I roll over in bed in London. It’s 3.30am and still 25 degrees outside. The air in the room is a least a few degrees hotter – thick, heavy, claustrophobic.

Each movement drags my sticky sheets with me. I’m drowsing fitfully, unable to fully drift off, instead in a confused, fever-dream infused torpor, like someone half-drugged.

The UK isn’t supposed to be like this, I think to myself – that’s why my bedroom is carpeted and curtained, with no air con, shutters or a ceiling fan.

I’m sleeping in the eaves of a 1890s terraced house, but at this point it more accurately resembles a Finnish sauna. Cooking to above 40 degrees in the daytime, and never really cooling down at night. It’s not even July yet – June 26th to be precise – and we’re mid-way through the first of at least three European heat waves in this Super El Niño summer that is 2026.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding simultaneously trite and like I’m being over-dramatic – but I’m fucking terrified.

I’m lying there scared for the children I may one day bring into this world, for the abundant natural beauty we have so ungratefully inherited and are at risk of losing for generations at the least. I’m scared for the millions of people who may be displaced by heat, drought, fire or flood, and for the geopolitical implications of whole nations or regions forced to make tough decisions by previously unimaginable climactic changes.

I’m scared for my grandparents who can no longer regulate their temperature like they used to, for pregnant women the world over, for the millions of species of animals who play no part but still bear the burden.

Climate anxiety is a powerful fear because it feels so vast and omnipotent. It’s like a recurring dream I had in my twenties of a great tidal wave sweeping up a beach – I can see it coming, feel the tremors in the ground, yet I have no agency to change it or get out the way.

And alongside this I’m angry – simmering with frustration and rage. I’m angry at myself for flying +20 times a year. For eating meat, using oil-based products, driving a car, wearing rubber shoes. I’ve been aware of this coming change for at least a decade, but has my behaviour materially changed in this time? Arguably it’s got worse. So I point much of this fury inwards.

But I understand the data well enough to know I’m a rounding error of a rounding error in this fight. So really I’m angry at Big Oil, Big Construction, Big Fashion – anything starting with Big is likely culpable when 100 companies have been responsible for +71% of emissions since 1988.

I also rage against the deliberate denial of decades of scientific data. Against the lobbies for range anxiety and against heat pumps. Against the fact Europe hitting Net Zero is more or less irrelevant without China, America and the major developing economies. Christ, I’m even angry these developing economies have to suffer hits to their growth while we’re able to languish in our post-developed comfort without touching living standards.

The anger is also at politicians who swap short-term appeasement for political or personal gain, avoiding the hard questions because voters have got used to not having to answer things that make them uncomfortable. And ultimately the anger is at how little sense all this makes – that we’re building technologies to escape a planet we’re ruining because of the damage done by those technologies in the first place. How on literal Earth did we get here?

And I’m lying there thinking that this is the year we look back on, reflect on, tell stories about – the year it really changed.

2024 saw the Valencia floods and LA wildfires – arguably two of the first major (developed world) climate catastrophes that made the rest of us sit up and pay attention.

But they didn’t go far enough – the destruction wasn't sufficient to spur action. We saw them, we were scared, we mourned, we moved on. In a mood reminiscent of US mass shootings, hopes and prayers were sent and almost nothing changed.

The Ministry of the Future is a brilliant, prescient piece of writing, but the only bit I disagree with is that the major climate disaster will have to be closer to home and worse than we imagine before the major powers wake up to what needs to be done.

Could 2026 be that year? What will it genuinely take for collective action to move from a pipe-dream to a pandemic-style response?

It’s now late July as I reflect on this, as 300,000 French and Spaniards have just been evacuated from their homes. The Super El Niño is really starting to affect Europe now. Greece is burning at this very minute, as is Portugal and Southern Italy, on top of France and Spain and countless other European and North African nations. The French flames are just 15km from Bordeaux – could we see the second major urban western conurbation decimated in two years?

Hell, even the UK burned briefly, a country quite literally known for its grey and its wet. And we’re yet to see the worst for California and Canada – with that set to come as Europe ticks into the Autumn.

The planet is suddenly warming at unprecedented rates, the fastest in its history – due to feedback loops of permafrost thawing, reduced ice coverage, and the forest fires themselves both emitting huge heat + destroying cooling forests. It’s also, ironically, in part due to reduced aerosols in the atmosphere that served to bounce the sunlight back off us.

Even conversations amongst Brits now mention the heat – the weather always having been a favoured conversation starter. We flit between awkwardly accepting we wouldn’t mind summers like this every year, while acknowledging this is unnatural, an aberrance – just about letting the undercurrent of threat seep through into July positivity.

But the seasons have a wonderful way of helping us forget. What used to signal the changing of the agricultural calendar now signals the collective climate amnesia that hits us each year. The respite of Autumn always comes, and long, dark European winters bring with them a kind of nostalgia for the heat – was it ever really that bad? We ate out in the garden almost every night!

But maybe this year it’s bad enough? Perhaps the scale of damage and loss of human life we’re seeing breaks the curse of seasonal memory loss. Perhaps this is where the mass backlash begins – the populists no longer able to claim this is “natural” warming when the fires or floods reach their doorsteps.

Maybe this is the point governments commit to massive geo-engineering efforts, force through energy transitions, invest heavily in novel carbon capture and desalination technologies, commit to massive scale re-wilding, flood and fire defences, and band together around something bigger than themselves and their short term priorities?

Or maybe this is just the year we remember when it started getting really bad.

The one the story books tell before the dark period that followed. I sure as hell hope I’m wrong, but like frogs in slowly heating water, it’s almost impossible to tell from the inside.

My way of not going insane is to invest in incredible, paradigm shifting companies building solutions to these problems, through economically viable technologies, at Kindred and personally.

It’s why I/we backed Stardust, Rivan, a stealth fusion company, Secondlaw, Lithosquare, ScyAI, Atmospheric AI, Minimal, Cariqa, Aardaia, Recupere Metals, Sparkmate and more. If you’re building something genuinely transformational - that combines business models that can make real money (no subsidies or green premiums in sight - I didn’t make the rules) while solving real problems: hit me up. I’m honestly not sure what else I can do.

The economics really matter here – when local labour is exchanged for foreign capital, a gaping taxation hole opens up. I’m interested in how a middle-sized nation avoids being squeezed in this environment, especially as the macro is less collaborative, less predictable, and faster moving by the year. Here’s my thinking.

From easy to hard

Anyone working close to technology cannot fail to see the speed with which autonomous systems are improving, across everything from data entry and processing to totally novel scientific discovery.

Alongside this it’s impossible to ignore the speed of development in robotics – not just the models that power them, but the cratering cost of hardware, speed and ease of deployment, and the sophistication of the use cases they now serve.

Across both software and hardware, technology is starting with the easier stuff (discrete controlled environments like data analysis or repeat assembly lines) and moving (at an accelerating pace) towards the more complex stuff (soft touch, humans in the loop, unpredictable environments, qualitative requirements). I wrote about some of these things a few months back in light of declining populations in developed nations:

My worry in this automating environment is not when or whether, but how the world changes. As this recent Economist leader mused, “eventually humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomical. Income may go mostly or entirely to owners of capital, who then go on to spend it on things that are made by ai and robots using natural resources that they monopolise.”

Let’s play this out in a scenario: labour automation in a British airport.

Over the course of a few years, a relevant percentage of the 75k baggage handlers, check in clerks, shop assistants, waiters, security staff, back office administrators, cleaners etc. at London’s Heathrow airport are replaced by robots and autonomous systems of various kinds.

Heathrow and its tenants buy these products and services from US or Chinese automation providers, either as one off costs or (more likely) via subscription models, while reducing human labour accordingly. No longer does a salary go to a UK individual (taxed at ~20% for lower end employees), but directly to a foreign company. Employer’s National Insurance contributions (~14%) are also lost, along with the multiplier effect of wages spent locally on goods and services that themselves create VAT and employment and business rates from the physical infrastructure those workers occupy.

Also, in many cases these salary-paying companies are not British in the first place. So we end up in a situation where the labour is performed by foreign capital, the UK worker no longer receives their taxable wage (that goes on to be taxed as they spend it), the capital flow is between two foreign entities, and the only revenue sources come from either VAT on the consumer goods purchased in the airport or corporation taxes that are likely expertly evaded by multinationals.

This scenario fascinates me for how a middling economy like the UK retains any of the post-automation value.

“Tax tokens! Tax robots! Tax capital!” I hear you cry, but none of these account for a protectionist system where the owner of the automated system is a US or Chinese company. They feel like wishful thinking. Companies from these two superpowers are backed up by nations with considerably greater might than any individual European player. China or the US can set the terms of nation to nation negotiation, can reciprocate with stronger tariffs or throttle supply of critical parts of processes needed for adjacent sectors.

Domestic ownership

Personally, the only way I see out of this system is to ensure that critical industrial capabilities are owned domestically, even if this creates weird, perverse market incentives and national champions who do not compete on the global maximum.

Yes, there are potential ways to tax this, but I worry these are susceptible to the forces of bigger and smaller powers, of which Britain is firmly the latter than in a world where only two economies really matter. Not only could taxation on autonomy in theory create anti-automation incentives, but more than that it’s dangerous to presume a future environment where either superpower can be relied on to act in the best interest of a third nation in any way. The leverage on these critical industries or supply chains does not lie with smaller states (excluding exceptional cases like ASML in the Netherlands or TSMC in Taiwan) and pretending this isn’t of central importance is at best naive, at worst fatal.

As such it seems obvious to me that we’ll need to develop and support national champions based on the criticality of the sector and the need for sovereignty more than the ability of that specific company to compete globally.

If this value can be created and retained domestically, taxation systems can function more effectively. There is more obvious alignment between private and public spheres with domestic champions, based not only on the genuine national pride found in many founder led companies, but also a closer collaboration and understanding than with the “GM for Europe” of a US company who cares only about the most efficient rent extraction.

The case for favouritism

So – we need more favouritism. Picking winners early on and throwing a whole load of state funding into ensuring their success.

Yes, Britain has a grim record when it comes to industrial policy: British Leyland, ICL, Inmos. It’s hard not to read these as examples of why there’s just no point trying. But this just isn’t good enough when the stakes are this high. We've been bad at this because we've half-arsed it, with insufficient capital, and focusing on propping up declining industries not forward looking to those that are set to become important.

Matt Clifford called for this in the January 2025 UK AI Opportunities Action Plan, stating “Invest in becoming a great customer: Government purchasing power can be a huge lever for improving public services, shaping new markets in AI, and boosting the domestic ecosystem. But doing this well is not easy – it will require real leadership and radical change, especially in procurement.”

The US tech industrial complex

The US has long understood this. Anthropic and OpenAI with government contracts and compute and funding allocations, Palantir and the DoW and Homeland Security, Anduril with the DoW, SpaceX with NASA. Arguably none of these companies would be the scale they are today without this large scale public support and endorsement.

In time I believe many of these companies will become organs of government, which in turn makes this even more important. Take the AI labs – either they need bailing out because the token party ends prematurely and so become quasi-governmental, or (more likely) they hit AGI (or something approaching super-intelligence) and become so powerful and dangerous they have to become quasi governmental. If this is the case, these companies can no longer be trusted to not share state or corporate secrets, and the importance of having local players who can play the same role becomes even more important. How does a medium sized nation play in a world where OpenAI is part of the US Government? Discomfort over Palantir and the NHS would just be the start.

Yet in the UK we have been terrible at this king-making in recent decades. Trying to do the free market capitalism of the US without the government ambition or capital to ensure these players don’t get eaten by a bigger, foreign fish. DeepMind was sold too early (although admittedly it is hard to see how the counterfactual could have ended at such scale without Alphabet), while ARM was sold before eventually listing in the US. Both cases where UK capabilities were lost either through mismanagement or lack of aggression on the part of domestic capital or the state.

This aggression of support has to happen across multiple areas and in multiple ways. Mistral is perhaps instructive (within a broader framework where France has been patient and strategic with its critical capacities e.g. defence, nuclear, cloud, LLMs). Mistral is by no means a frontier lab of the level of Anthropic, OpenAI or Alphabet. Its funding is an order of magnitude smaller, as are its deployments and usage. Yet through considerable public financial support, compute allocations, favourable public contracts and outsized domestic profile, it has developed as Europe’s answer to the labs.

The ASML investment into Mistral feels telling as another part of the sovereign European tech supply chain – now owning an 11% stake in the business. Mistral has been deemed a critical asset by the French government (and increasingly EU allies) and is therefore to be promoted and supported, enabling France (and in turn Europe) to have some sort of independence from US models in a scenario of further geopolitical uncoupling.

Defining these sectors

Defining what exactly is a “critical” industry isn’t simple, but my punt is that it’s anything that if it gets turned off, the country stops running as it should or we fall behind internationally in a relevant manner. Things like autonomy, manufacturing, life sciences, tech bio, chips, AI models, compute infrastructure, energy generation & storage, energy transmission, cloud infrastructure, defence infrastructure and cybersecurity.

The current UK cohort of potential champions includes incredible companies like Wayve (autonomy), ElevenLabs (applied AI), Synthesia (applied AI), Fractile (compute), Isomorphic Labs (drug discovery), Octopus Energy (energy), Fuse (energy), StabilityAI (applied AI), FacultyAI (applied AI) etc. with an amazing second tier of runners including Callosum (compute), Latent Labs (drug discovery), Rivan (energy), Isembard (manufacturing), Axle Energy (energy), Automata (lab automation), Ineffable (novel AI lab) and many more. These companies need support.

I’m not proposing subsidy led competitiveness. I’m proposing we acknowledge how the power law within technology companies works, look seriously at the winner-takes-most, capital-as-kingmaker nature of many of these markets, and lend a helping hand on the way up – not just with money, but with visas, public procurement, regulatory status, public narrative and more. This would involve first and foremost a public acknowledgement of the criticality of these types of companies followed by the need for short term favouritism to ensure long term sovereignty.

This is why I love the work the Sovereign AI fund is doing - sourcing and backing these potential winners early on. The British Business Bank, NSSIF and others also exist to help them (and their funders) on the way up. Matt Clifford’s policy work has been vital in reframing and underpinning what good actually looks like for tech in the UK.

But the sizes are all wrong, and we’re kneecapping ourselves with a lack of ambition and a lack of mindset that says we’re willing to pick winners and ride them on the way up. The 2024 Draghi Report cited ~€150bn as the sum needed to make Europe competitive in technology (as part of a broader €800bn package), yet SovAI has £500m to play with, and our bigger funds seem perpetually stuck in playing nicely and allocating small chunks to dozens of players or running endless open procurement processes vs. leaning hard into specific industry champions.

Our funds’ ability to streamline visas, unlock government and signal state support are great, but this is hollow without real, ambitious state capacity and focused deployment. By contrast Bpifrance is managing around €36bn and has put hundreds of millions into Mistral alone.

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Regional champions

The strange part of all of this is that we may end up in a situation where non-globally competitive players end up having an outsized role in domestic industries. If sovereign capacity becomes more important than best-in-class services, middling nations will end up having to purchase locally, even when that local offering is not the best possible option.

This is not necessarily problematic in a more protectionist world, but it does beg the question of how the balance is struck between attempting to compete on a global maximum, and relating to regional alliances at the same time.

Britain is in a fragile position, adjacent to Europe but external, and yet simultaneously drifting ever further from an increasingly belligerent and complex US. The UK Ambassador’s comment about our relationship with the US was powerful (and I believe true). The nonsense anachronism that is the US-UK special relationship holds us back more than it benefits us. All while we sit adjacent to the most powerful global bloc of middle-sized nations, that while hamstrung by bureaucracy and infighting, at least has the collective size and scale to fight off the two global behemoths.

Rejoining the EU in our previous form feels unlikely, but there are many valuable middle points that benefit a UK currently out in the cold. Science collaborations and defence alliances are a great start, but what would a mutually beneficial tax structure look like with preferred partners? Could a German robotic arms manufacturer selling into UK factories alongside a UK chips player selling chips to Germany create a more collaborative taxation environment where a coalition of aligned nations collaborated on ensuring regional vs. domestic champions? Shared procurement schemes show an early signal of how this could look, the Single Market is an obvious EU boon here, so how could Britain position itself around this?

The sovereignty stack

Much great work has been done defining the key areas required to build a sovereign tech stack that is well set up for the next few decades. At Kindred we spend our lives investing in these spaces – the sectors that we believe form the plumbing underneath the economy: robotics & automation, industrial tech, life sciences, tech bio, energy & minerals, compute (chips & models), cybersecurity, autonomy etc.

I’m proud that we’ve backed Fractile, RobCo, Latent Labs, Cradle Bio, Paddle, Lithosquare, Stardust, ZML, Dunia, Foresight Data Machines, SAIF and many more all directly in these spaces, many of which are UK based.

Yet this early stage funding needs matching by state activity to ensure these companies are neither lost to US capital markets or die a death based on lack of favouritism where government funding could be make or break.

As the AI Action Plan notes, the UK is “the third largest AI market in the world”, an astonishing achievement for the 5th largest economy, 20th nominal GDP per capita and 22nd largest population.

Yet without the right management of these critical assets on the way up, we'll watch them list elsewhere, get acquired by larger foreign players, or simply lose to better-resourced competitors. Sovereignty is not an abstract notion, but the difference between a country set up to own the value of its own innovation, and one that ends up a rentier economy or vassal state where the money ends up somewhere else.

To ensure the positive future transpires, we need a few things, aggressively executed and at scale. Funds like SovAI and the British Business Bank need to be much bigger, with the mandates and freedom to actually make things happen at scale. We arguably need a Bpifrance-equivalent with its own mandate to take concentrated bets, and we need to find a way to rewire procurement so that the government can and does act as the anchor customer the US manages so well.

Alongside this, stronger and clearer ties with our European allies is paramount, which will not just require the eating of some humble pie, but realistically also necessitates an acknowledgement that the once-great Imperial Britain is now a middle-sized nation and as such needs to behave accordingly.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives, while investing in start-ups via Kindred Capital and Anti Ordinary. Thoughts? Comment below, or just binge my content @ maxbray.xyz

After Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable type printing press around 1450, and its ensuing wildfire spread across Europe, there came a mass internalisation of thought and learning. All of a sudden lay people could access information in the vernacular - not just religious texts but secular works on anything from science to romantic literature to history.

With this spread of literacy and learning, the hegemony of information and ideas fell out of the church’s grasp - the most notable result of which was of course Martin Luther, the grumpy pot bellied Saxon who took on the might of the Roman Catholic Industrial Complex and won. Alongside this fragmentation of Christianity came the spread of scientific and philosophical ideas that powered the Renaissance - a novel technology that unlocked widespread access to information that was previously gate-kept or fragmented and in turn drove forward human progress.

Sound familiar? What if 2026 is like this again but for a monopoly over learning? This is my attempt to grapple with whether large models will do for higher education what the printing press did for the church’s dominance of knowledge.

Big ideas, bigger debts

I read history at a UK university in the mid 2010s, emerging from my degree with a wonderful handful of gobbets about the past (a worrying amount of which were about Martin Luther’s love of beer), a network of smart, ambitious friends, a solid stamp on my CV and +£40k of debt.

Even at the time the debt felt hefty – tracking well above inflation, but manageable as it was salary linked. And this was 2016 - the days when a graduate with a half decent degree could walk into a job.

And importantly – it was before LLMs. The internet was already an astonishing resource, but it had to be traversed, sifted, waded through. It rewarded the incredibly diligent, the patient and the brilliant, but was nowhere near the autodidact’s paradise large models have turned it into.

2026 doesn’t look much like 2016. Graduate jobs continue to crater across the developed world, leaving young people sending bulk applications into a void of soulless AI interviews and constant rejection. It’s a hard sell to take on three years of debt for an uncertain outcome and a potentially redundant skill on the back end.

While on the flip side we’ve stumbled upon one of the most powerful tools man has ever invented. Large models could well be the next enabler humanity has discovered in the long line from fire, through agriculture, minerals extraction, to moveable type, the steam engine, electricity and the transistor.

As I’ve written about at length, a smart young person with a Claude account and a few hundred pounds in credits can not only up-skill themselves on essentially any topic, but then act upon that up-skilling – building anything from PCBs to consumer electronics to stone carving robots to software products.

Max Bray

Building a nation of entrepreneurs

Back in October 2025 I wrote a piece entitled “Tall Poppies”, highlighting Britain’s culture of cutting ourselves down - arguing that our discomfort with tall poppies, i.e. those who stick their head above the parapet and try to strive for something better, was one of our great national malaises…

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5 months ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · Max Bray

And this is all as we witness the decimation of British universities. Their finances are crumbling, with 45% (124) of UK universities projected to face a deficit in 2025-26 (and 1/6 having less than 30 days of cash on hand). As a result, these institutions shed 13,300 jobs through severance in 2024-25 alone, with more than 90 announcing staff redundancies, course closures or other restructuring, from Nottingham to Essex to Cambridge. This is not a system in good health.

The future, via Helsinki

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in Finland with the FR8 team, interviewing them for Unreasonable. The TL;DR on this clandestine operation is that a group of hugely impressive, wonderfully ambitious twenty-somethings have built a “hacker hotel” in a palace in central Helsinki, providing an unstructured environment for young people (16-28) with the desire to build something the rest of the world would consider insane, surrounded by their peers.

Unreasonable

02. Ernesti Sario & Nantte Kivinen - Building Hogwarts For Hyper-Ambitious Young People

There are very few people out there like Nantte and Ernesti. University dropouts, wise beyond their (young) years, and building one of the most exciting things in technology right now - that could well be a model for where higher education goes in the AI era…

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3 months ago · 3 likes · Max Bray and Cristian Pinto

Many of them are university dropouts, some never even applied. There is no curriculum, no classes, no (mandated) equity stake, and no necessary output for the 30-strong cohort in the 12,000m² palace (photo below). This is a maker space at its purest. The team exists to help steer and guide, but not to direct. Building a business out of the programme is fine, but so is building pretty much anything else.

I spent much of the time there wondering if this model was the canary in the coal mine for where higher education goes. Yes – these individuals are outliers. Outcasts, misfits who never fit in in the normal system, and no, this is not new (the Thiel Fellowship, Residency, even YC/EF have been pioneering similar models for years), but the combination of technological advancements and macro conditions suggest this time is different.

