decentralized macroeconomic and geopolitical scenario of the future is not something that we will attempt, but there are some areas and trends which are easy to see, validate and bet on.

• Synthetic Biology

  Synthetic biology is one of those absolutely unstoppable forces already clear to completely revolutionize how things are made. We are in the early innings, and each day we see decks of startups with visions that chart a completely different future for humankind: one of abundance. By using enzymes, bacteria, cells and so on, we do see a future in which we will be able to produce everything we need to continue running our current (and obviously a whole host of new) industrial and chemical processes.The key thing about synthetic biology is that it uses widely available inputs and works in modular systems, therefore removing the need for large one-in-the-world industrial plants. The future of synthetic biology is interlinked with industrial decentralization.

• Energy

  Energy is the fundamental thing that underlines everything. The more energy we have, the more abundance of everything else we will have, and the better off everyone else.

  We’ve lived an incredibly positive world phase in the second part of the last century, and that is exclusively because of basically free fossil energy. As in every basic econ intro class, we all know we can’t just erode the principal and hope for the best (although most head of states could be reminded that now and again).

  So we need to “make” our own energy and access renewable stocks, just as we do with other resources (wood in Europe comes as one of the best managed resources, worldwide fisheries are one in which we could do a whole lot better, and time will tell).The global shift towards solar and wind has been of the biggest decentralizing forces in modern history (although the production of panels and turbines is centralizing in some -usual- places) and this will become stronger and stronger.The examples both in our portfolio and outside of it are growing: small modular reactors, renewable natural gas, microgrids and so on.We are incredibly excited to see this trend continue growing and affirming itself as the core of the industrial decentralization space.

• Manufacturing

  Probably where most of the impact will be, and honestly, really hard to grasp the magnitude: networks of distributed 3D printers operating in hospital wards, offices, houses and battlefields are taking shape today. These are systems that can be continuously restructured, adapted, designed to operate with low-latency at high-resolution.

  The factories of the future will have many shapes, not only that of a gigantic plant. Distributed manufacturing will drive a commoditization of hardware bringing down the cost of critical machines for health, industry and defense. Fast, cheap and easy parts production will drastically reduce the time it takes to fix things, hence creating more resilient infrastructure. Medical devices will be designed and produced in situ, closing the gap between production and point of care. Bedside to bedside. Rapid prototyping and manufacturing directly in academic classes and research labs is already benefiting academic institutions and research centers, accelerating even more our ability as a species to build the things that we need.

  3D printing in aerospace and advanced industries is on the verge of a seismic shift from prototyping to large-scale production. Just-in-time manufacturing of interchangeable components is democratizing hardware as we have never seen before.

  We honestly believe decentralized manufacturing to be one of the biggest forces present today.

• Food

  Not sure how many people notice, but supermarket shopping has become ever weirder, with rarely anything grown in your own country anymore.Also, another non-obvious thing is that “food transport emissions add up to nearly half of direct emissions from road vehicles.”So something that should be obvious but often isn’t is that food prices and availability are intrinsically tied to the petrochemical industry, given that farmers are one of its biggest customers with fuel and nitrogen.

  This is also where fiat food comes along. As fiat-money is an imaginary entity, not backed by anything other than trust, “Fiat Foods are foods with no nutritional value and not backed by nature”. Fiat food has happened because of incentives and subsidies to the petrochemical industrial complex and farmers that depend on it (yeah, the big reason you can’t really eat anything that doesn’t have corn in it).

  We believe decentralization can end all of this, producing food locally where it is needed.

  Dis-intermediating this relationship with electrification, bio-based fertilizers, novel selective sustainable pesticides is one of the big steps to take.

  But the next one is to enable a whole new crop of farmers to produce all-year-long close to the large population centers. We’re already seeing a number of startups producing food from captured CO2 and we don’t expect this trend to slow down.

• Recycling / Circular economy

  When Rockefeller saw ethylene burning in his plants at Standard Oil he said he didn’t believe in wasting anything and decided to find a use for ethylene. Now we have polyethylene in no short order thanks to that.

  Reusing industrial waste is a major trend we are seeing in all industries, and we believe a new polyethylene could be found at any time when human ingenuity, greed and necessity meet.

