Furthering American ambition

We’re long human. We’re optimistic about superintelligence, and we think it will change almost every industry. We also think it makes human capital more important than it has ever been. The technology won’t walk into a hospital or a power plant or a shipyard by itself. Small companies will carry it there and decide how it gets used. They’ll be its stewards, and who works at them will matter as much as the technology does.

Small groups doing hard things is an old American pattern. The Constitution was drafted by fifty-five people over one Philadelphia summer, which by today’s standards is a mid-sized Series A.

Early on, the first ten engineers are most of the company. Whether one of these companies works, and how much it ends up mattering, depends a great deal on who those ten people are.

Our mission is to make sure the first ten engineers at the most consequential startups of the next decade are chosen for the things that actually matter, by people who know how to see them.

The engineers we mean have ambitions of their own. Many of the best want their careers to add up to something, and they’ll take a hard problem over an easy raise if the problem is real. When one of them lands in the right company at the right moment, their ambition and the company’s move forward together. That’s most of what we mean by the line.

If the next decade goes well for this country, it’ll be partly because a few hundred small companies got their first ten people right. We’d like to have something to do with that.