The New New

Much like the impact printing had on smashing the hegemony of the church, I believe artificial intelligence will cause a mass fragmentation and unbundling of higher education.

Universities will still exist, yet nowhere near at the same scale – there is just considerably less need for a one-size-fits-all, mass market offering in an era of personalised everything.

In their place will exist new forms of higher education institution – some that are FR8-like, others whose form we can’t yet divine. I fully cede that the FR8 model certainly won’t work for most, and has no plans to as your average teen is nowhere near that agentic, ambitious or internally motivated. Social pressure goes so far, but the firm, guiding hand of the educator goes further.

What I’m interested in is what new forms of experience we’ll cook up in the years to come.1

Growing up

Higher education serves four overlapping purposes:

1. Knowledge transfer – lectures, reading lists, essays, lab work – the learning bit

2. Hard skills – you can’t become a (particularly good) surgeon by watching Reels

3. Credentialing and signalling – the brand on the CV, signalling to the market you’re employable, a proxy for smarts and work ethic

4. Life-stage levelling – finding your tribe, leaving home, fending for yourself for the first time, part time work – i.e. the wonky, messy growing-up bit

For some the learning is most important (e.g. a doctor or engineer), while for others (generalist arts degree) the learning can actually be secondary to the preparation for adulthood. Credentialing is downstream of the entrance requirements, skills and knowledge learned along the way.

What AI is doing is challenging these four areas in different ways, opening up new potential models as it does. It is posing a major challenge to the previous hegemony of knowledge transfer and, increasingly, hard skills but is yet to (and perhaps never will) touch life stage levelling and network building.

Death to credentials

Yet in posing a major threat to these two skills-based areas, it has in turn shaken the foundations of credentialing systems higher education institutions project to the outside world.

If anyone can produce a competent looking essay or lab report with an LLM, a generalist degree means almost nothing to the world of work. This is especially pointed given we’ve existed for the last ~25 years in a world where around half of UK and US students get an undergraduate degree, and social sciences, business, law and liberal arts make up between 45-50% of all degrees in these nations.

The market has already been pricing this in for years. The FT reported that five years after graduating, business students had an average annual salary of £33,200, less than those with a nursing degree and far behind graduates in medicine and economics (2022-23 data).

With the proliferation of middling universities and degrees, we’ve ended up in a strange world where we use the same credentialing system for a Fields Medal-level mathematician as someone with a business degree from an ex-polytechnic.

What FR8 has woken up to is that new credentialing models are necessary in this changing world – based on the things that hold value in a commoditising working environment. Silicon Valley did half of this work twenty years ago by turning dropping out of university into a higher status activity than staying the course, but this still in part relies on the initial signal of “I got into Stanford”.

Universities won’t die, they’ll be forced back to their core academic purpose – fewer of them, higher quality, fewer degrees, more specialism and more about focusing on those who will actually push academic fields forward.

Alongside this, higher education will unbundle. The FR8 signal is an example of how this could work. Their product, ironically, is more of a competitor to your top level universities, but with an agentic “build it” spin. But given the renewed importance of demonstrating output not process, I can see how this same model could flow downstream into more mainstream offerings.

Signalling will change in line with this. We’ll likely end up with more fragmented credentials, harder to divine to the generalist, but more valuable in their specialist environment. This already exists in vocational fields – most electrical or medical qualifications are utterly unintelligible to the lay-person – but we don’t yet know what this looks like for a more generalist audience where broad categories for white collar work have served some purpose for the majority of this century.

From didactic to agentic

Beyond the signalling is the way these new models could actually work. As we dismantle these tired credentials, the way humans learn must also change. Pure fact repetition, essay writing and repeat lab work served well in a world where basic critical thinking and repetition held the majority of value in most jobs. But as both of these areas become commoditised by models orders of magnitude more capable than the average person (and on an exponential improvement curve), this is no longer fit for purpose.

As the New York Times noted, “a coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker”. This is in part why the “drop out” culture has become so desirable – it’s not just the impatience to start building things, it’s the realisation that the skills taught in a Stanford CS degree no longer match the needs of the real world enough to justify staying the four year course.

So what comes after? Again here, FR8 offers insight.

As intelligence has commoditised, value compounds in being able to do (or orchestrate) work, knowing how to make important decisions at the right time and bringing a human touch to something otherwise cold and digital.

FR8’s model is hyper agentic – empowering and enabling individuals to learn for themselves and drive work forward without external instruction or input. This could be building a propulsion system in space or understanding how proteins fold – the important thing is that the individual is in the driving seat, and is judged on their individual output, not conformity to a mark scheme or exam structure.2

Imagine a specialised wellness centre instead of a sports science degree. Gone is the majority lecture-focus. Instead students learn the necessary scientific underpinnings through hands-on practice, sampling many disciplines (massage, osteopathy, acupuncture etc.) before going deep into a specialism. Human and AI teachers work alongside one another, and peer-to-peer learning and training is built in. Student gain practical experience through industry internships, and emerge from a shorter, sharper course with the academic discipline of before but a much stronger real world grounding.

Peer to peer

Much of these new models exist, just not yet in the mainstream, such as the Ecole42 model for software engineering education. These schools (such as 01Founders in London or //kood in Estonia) pioneer a fully teacher-less model, where students are set up on day one, in person, with a fully digital system where they learn alongside one another and teach other students as they go.

Everything is project based, focused on deliverables, and the model can adapt as the frontier of software engineering changes before it. Most students still need guidance, but the shift from atomised individual learning to active peer collaboration (including AI-assisted peer marking) feels like a logical next step – especially as human labour isn't getting any cheaper.

Fully personalised

One of the fascinating enablers to this transition is the ability of technology to personalise the experience at minimal marginal cost.

It has long been known that personalised learning works. Benjamin Bloom discovered in 1984 that students who received one-on-one tutoring combined with mastery learning performed two standard deviations better than students in conventional classrooms (= the average tutored student outperformed 98% of their peers). Yet tutoring has traditionally been limited to the wealthy due to the high labour costs associated.

The challenge wasn’t in understanding the opportunity, it was in scaling it. There just weren’t enough teachers, hours, or pounds to give every student a personal tutor. And alongside this, cohort sizes inflated as the state became ever more thinly stretched across more universities, dulling the product further.

AI has fully collapsed the teaching cost. One teacher can now do the job of five – more architect than builder. The FR8 cohorts already know it because they’ve done it themselves, but imagine the power of this for the broader economy. By using LLMs as agentic teachers, anyone can learn anything, then act upon it in the real world.

And with this personalisation, much of the associated timelines can collapse as well. Imagine if there were six months or year long hyper-personalised general exploration courses as feeders – with the specialised degree still a possibility as an offshoot, or the opposite – an “action” year following the specialised course that provides the real world experience but with some structure and guidance.

There’s an interesting parallel here in Art Foundation courses but for broader learning. A space for young people to experiment in a less structured environment vs. locking in for a weighty 3-4 year course with limited flexibility.

Friends & feelings

Of the four purposes the university serves, AI poses serious threats to knowledge transfer, hard skills and credentialing. The fourth is what’s left – the human bit, and is arguably the most important part to bring with us as we enter a new era.

The friction around having to make new friends, soft launching adulthood without the real pitfalls of unemployment, the gradual emotional maturing from a fresh-faced fresher into a job-ready graduate, are not to be underestimated, and the worry with speed-running higher education via technology is we lose some of this gradual, developmental phase.

