New Emerging Managers episode with @rohanpuj is live. Rohan is one of the few truly independent thinkers I've met in venture. Even rarer, he has the risk tolerance to actually take big swings on those views. I believe these are the 2 qualities that make a great investor, and he's one of the few EMs I've met who I think has the potential to be generational. His take is that the first generation of VCs were risk takers who took weird paths into the industry, while the new school is mostly credentialed box-tickers whose biggest fear is being wrong when everyone else is right. So VC has become a markup game. Rohan goes where no one else is looking. In his first fund that meant hard tech before it was consensus: K2 Space (big satellites when everyone was building small ones) and Jaza (an African energy utility now growing ~10x a year). In his second, it's Truffle (personal AI computers that run models locally), backed months before everyone started buying Mac Minis to run agents at home, and doubling down on After Thought's new AI architecture to fix what LLMs get wrong. We get into what makes him different, the list he keeps of the 21 investors who've returned $1b+ on a single deal more than once, why he hates SF, why he thinks the hard tech window has closed, and much more. (Disclosure: we're LPs in Valhalla's Fund II)

A while back Marc Andreessen sparked a small civil war in tech over introspection. The fear: the inner work (therapy, psychedelics, etc) one-shots you, takes your hunger, and you end up meditating in a yurt while the killers keep winning Personally, I shunned introspection for most of my life because I was too busy chasing my goals. This changed a few years ago, when I was fortunate enough to achieve most of what I'd set out for myself as a teenager. My initial response was the natural one for ambitious ppl: set bigger goals. But I quickly realised I didn't have the same motivation. I couldn't convince myself reaching them would give me what I wanted. I needed meaning, and to find it I had to figure out who I was outside the ambition, and what I actually wanted So when I sat down with @mhdempsey, the rare VC who talks openly about therapy and psychedelic journeys, I had to ask: did the inner work make you a better person? And a better investor? His answer to the hunger fear: "You need to operate from a place of calmness, but calm obsessiveness." I tend to agree with this. The hunger doesn't go anywhere, it just stops being frantic.

New Emerging Managers episode with @Rewkang is live and it was a banger! Andrew is one of the most successful investors I know, and his parlay into robotics is looking like one for the history books: $19m into Figure before he'd even spoken to the founder, a ~15x reprice, then using part of this position to anchor RoboStrategy ($BOT) which now trades at ~$700m market cap on NASDAQ But Andrew's goal with Robostrategy is much bigger than one great trade: to build the "SoftBank for robotics", giving retail access to what he believes is the biggest market in history, and letting him continuously raise from and compound in public markets Andrew shilled me Figure back in '24 before he invested, and I looked at it pretty deeply before unfortunately passing. So in this episode I play devil's advocate, putting the strongest bear case on Figure and humanoids to him, digging into what I missed, and letting him take it apart. We also get into his broader investing philosophy, the RoboStrategy structure, and much more Listen to the entire conversation on Youtube now: