Studio
The classic investor searches the market for existing teams and hopes to select well. That leaves the two most valuable levers — the thesis and the team — to chance. We reverse the order.
We do it in one industry: financial services and the infrastructure underneath it.
01
We name a specific application in financial services where compute carries the scaling and the business funds itself. Not a sector, not a trend — a named failure in a named market, with a reason the window is open now.
A thesis that cannot say what is broken, for whom, and why this year rather than three years ago is not finished. We do not staff unfinished theses.
02
We assemble the founders and the key roles around that thesis. The thesis does not bend to the team we happen to find.
This is where most studios quietly compromise, and it is the step we refuse to rush. The person we are looking for usually knows a market cold and has never founded anything, because the risk and the overhead were never worth it. We remove both.
03
We write the business and product strategy for the thesis and turn it into an implementation plan — milestones, regulatory path, resourcing, and the financial architecture that lets the company fund itself.
We stay operational through the first year. Not as board observers. In the work.
04
Every function that does not differentiate the company stays with us. The founding team keeps product and market, which are the only two things that cannot be centralised.
Corporate services
A new company normally spends its first year building these. Ours start with them.
Terms
You run the company. We hold a minority position and we are useful in the work, not decisive in it.
The specific terms — your share, the vesting, the capital we commit — we discuss in the second conversation, once we both know the thesis holds. We put them in writing before anyone leaves a job.