Looking to FR8, I worry less about this. The experience may only be three months, but every cohort member I spoke to spoke of the intense feeling of community, alignment and belonging that was engendered almost immediately upon arrival. I don’t believe this maturation process is as much about length of stay as quality of experience, and so if that can be preserved without the need for a weighty, expensive, long duration degree, I’m all for it.

Let’s talk privilege

Of equal note is the importance of ensuring these new models don’t just serve the well-off or well-connected.

The 17-year-old who already knows what they want to build, has parents or mentors that can vouch for them, and the confidence to apply to a FR8-like programme, will thrive in this world.

The 17-year-old from a working-class town with no professional networks, no role models, no idea what they want to do yet, who needs three years of structured time and a brand-name credential to crowbar their way into the professional class, is the loser of this transition.

Max Bray

Tall poppies

Britain is exceptional at inventing things, but not very good at turning them into businesses. I think this is as much a cultural problem as it is an economic one…

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10 months ago · 19 likes · Max Bray

Now these technologies are innately democratising – the barrier to entry of using ChatGPT is having a phone or computer – but the credentialing layer is a different question, and there's no guarantee it follows.

It’s worth weighing that while the traditional university was far from perfect, it has long served as a vital engine for social mobility. If the state plays no (or less) role in this future, the new educational model risks replacing university with something that entrenches advantage rather than disrupting it.

And through it all, Catholicism sustains

Oxford University is 930 years old. Harvard has an endowment of $56.9 billion. Like the Catholic Church in 1520, they aren’t going anywhere.

But their hegemony is ending. In their wake a thousand new sects will emerge. Most will be small, many will fail, but a few will become huge new institutions whose forms the medieval mind couldn’t have imagined. This is FR8, 42, Thiel, and the descendants we haven’t seen yet.

This transition will likely be ugly. Mid-tier universities will close, some good ones with them. The models that replace them will be imperfect in new and unfamiliar ways.

But in many ways this future resembles the past more than we might like to consider. Fewer, elite academic institutions, plus a broad long tail of specialised qualifications and centres of learning, whose credentials and signals mean little to the wider world.

The idea of everyone studying a business degree would have meant little to the academic or industrialist in 1900, yet in many ways the world they inhabited was considerably more effective at getting things built, fostering big ideas and learning how to get things done than the one we inhabit today. Food for thought.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives, while investing in start-ups via Kindred Capital and Anti Ordinary. Thoughts? Comment below, or just binge my content @ maxbray.xyz

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Back in September 2025, said to me that he felt podcasting was still a very young industry, citing the as yet unsophisticated advertising space, and also noting that 90% of podcasts never make it past 10 episodes.

This really stuck - not only that we’re at the foothills of a very long journey into the medium, but also that this is a space in which most people have a swing and never really take it anywhere serious.

While I keep chuckling to myself (or maybe going a bit red) at the question “does the world really need another need podcast?”, I increasingly think this medium is like radio in the early to mid 20th century. Mass market, sure, but with a long way to go and a hell of a lot of value still to be added.

Concurrently, I’ve been getting increasingly excited abut what I call the New Tech Media - people telling stories in a way that escapes the tall poppy problem of mainstream channels (see: , , , VENTURES etc.), but also in a style that is consistent with their own agendas, personalities and styles. Video first, high quality, live or long form. Content as personalised to the creator as vibe coding has made software to the user.

Therefore when came to me talking about building a media arm for his burgeoning pluto house empire, I was in immediately, and was born.

Unreasonable

A podcast about ambition

By Max Bray

Our angle? This is a podcast about ambition. To tell the stories of absurdly unreasonable people we think are pursuing utterly unreasonable goals in a totally unreasonable manner.

Why? Because I believe that many many good things are downstream of ambition. If we can unshackle a new generation of young people to aim bigger, move faster and stop taking “that’s impossible” as a reason to stop, there’s a genuine shot at boosting growth, driving people to find purpose earlier in lives, and building things that really, genuinely positively impact the world in which we live.

We’re less interested in what the individual we speak to does day to day, and more focused on who they are, how they think, what makes them tick, and what makes them different. By unpicking the frameworks of these outlier people (who often look from the outside to be totally unattainable but have actually gradually built themselves into the version you see in the media), we hope to understand and normalise how operating without shackles actually works.

So where better to start than the one and only Harvey Hodd of Rivan Industries. Premier League youth footballer, 3x founder, Collison-backed e-fuels impresario, hater of kettles and thoroughly good human being.

Yes, he’s just raised a very exciting round ( 👏) but what we care about more in the conversation is how he operates - the mental models, the processes, the support networks and the wiring that makes him tick in the totally unique way that he does.

Unreasonable

01. Harvey Hodd - Does It Make The Boat Go Faster?

In our first episode, we chat to the inimitable Harvey Hodd of ⁠Rivan Industries⁠ - a company building modular solar powered direct air capture-> e-fuels systems to tackle both carbon emissions, reliance on natural gas and energy security…

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4 months ago · 1 like · Max Bray

From here we ended up in Helsinki chatting to Nantte and Ernesti of FR8. There are very few people out there like these two - university dropouts, wise beyond their (young) years, and building one of the most exciting things in technology right now - that could well be a model for where higher education goes in the post AGI era.

Put simply, they’re building a hacker hotel for wildly ambitious young people. Based in a 12,000m² Helsinki palace, their cohorts include founders building novel chip architectures, rocket fuel, brain computer interfaces, model interpretability layers, space docking systems, robot training platforms and much, much more.

As two twenty somethings with nothing on their CVs except FR8 and half a degree, they felt like another angle on the same question. The guys have managed to turn themselves into operational monsters in a very short space of time, reframing their ambition and reference points for success in an astonishingly short timeframe - something Cristian and I found absolutely fascinating in our conversation.

We spent an hour with them in the magnificent board room of their HQ, talking finding purpose, manifesting outcomes, levelling up ambition and what the future of education could look like.

Unreasonable

02. Ernesti Sario & Nantte Kivinen - Building Hogwarts For Hyper-Ambitious Young People

There are very few people out there like Nantte and Ernesti. University dropouts, wise beyond their (young) years, and building one of the most exciting things in technology right now - that could well be a model for where higher education goes in the AI era…

Listen now

3 months ago · Max Bray and Cristian Pinto

This is just the beginning. If we make it to 10 episodes, we’re top 10%. 50 episodes gets us to top 5% - these are the two numbers we have in mind, and right now we’re laser focused on the inputs. Great guests, great conversations, working out how to edit videos into clips without totally messing everything up, and not much more.

Through this we hope to normalise ambition, taking big swings and leaning into entrepreneurial risk. Get us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Substack, X or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to . We hope you like what we’re building.

Back in October 2025 I wrote a piece entitled “Tall Poppies”, highlighting Britain’s culture of cutting ourselves down - arguing that our discomfort with tall poppies, i.e. those who stick their head above the parapet and try to strive for something better, was one of our great national malaises.

It struck a nerve - lots of people nodded their heads in a very British fashion - enough to be part of the chorus, but not enough to actually stand out. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t get us anywhere - I evidently diagnosed something, but this was the easy bit. Trying to do something about it is something entirely different.

In conversation with Josh (of Plugged), I realised this is a topic I feel pretty strongly about, and that most of the things I care about are downstream of ambition and confidence. Given I work in arguably the most dynamic part of the UK economy, I’m luxuriously situated close to people who aren’t limited by these concerns - giving me a front row seat into what could be done to tackle some of these problems head on.