  Circular economy is a bit of an unfortunate name nowadays as it seems to be only really applied to hippie-like “reuse this tote bag” sort of situations. But a circular supply-to-waste chain is a decentralized, resilient and decarbonized future that we should all want. It is also surely the cheapest as soon as we move away from free oil - and the only one that can bring about the future of abundance we all strive for.

  Industrial circular economy is making traditional production processes cheap, green and reliable. Chemical plants are being redesigned to improve value chain through better material flow, energy efficiency and infrastructure distribution.

  We believe that after the first wave of trendy consumer circular economy startups, we will see many, many more startups using this idea in industrial contexts.

• Natural resources

  The first time I saw the deck of Ocean Oasis, I was so incredibly excited. Obviously a company that produces cheap, safe drinking water is exciting on its own, but I believe I had already seeds of this thesis and Ocean Oasis fit it perfectly. Decoupling the geographical constraint tied to drinking water is a perfect example of our thesis here.

  And this is happening on a whole host of other natural resources. Companies creating synthetic precursors for chemical processes from CO2 are another. Asteroid mining, phytomining, ocean mining and so on are such a clear trend of delocalizing production of primary inputs that are core to a wider industrial decentralization.

• And so much more

  Decentralized fuels production and material processing will free economies from the dependency on often autocratic resource-rich countries. Distributed fertilizers will decouple food availability in developing countries from global supply chain fragility. And then vaccines and medicines produced in containers. In-space manufacturing. Affordable construction materials from industrial waste upcycling. Possibilities without limitation.

And here we are. A small fund seeing a big trend. One that we believe is the only possible path for our species, and one we are extremely excited to continue investing in.

Unruly invests in founders that leverage industrial decentralization to create abundance, resilience and freedom to bring about a more decarbonized, decentralized and developed world.

If you want to learn more about industrial decentralization, we invite you to our inaugural research seminar, happening in May 2024 in NYC and virtually:

The Decentralization of the Real World - Research Seminar · Luma

"The Decentralization of the Real World" is a research seminar organized by Unruly Capital and co-hosted by Newlab in Brooklyn NYC. Some of the world's...

https://luma.com

Part II: what’s next and what’s important?

Part I: An ode to entrepreneurship and venture capital

Recently I've started to realize why I've been so fascinated by and attracted to venture capital. It's not really the #1 career choice for 20yo kids that don't know what to do with their life, and yet, having barely heard it mentioned a few times, I already knew it was what I wanted to do when I'd grow up.

The reason, as I believe it today, is that venture capital is one of the most important activities of man kind: the choice of how to allocate resources.

That choice, now almost fully monopolized (as most everything else) by nation states governments (and more and more supranational entities), is also practiced at small but very very effective scale by small players around the world: angel investors, venture firms, accelerators, etc. They all have a bit of a say in what gets built by founders.

I believe practicing venture comes with an ethical, moral responsibility to all of your fellow humans on top of your limited partners for what you decide to invest in. Some people decide to invest in the next deployment of scooters around towns or the next 10 minute delivery app, and I think those people are failing all of us.

Would you rather come back home to your kid at home and say: "hey! today I've invested in a company that has a slightly better SaaS sales outreach technology" (or whatever) or "today I met with a founder that might solve humanity's quest for infinite energy (proteins, plastics, etc.)"?

I'm not a very ambitious person, and I think I can often keep my ego fairly in check (although that's not super easy all of the time), but I do like to make sure that what I do has some sort of importance, for me, my family and ideally for a larger number of people.

And I believe that in our era, venture and entrepreneurship are the most impactful things you could do with your time on this Earth.

In previous historic periods, the biggest impact you could have on the world was to become a general, go out on massive campaigns and conquer new regions for your empire, thus advancing the quality of life of all of the people on your side (cause you'd be enslaving the others or extracting value out of their regions anyways)

After a few centuries, this has transferred to becoming a career politician, or worse working in one of the shadowy agencies in charge of many a coup. There was nowhere else to have the outsized impact you could have while taking decisions for millions of people. Deciding on their economic activities, rights, bodies, religious and sexual freedoms but also on large scale wars and resource appropriation.

As nation states finish their dominance cycle and are all essentially bankrupt all around the world, indebted like some of the worst commercial paper you could find and absolutely impossibilitated in investing in new technology nor deploying new technologies in a fast way (read Patrick Collison's thoughts on the costs and timelines of new large scale projects) it's all in the hands of the ingenuity of private individuals and groups.

