Six Themes for 2025

Where I'm investing next, Nuclear Waste, 23andMe, Su*c*de Rounds

At the end of last year I wrote “when to call me” - some theses and themes I was/am interested in. That stuff all still matters but a lot of it was quite backward looking on what I ~had~ done.

Here’s what I’m thinking about now and am going to do going forward:

1. AI Extrapolations: the first order impacts of AI are pretty obvious (lower cost digital stuff, personalization, observation, and coordination). But so what? What happens next? Rather than debating the inputs, we need to be tracking the outputs and the ripples from there. It’s at the 2nd and 3rd order impacts that things gets important and unique opportunities open up. Stop asking what will happen - we know what will happen - start asking what happens next.

2. Age of Inbound: The cold email and autodialer are going the way of the banner ad. The Great Ignore has begun. AI is killing traditional outbound sales channels and it’ll only get worse. Too many competitors, too much slop, too easy to scale what works. The distribution models of the future will all be based on some combination of captive/proprietary distribution, virality, and organic growth, and inbound demand. The age of inbound is upon us.

3. Going early and long NY: as much of the world becomes more formulaic and scale oriented, the opportunity to be a positive-sum truth teller and supporter to/for the earliest companies gets bigger. When capital is cheap, sell time and thoughtful effort. This is increasingly important to me, especially for NYC founders and companies. I want to ~be the first money and more importantly the first partner to NY companies.

4. Illegible to undeniable/no more gradient stages: Nominal stages (seed, A, B etc.) don’t really matter. Instead, the only important distinction is between risk and scale. Everything else is nomenclature and posturing along a gradient. So the typical distinctions of a seed fund are basically meaningless. What you really need to do is commit to being a risk-on early stage fund finding good risk/supralinear bets (where if you’re right, you’re right) no matter the named stage. Use your money to flip illegible bets into undeniable stories.

5. Long apps/user: looking at really new technologies I want to bet on the apps, users, and beneficiaries. The foundational level is too capital intensive and the “middleware” doesn’t produce the biggest winners. But the “app layer” is where we’ll find our winners: those who can use new technologies to pioneer new products, business models, markets taking the risks we like to underwrite. This is most obvious in AI but we see the same sorts of opportunities in robotics, deep tech, and stable coins.

6. The complexity crisis: as software does more (more use cases), gets cheaper to build (more competitors), and gets upgraded/updated more frequently (more features), enterprise environments will get way more complex to manage. That will create tons of downstream challenges and big opportunities for consultants/SIs, integration platforms, vendor management, and identity infrastructure. The way software is purchased, deployed, and managed is going to completely turn over.

The existing themes and areas of interest (SMB platforms, real world businesses, buyouts, healthcare) aren’t OVER for me by any means. But some of them do feel like bets I’ve already made and categories I’ve covered vs more unexplored unexplored ground.

Nuclear Waste

Nuclear power is obviously going to expand globally and be a key pillar of the energy transition. That’s already underway and we can all see that. But what happens with the waste is at this point much less clear.

Angele Sahrouie, an analyst at Slow who covers deep tech and critical industries, put together a great deck on the challenges and opportunities on the horizon in the nuclear waste supply chain. Read more here.

I Read

• Let Chi Ossé Explain. Chi is very young but has an extremely bright and promising career as a New York Democrat. He is very often right on the issues and has been exceptional at making them communicable in the right way - oftentimes across otherwise challenging ideological lines. Really a gifted communicator with an eye on solutions, not just problems.

• Oregon is taking a hard stand against PE ownership in healthcare. This is overall really good news. It’s possible that private equity investors will find ways around this but it’s clearly part of an emerging regulatory consensus against consolidation. Consolidation in HC leads to worse outcomes, higher costs, and more physician burnout. Read our private practice thesis here.

• Trump's "beautiful" bill wrecks our energy future. The “BBB” is an absolute disaster. It doesn’t just roll back the IRA, it rolls back a decade plus of energy transition progress. It’ll make energy bills higher, our air quality worse, and our climate issues more dire. And don’t forget the massive cuts to healthcare funding!

• Why OnlyFans May Sell for 75% Less Than It’s Worth. It’s the porn, obviously.

I Wrote

• Six Themes for 2025 (and beyond)

• Why the 23andMe sale/lawsuit does (and doesn’t) matter

  • Short term: it doesn’t matter. The data isn’t valuable today. We know that because if it were valuable, then 23&Me would be valuable instead of going bankrupt.

  • Medium term: biological/genetic discrimination is probably going to be a real thing fairly soon.

  • Long term: your DNA will be important for identity verification and proof of life/humanity. Unfortunately it’ll probably be more like an immutable password than a public key.

  • Longest term: can't forget targeted bioweapons! A virus or chemical just for me bc I made the CCP mad

• Suicide round: noun (derogatory). Raising at the max price with min capital. The valuation sets a high bar without enough capital to clear it. Here’s the steelman case for raising this way. Best argument I can make.

Abundance

Now that the Abundance NY Voter Guide is out (remember, it’s not just a mayoral race) I’ve been thinking more about my own ballot.

In particular I want to highlight the Comptroller race between Mark Levine and Justin Brannan. Simply put, the current Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine is the guy for Comptroller. Whoever wins the race for Mayor, we’ll need a super competent, no bullshit comptroller to keep them in check and Mark Levine has a great track record on the issues that matter, namely housing. He’s a public school teacher who started a credit union, a great choice to audit public agencies and keep the government in check.

OTOH Justin Brannan is a NIMBY who exempted his own district from the City of Yes rezoning AND has been highly critical of congestion pricing. He’s unfit for citywide office on that basis alone.

One Cool Job

Long Journey Ventures is hiring a “gardener”. Basically an associate to help them track (and buy-up in) all the tiny checks, scout investments, etc. I’ve invested with them and like them. This is a job I would have LOVED 5 years ago. Definitely worth checking out