I don’t expect to solve the British discomfort with ambition overnight, but I do believe there are ways to start building the talent pyramid from the bottom up and supporting it as it grows. By normalising ambition, widening the funnel of people willing to take swings, and building the infrastructure to support them as they grow - we might just be able to spit more successes out the top.

[As a caveat up front, this is very London centric. This is a deliberate choice - both for focus, because I know it best, and because whether we like it or not, the city makes up ~22% of the nation’s economic output, and ~60% of the tech sector. The logic herein should be portable to any other location.]

Setting the context

As we pinball through the first months of 2026, this feels ever more relevant. The barriers to entry for founding a business are trending to zero. A smart teenager with Claude Code or Replit can spin up a fully fledged company in less than a day - with everything from product design to hosting to merchant of record built in natively and set up for <£100.

We are also staring down the barrel of an economy that is almost unrecognisable from the one Josh and I grew up in. If the much discussed AI 2027 or the 2028 Intelligence Crisis are anything to go by - we are at the foothills of a sectoral shift not seen since the industrial revolution. Even if they are mostly wrong, the changes are still likely to be profound.

Citrini Research

THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

Preface…

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6 months ago · 8073 likes · 91 comments · Citrini and Alap Shah

Within this environment, not only will the number of traditional white collar jobs decline sharply, but on the flip-side, the autonomous entrepreneur (see: builder) may well be king - limited only by speed, hard work and scope of ambition/imagination.

We have a chance to drive our ageing, services-led economy forward, but we’re also in dire need of a wake up call. So what can be done to build a nation of entrepreneurs?

Reframing ambition

Not unreasonably, the “aspirational” route for many top grads in the UK has long been Partner level at a major consultancy, law firm or financial institution. This job has traditionally been stable, highly well paid, relatively high status. We are a nation of service-people - pinstripe suited, subtle in our manner, with quick wits and sharp tongues ready for whatever CEO, politician or private client needs our input.

Josh calls this the “consulting industrial complex” - legions of service providers who add a sum total of not that much to the wider economy. They do not create, they facilitate. Scrum Masters, deck builders, proposal jockeys.

Still Wandering

The death of the corporate job.

Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. "I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams," she said. Then laughed. "I genuinely don't know what that means anymo…

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a year ago · 18101 likes · 1433 comments · Alex McCann

These are the darlings of the careers fair. Josh and I were both very lucky to go to a top university - and not only were we not taught a single thing about the world of work in our time there, but both our careers fairs, four years apart, were chock full of this kind of opportunity. Accordingly, our most brilliant friends went into IB, consulting or law. There was nothing from small tech or even big tech. Venture didn’t feature. Being an entrepreneur? Not even on the menu.

This feels indicative. Those in the working world wildly overestimate the literacy of graduates regarding the wider job market. The frame of ambition students are presented with in their final year often becomes the reference point for where they land.

Now - it is a very important point to note the privilege baked into risk taking. Having no safety net is the luxury of those who have one provided for them. There will always be those who are financially safe enough to try, and those mad enough not to care. These trailblazers have built our unicorns to date. But they’re not enough, and more importantly, they’re not representative.

We need to create, and normalise the pathways for those traditionally excluded from this route by either lack of awareness or lack of security. The young people with the highest stake in changing the world - the ones for whom the current system is most broken - are precisely the ones for whom the risk is most existential. We’ve built a system that selects for people who can afford to fail, but this isn’t a talent engine that functions for a wider society.

Yet what I suggest is that with the right structures, the perceived risk and the real risk can be more different than they might immediately appear. The first few years out of school or university provide a perfect time to test this difference. If the downside risk can be demonstrated and capped, through fellowships, spaces, anti-grad schemes, programmes and the like, the unlimited upside can be revealed.

The work we have to do here is provide the stories and the access to new ways of thinking. Encourage shackles-off ambition. Capture young people before they become institutionalised, salary trapped, mortgage bound. We need coordinated infrastructure that catches people early, supports them through the messy middle, and tells their stories back to the next generation.

That infrastructure has three layers - spanning (1) Storytelling, to educate and amplify, (2) Physical Infrastructure to support, connect and multiply and (3) Capital, to both limit the downside and supercharge the upside.

1. Storytelling - a new media landscape

The first pillar in this new landscape is telling the stories that inspire. We are currently in an environment where entrepreneur-focused news fails to break through into the mainstream, and so the majority of the people we want to build don’t even know it’s an option.

Traditional media just doesn’t tell these stories - for the reasons laid out in Tall Poppies multiplied by a national obsession with celebrity and scandal, ideally as salacious as possible. Furiously ambitious people doing extraordinary things just don’t sell within this system.

The example I often refer to is “name me a famous UK entrepreneur” - you either get Dyson or Branson, two septuagenarians, or Steven Bartlett, an influencer with a podcast. Where is the national storytelling around Greg of Octopus, Tom from Monzo, Mati of Elevenlabs, Victor of Synthesia, Nik of Revolut, Walter of Fractile, Poppy of Darktrace and the like?

These stories aren’t breaking through - and if our ever-mercurial and rapacious national media won’t cover them, we need to shortcut this by building and amplifying new channels to boost the system as a whole, pulling people into the sector and then in turn amplifying the stories that come out of it.

While the sector itself is doing a good job at starting some of this storytelling, this is currently limited to an already-informed audience. TBPN wrote the social media friendly news channel narrative in California (to incredible success) and etn has followed (perhaps a little too closely) in the UK. We’ve got Ventures focused on short sharp interviews, and Plugged with a social-first approach.

Harry Stebbings has done a phenomenal job with 20VC, but he’s a one man outlier currently, and still tends towards an industry-insider approach. Tara Keeney’s TikTok friendly work walking with founders is impressive (and could be a crossover success), new entrant UK2.0 is telling many of these stories, and Simon Squibb is perhaps the most approachable form of normalising entrepreneurship. But this is nowhere near enough.

UK 2.0

Shooting for the moon in South Kensington

We like to laugh at our penchant for queuing in Britain. Yet in the right circumstances, a long line can be the most enticing thing in the world…

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5 months ago · 5 likes · Alys Key

These stories are mostly within an echo chamber. Linkedin live streams spinning in a bubble of already-informed parties. Where’s the Tiktok native version? Who’s owning this for the YouTube shorts audience? Where’s The Generalist’s UK-native version, romanticising entrepreneurship and going deep on the outlier stories that inspire?

Who’s our Tim Ferris (taking the interpersonal side of entrepreneurs’ stories mainstream), Packy McCormick (making business strategy actually entertaining) or Anu Atluru (bringing beautiful writing to tech sector analysis)? Substack has democratised blogging - the limiting factor is energy not reach. X is a cesspit, but one that can be worked by the right hands. Less than 10% of podcasts make it past 10 episodes. A thousand more accounts or podcasts is not just noise, it’s momentum - media is not a zero sum game, and competition is no bad thing here. We need to move from “that’s not how we do things here” to “this is the story we need to tell”.

Working Theorys

Dreams of Stability

Everyone says they hate the question: What do you do? It’s cliché and reductive. But nobody stops asking, and nobody stops answering. Because the answer is never just about what you do. It’s about what people think you’re worth, and what you want people to think you’re worth…

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6 months ago · 313 likes · 39 comments · Anu

2. The physical infrastructure

To amplify stories, they need to be written - and this starts by getting people in the same room. This physical infrastructure comprises three interlinked parts - events, communities and spaces. An event introduces someone to a community. The community gives them a reason to show up at a space. The space produces work that becomes the content for the next event, and so on.