I would stipulate that as of today, it's entrepreneurs and early stage investors that have the largest impact on the world. And this will be the case for a few centuries.

Some people would push back on this view pointing out that people are building some pretty useless stuff all around the world for a quick buck, and that investors are giving them money to do it. That's undeniable, and probably part of the deal, but I feel we're at a very clear crossroad at the moment.

The younger generations are infinitely more aware of the shitty situation our planet and population find themselves in, and will more and more only justify working on important topics.

I've still got a lot of optimism left, and hope to keep it as I grow older. The bet here is that ingenious and crafty individuals will fill the gaps left by the old school institutions and show us and everyone else the way.

They'll rally people to follow them on their crazy journey, and figure out how the 8 billions of us can coexist peacefully and sustainably on this planet.

Like Cal Rodgers, which in 1911 completed the first coast to coast flight from New York to Pasadena. It took him 49 days!!

He crashed 16 times and broke multiple bones. He broke every possible part of the airplane, and yet he kept on going. When he got there, he said that he believed he'd see the day when it'd only take 3 days to cover the journey.

Now, there are two type of people in the world I believe, the ones that thought that this was absolutely crazy and the ones that were able to see where this was leading to. Even if there were no airports, it was incredibly dangerous, there was no navigation equipment (he was following the train tracks!), it was ridiculously expensive, it could only carry one person and the train only took seven days at a time in a much safer, much more comfortable ride.

Cal Rodgers was able to see the future we have today, where we can cross the world in less than 24 hours, and tried his best to make it happen (he unfortunately, but quite predictably I'd say, died in a plane accident a few days after his trip was over).

That is a pretty unruly founder and the perfect prototype of the founders I would love to meet every day.

My day to day is an ode to entrepreneurs, thanks for all that you do, for dedicating your lives to showing us a potential future that is better than what we'd get otherwise.

Us on the investing side are nothing like Cal Rodgers obviously, but we're like the people that would assemble at each of his landings. We'll be here on the sidelines, in a much more comfortable ride no doubt, but in awe and cheering from the bottom of our hearts for you.

---

Part II: What's next, and what's important?

Answer these two questions, and it's my belief you'll do well for yourself and for others in life.

I didn't know those two questions were the ones driving me, but I was feeling a nudge to explore early stage investing since I was in college in Italy (where the word "startup" truly had to yet enter the lexicon).

When I got a job in a small VC, I was appalled by the speed and the triteness of the companies being presented to us, until one day one deal came across the desk, with a 19 year old entrepreneur (easily half of the median age), and after convincing the firm to invest, I invested 50% of my then absolutely minimal bank account balance in it.

A lot of people thought we were nuts for giving money to a kid with basically no product working on a minuscule area of the internet. And yet, a few months ago that deal returned the fund.

The same happened when talking about Bitcoin in 2009/2010 and when investing in the Ethereum sale in 2014.

As I pass 10 years of investing in some form or another, I've thought long and hard: why was I able to make money? Is it that with everything going up, any monkey throwing darts would have performed well (which most likely is the case), or if I do actually have an edge, what is it?

It's not helping the companies grow like some mega ex-operator, that's for sure.

It's not by fighting to get into the most competitive deals like former investment bankers flying CEOs in their jet at 3am to a Vegas party (true story btw, a few VCs got on their jets in the US to wine and dine a portfolio founder in Paris, just for one evening).

But could it be just spending time at the fringes, sitting and asking yourself: what's next? I believe it can be.

A rising tide lifts all boats, so a lot of your mistakes can be forgiven, but you have to guess where the tide will actually be.

It also turns out that answering this question is the most intellectually fascinating journey one could embark on.

For this reason, I've decided to formally commit to doing this for a much longer time, by starting Unruly Capital, in which I'll be one of the largest LPs.

Unruly is a spirit, it's the spirit you find in the most interesting and successful people in history, and surely in the most successful entrepreneurs.

You can't build anything meaningful by complying to the status quo and social rules of your times, you must instead dare to challenge yourself in finding the hidden truth if you want to bend and shape the direction of history.

Unruly is thus a spirit that is at the core of the firm.

My previous firms have been named Mission and Market, and Semantic.

Mission and Market represents the two big streets in San Francisco where a lot of the startup activity was happening, but more importantely it also represents two core parts of a startup's focus: a strong mission to align and rally employees and a large market to support a large company.

