The Generalist’s mission is to act as a translator for innovation. Progress is messy, and the frontier is almost always blurred by a shimmering veil. Our work is driven by a desire to deeply understand the players, organizations, patterns, and technology pushing our world forward. By doing so, we hope to raise the standard of conversation around these topics, lay the groundwork for better ideas, and bring forward more people to chip away at the Tunnel of Knowledge’s far edge.
One of the core theses of our approach is that to fulfill that mission, you have to be a player in the game yourself. While you can learn much from watching and listening to great entrepreneurs and technologists, there is no substitute for being a tangible part of their story.
This was one of the motivations behind launching Generalist Capital in 2022. (Another motivation? I thought it would be really fun.) Nearly two years after Generalist Capital received its first LP investment, I can say that belief has been borne out. As well as being even more fun than I’d hoped, Generalist Capital has been a vehicle to understand innovation from a different, deeper vantage. It has introduced me to promising technologies earlier, helped me better understand the intensity of building a high-growth startup, and provided a different vantage from which to observe market dynamics and its participants. It is one thing to interview a VC or CEO and another to co-invest alongside them and think through new challenges together.
As Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari has noted, every company is a kind of fiction. They are a collection of people united by the promise of a narrative, a story about themselves, the market they operate in, and the world of the future that they are helping to make. Startups are particularly this way. In the early days there is nothing but the story – expressed through a pitch deck, memo, or sketch on the back of the napkin. It is only through time and contact with the market that startups take on greater and greater realism – though there is always a part of them that remains in the narrative realm.
Because of our work at The Generalist, I can’t help but think of the ten companies we have invested in as stories. All of them have characteristics in common. They are stories of ambition, intelligence, and slim odds; tales of zealotry and apostasy, of unreasonableness and the dividends of unreasonableness; they tell of persistent struggle, unlikely victory, and the desire to build something bigger than oneself. Yet, they are very different, too, each with their own protagonists and enemies, each facing and manifesting a particular view of the world to come.
In today’s piece, we’re sharing nine stories – one is not yet ready to be told. I hope they provide a glimpse into intriguing markets, entrepreneurs, and the improvements they are looking to bring to our lives.