Events are in many ways the backbone of the entry-level ecosystem. The easiest gateway point for a young person into a new sector is often a meet-up, hackathon or fireside chat. Alexandria Lab in SF/Munich and In Silico, SoTA, or txp in London have demonstrated how talks don’t have to sacrifice on quality to reach wider audiences, while Plugged and London Founder House have gone more “bottom up” in their open-to-all house party approach.

Hackathons are equally valuable, as long as they’re quality, and the work of communities like SoTa alongside vibe coding scale-ups Lovable, Openclaw or Cursor are making everyone-can-build-software a reality for a broader audience.

What’s valuable is diversity - providing as many entry points to the novice as possible, and bridging the literacy gap between newbies and industry insiders. Broad, horizontal meet-ups, deep-dive vertical communities, small discussion groups are all part of the equation. The health of the ecosystem in many ways can be viewed as a function of the number and quality of this kind of event.

These events feed and are fed by wider communities, often of the same name - turning individual interactions into deeper connections. Unicorn Mafia, YSYS, Foundervine, Colorintech, Entrepreneurs Collective and the like are vital drivers of the ecosystem, hosting dinner series, longer-form hackathons, book clubs, pitch events, all of which pull the curious in and then channel them into other avenues - a self-reinforcing loop that feeds into, and draws energy from, shared spaces.

One of the most exciting things to come out of SF in the past decade is the founder/hacker house or residential incubator. South Park Commons and The Residency have built incredible talent machines that accept outlier individuals from across the world. FR8 is rapidly becoming the European gold standard, with Pluto House, London Founder House, Telos House, Alexandria House, and more popping up across the UK and continent.

These spaces are exceptional as they not only increase surface area for connection, but show young people what great looks like in a compressed timeframe. Perhaps this is more directed towards the maverick entrepreneurs willing to up sticks and move in with relative strangers, but the model stands - a shared safe space to explore, experiment and then execute.

The challenge with these, and with spaces in general is the business model. Property is a gritty business, especially when your tenants are a gaggle of twenty somethings with little more than laptops to their names. Many of the brand name US houses or spaces are billionaire funded. Much like their university donations, the culture is one of giving back - something we still lack in Britain. The Nordics are shaming us here - Sweden and Finland are seeing an explosion of funded spaces, often backed either fully or in part by successful regional entrepreneurs. This combination of duty, community and national pride is powerful. We need British entrepreneurs to stand up and be counted here - giving both their money and their time to these initiatives.

There is also work the state, property developers and universities can do here - brownfield sites, disused warehouse space, old schools, interim out of use offices all make for excellent work hubs. The barrier to entry should be a locking door and functioning wifi. Camden Council have done some great work here, Imperial College has hackspace but more is needed - and the more centrally in London the better.

It’s exciting that Frontier Tower is coming to the capital - a multi-disciplinary deep-tech co-working and hotel that could well become a real centre of gravity for London builders. This adds to the foundational effort of Entrepreneur First in building a hub around Shoreditch Exchange. But we’re still lacking a Station F-style nucleus for big and small tech to meet in one place.

This connection within spaces is the key unlock - having the space is one thing, filling it with mentors, role models, potential customers, teachers or funders is another. Bigger companies could do a lot with excess desk capacity, or funds, like Localglobe with Phoenix Court to foster this connection.

This is a multi-faceted chimera of a challenge, in no way solvable by a single actor. It requires collaboration between dozens of bottom up events and communities, and the more centralised driver of funded, collaborative spaces. The last piece of this puzzle is arguably the most obvious, but still worth examining - the capital stack to fund the ecosystem and drive both the talent and media machine.

3. The capital stack

Capital is the fuel that drives this people machine, and is key to de-risking an entrepreneurial route for those not fortunate or insane enough to dive in with no armbands. The grad scheme may be dull, but it is paid, and for even some of the most ambitious young people, a steady wage in an uncertain world is hard to turn down.

To function effectively, the ecosystem needs a variety of funding routes for young people - covering routes into jobs in entrepreneurial firms, fellowship funding for exploration periods, non-dilutive grants for foundational research, company foundation support etc.

Starting at the earliest touchpoint, programmes like Relativity Collective or Zero foster this awareness and connection before individuals leave institutional education - offering short courses, summer camps and community for founder-curious profiles before they’re free agents.

For those still in academia, Wilbe and Creator Fund provide funding for academics who are either unaware of how to spin out or scared of making the leap with no backing. There is much to learn from Canada here, who have built multiple competitive (semi-public) routes for AI researchers looking to leave academia via Mila and the Vector Institute - providing a third path for academics away from staying in education or taking a job in a hyper-scaler AI lab. There is neither the time nor the appetite here to take on university tech transfer offices, only to say that every day our top institutions lack standardised terms for funding, equity and IP transfer is another day wasted.

For hungry generalists, Entrepreneurs First is a brilliant route - and is an unusual example of a genuinely globally competitive accelerator programme. While for those not ready to get straight into building for themselves, the “anti grad scheme” products of Jumpstart, {Tech: Europe} or Null Fellows bridge the information gap between young people and exceptional opportunities.

Adjacent to these more structured programmes or job searches are fellowships - giving precocious or deeply curious young people the funding and freedom to explore their ideas without short term salary pressure. While furiously competitive, the Thiel Fellowship has paved the way for funded fellowships for the most unusual of young entrepreneurs, alongside Spec.tech and Kevin Hartz’ personal work in the US. We need more of these - Project Europe is having a good crack (in spite of the depressing gender breakdown of the backers), EWOR is hoovering up excellent European talent, and Regen are doing interesting work with their worldwide fellowship for “aliens”.

From the Atom Up

First contact: Aliens and the ReGen Fellowship

During September to November we ran the first edition of the ReGen Fellowship, a program for technical people exploring ideas that could reshape the world from the atom up…

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9 months ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Sam Tidswell

A nod here to ARIA - a truly ambitious publicly funded R&D agency, backing anyone from a solo scientist to founder to non-profit for the specific work they’re doing within their field. This takes the best from DARPA and leans into British strengths, with the unique innovation being the flexibility of funding methods and mechanisms - focusing more on desired outcomes than quibbling over terms.

ARIA

Innovator Circles: Cultivating the ambitious communities where breakthroughs begin

Why we’re building a high-ambition culture…

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10 months ago · 25 likes · ARIA

Following the example of Regen, funds can do more here - it shouldn’t be dependent on behemoth a16z and Speedrun Alpha to fund brilliant people at the earliest stages. Again - this needs our trailblazers to put themselves out there - both in terms of capital allocators giving no-questions-asked small grants to brilliant individuals, and exited founders with money to spare taking it upon themselves to fund the next generation. These fellowships don’t materialise out of thin air, and the likes of InnovateUK do more to fund grant-repreneurship than real ambition. Excepting unusual cases, public bodies just aren’t very good at this type of capital. The private sector needs to fill in the gaps, being patient that the ROI will come, even if it takes longer than impatient investors might hope.

a16z speedrun

Why We're Launching the Alpha Fellowship

Tomorrow is the final day to apply for the first-ever cohort of a16z speedrun Alpha, a selective fellowship for exceptional students and recent-grad engineers who want to build startups, either by joining a breakout portfolio company at the ground floor or starting one themselves…

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5 months ago · 35 likes · 8 comments

Lastly, equity funding is always worth mentioning. The EIS/SEIS schemes in the UK have built an impressive early-stage funding ecosystem, and the UK is head and shoulders above the rest of Europe in terms of number and size of funds - but more is still more in this case. We need more public angel syndicates like Ventures Together, and individual business angels unafraid to shout about their allocations and interests - as these types of capital can come in before founders or ideas are ready for the beady, hyper-critical eyes of institutional venture capital.