Semantic to stress the meaningful, the important.

I'm not here to make a quick buck on the latest fad. Not because I wouldn't like it, but because, aside from not adding too much to the world, I find it too hard. It's by definition a hard strategy, where you have to guess which new speculation will be going on and find the right entry and exit points.

Focusing on the meaningful, I've found it to be a much more sustainable long term investment strategy. Meaningful companies attract the best people, and in turn create the most value. It might take a little bit more than the new fad, but the probability is much higher.

I like to think we already know what the core areas of focus and growth in the future will be, there is just a lack of guts to invest in them when it's not yet 100% guaranteed (some people tell me instead that  it's too hard to know what the world will look like and where the growth will come from, but then again I guess that's why they're not into VC and I like so much).

At Unruly I want to combine this ethos and vision.

Unruly will focus on important companies, with a strong mission and desire to shape the world for the better, building meaningful and important products in what will end up being large markets. It means trying to find what is unruly and crazy today, and will become normal tomorrow.

But there are no rules, no investment mandates in specific topics, just current areas of interest and conviction.

Unruly is built answering the question: what does a 100y investment institution look like?

And in formulating the answer, I came to the conclusion that by being long "real", useful and important innovation in any cycle it feels really hard to lose money.

It's hard to find ways to describe in a word what unruly will be focusing on but, if I had to choose one, it would be the frontier.

In history the frontier is where the most interesting, exciting and rewarding things happened. Either in the physical frontier of the new unexplored lands, like the pioneering settlers of the new world with their thirst for adventure and growth, or the frontiers of intellectual thought.

Both frontiers are full of danger, from unknown snake bites or a new tropical disease in the unknown territories, to the very real risk of being hanged or burned at the spike in the "civilized" world, so entrenched in its old ways.

Today it's hard to find unexplored lands (aside from new planets that is) but capitalism, and venture capital specifically, can remain a frontier way of life. A way to intellectually stimulate yourself to think about what is next, or, better, what should be next, and strategize about how to make that happen. Which companies, which entrepreneurs, which sectors, which geographies to focus on in order to create the new world you want.

So which are those frontiers?

The easiest heuristic I could find for something to be classified in that way is noticing if a lot of people are scared of it, and at the same time some of the smartest people you know spend all of their time thinking about it.

As of today, the things that fascinate me the most, while scaring a vast amount of people, remain hard deeptech focused on climate; genetic engineering; artificial intelligence; space technology; decentralized computing, finance and governance; anything built in and for Africa, synthetic biology; precision fermentation; new materials discovery; psychedelics and a longer tail of areas I'm not fully versed in yet.

But identifying the areas and trends is obviously not enough, then it becomes a question of finding what the meaningful things (ideas, products, companies) in each area will be.

That's a much more subjective topic, but at this period in time it seems pretty clear that implementing nature based solutions and new technologies to avoid a climate catastrophe is core to our species survival. At the same time, decentralizing and localizing production of energy, food, materials, etc. and trying to give back control of data and money to people instead of nation states or centralized institutions is a very important thing to work on.

On the other hand, it's very easy to define Unruly by what it won't be focusing on. Figuring out which new SaaS software large enterprises will start using, which new consumer app will have us glued to the screen for more time, or which new bored ape or game will explode in popularity do not fit the bill for me, and therefore will not be part of the investment activity.

As I sit here looking at the results of the previous firms, with Mission and Market Fund I fully returned almost two times over to LPs in 6 years (while keeping most of the winners still in the portfolio, including absolute rocketships like Replit, Atomwise and The Every Company); Semantic with massive winners like Nexus Mutual, Dune, Lido Arweave and more; and a personal blended angel portfolio return I couldn't ever dream about enabling me to not work anymore (including planet-changing companies like Twelve, Seaborg and Heart Aerospace), I'm confident this can also be a most rewarding journey.

But the confidence doesn't erase the risks, which I'm very well aware of. The frontier is full of them.

In this case, the dangers include obviously losing all of my (and my LPs') money, but also being made to look like an absolute idiot for believing in some crazy new obscure technology that will never work or some new belief that would make most want to imprison you.

But what is the fun in life in playing by the rules of your time?

Why join the navy if you can be a pirate? 🏴

Find us at unrulycap.com / @unrulyvc / Sifted