I would argue the UK is well furnished with VC funds at the early stages, and the challenges lie in risk-on angels for first cheque funding, along with later in the fundraising journey as founders need deep institutional capital to plug the UK -> US leak as teams raise from US funds in later stages, often more out of necessity than desire.

The view from 10,000 ft

It isn’t often that we get the chance to zoom out on an ecosystem and examine it from afar - as a machine designed to achieve an aim, in this case promoting a nation of furiously ambitious British builders.

While it is challenging to hold something of this magnitude in hand, the exercise of stepping back and asking what best in class could and should look like, and where we could be directing our ambitions is one I believe to be valuable - for inspiring activity, sparking debate, driving connection and sharing stories.

I am a firm and passionate believer in the strengths contained within the British economy, of London as a uniquely global, competitive and welcoming city (even in spite of its endless winters), and the power technology has to both improve our world but also build a more resilient economy. There is a wave of uncertainty coming, and regardless of how great this may be or how long it lasts, fostering an economy capable of weathering this time of change is something we should all be discussing.

By building a media apparatus actively incentivised to tell stories of our most brilliant people and companies, that is fed by a talent machine comprised of events, communities and spaces, and funded by flexible, open-minded capital, we set ourselves up well for increasing both the resilience of, and surface area for opportunity within the economy.

Yet this requires exited founders to write cheques and give time. It demands funds willing to back people before they’re ready. It needs our institutions to move on from obsessing over terms and lean into the upside, not potential downside. It requires young people to show up before they feel qualified. And it calls on all of us to stop apologising for ambition - because otherwise we’re no more than tall poppies cut down once again in the summer breeze.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives, while investing in start-ups via Kindred Capital and Anti Ordinary. Loved it, hated it? Neither? Tell me, or just binge my content @ maxbray.xyz

A prediction market is a specialised financial exchange where individuals trade contracts based on the outcome of future events - or, in human speak, a website that lets you bet against other people on whether something will happen or not, or the way in which a thing is going to occur.

As of 2026 there are two major prediction markets running online - Polymarket and Kalshi - both founded in 2021. The former has lower total historical trade volumes ($17.6bn vs. Kalshi’s ~$28bn), but is growing considerably faster (~$100m daily vs ~$17m). Both have raised considerable sums of money. To put these volumes into perspective, the UK gambling industry had gross revenues of £16bn ($21.4bn) 2023-24, or £43m ($57.6m) gambled per day.

These markets allow you to bet on all sorts of mad stuff - how much the next Avatar film will gross, whether the US will invade Iran, who wins the Superbowl, or who’ll be outed in the next set of Epstein files. If you can imagine it, and measure the outcome, there’s a potential market out there. (To understand how they actually work, read this)

Now, the technologist in me absolutely loves this. It’s P2P (running on crypto rails), decentralised (no “bookie” is setting the odds), real time and absolutely bonkers. Back in 2024 there was literally a Polymarket trade on the duration of lizard man Bryan Johnson’s nighttime erections. This is the internet at its freewheeling, chaotic best.

But there’s also a terrifying, dark underbelly to all of this. Over the last few weeks I haven’t been able to stop weighing up the negatives - insider trading, the effect on politics, gambling framed as investing, reality as a derivative of the market - versus the positives - the democratising nature of real time “true” polling, skin-in-the-game staking of real world events, and gambling without the stacked odds of betting organisations.

Here’s my attempt to make sense of it all.

It’s all just sports betting from here

The traditional worries around sports betting have always been that it would debase the value and enjoyment of sports - turning something pure (“Go! Team!”) into something complex and muddy (“Well, I might be able to hedge a loss by making some money on the other side”). In the UK we’ve had legal sports betting more or less since the Tudors, and none of this has happened - yes, sports gambling is dangerous and addictive - but it also hasn’t ruined the viewing experience for the vast majority of fans, nor the sports themselves.

I worry politics might be different. Firstly, betting on sports doesn’t change the outcome. The event is discrete, undertaken by professionals, has well established and clearly defined rules and boundaries on cheating or match fixing, and, thank the lord, is generally loved intrinsically by those that perform it meaning the vast majority of participants can be considered “good actors”.

Politics doesn’t always look like this. It’s dirty, partisan, drawn out, chaotic, open to malicious influence, and the opinion of an event or decision can fundamentally alter its outcome. Just look at the example of the “French Whale” in 2024 - a series of bets by one Frenchman totalling $80M on Trump on Polymarket. Regardless of the intent, the sheer size of the bets influenced the odds, and in turn the media narrative of “Trump momentum” when the polls were deadlocked. It’s hard to say whether this skewed the result, but the precedent is there.

Admittedly this can happen in many different fields - Elon Musk’s use of X as a mouthpiece for Trump’s campaign was no less influential, nor Biden’s stumbling in the debate. However the difference here is that from the outside, a prediction market “probability” looks like the aggregate of many thousands of opinions, and speaks to us in the language of polling. It feels legitimate, balanced even.

Now in a perfect market, even a “whale” sized bet clears to zero as the market sees the inefficiency and re-balances the odds. However politics is so fast changing, these moments can be of great influence. A 24h skew on prediction market weightings the day before an election could be enough to influence public opinion, especially as the volumes reach significant levels and the prediction market odds are cited in mainstream media.

And for those who say “we’ve always had betting on politics!”, the difference here (as is almost often the case with the internet) is the speed, scale and visibility. No single betting shop has the potential international profile of these markets, nor the real time or peer to peer nature. Gambling apps don’t look like or feel social media sites, and come stock full of boring (important) warnings and alerts. Moreover, the sense you’re betting against John Doe (or 1000x John Doe), not the house, makes the whole thing seem less weighty and less risky, but arguably more representative of public opinion.

Memeified decision making

But at a deeper level than this, I worry about this for what it does to decision making in society. Young people are already woefully disengaged with politics across developed nations. The lurch to extreme political views is in part due to exhaustion with the stale nature of politics, but I believe also because engagement and understanding are at record lows.

And this trend could serve to compound this. Peer to peer betting creates yet another abstraction layer between the individual and the reality - gamifying and memeifying socially and economically profound decisions.

“Vote for X? Well the odds look good so YOLO”. It turns everything into a “moment”, distancing the decision from the reality, distorting the incentives, and ignoring the second order consequences. It reminds me of a friend who voted Brexit as a joke because they thought it would never happen. Imagine if he had also had upside and potential clout. This kind of poor decision making is very hard to undo when the timeframes and reality of politics and society don’t match up with the speed, relative ease and excitement of an online flutter.

It’s perhaps an extreme framing, but what happens to the already fraying social contract when we stop being citizens and shift to being odds-maxxing voyeurs? If I no longer feel incentivised in the future of my nation, and have frictionless ways to hedge against it, why wouldn’t I? It feels that lurking deep below the memeification of society is a dark undercurrent - one of status over substance, and get-rich-quick grift over hard earned marginal gains.

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Bad people doing bad things, from anywhere

This is before you consider the fact this is a digital exchange that knows no borders. You can’t (currently) bet on these markets with a UK IP address, but this is easily solved using a VPN, especially so given the currency of choice is crypto.

While the Trump Administration (in its infinite wisdom) has gone all in on these markets, legalising them after a period in the regulatory wilderness (and regulating them not as gambling but as financial markets), I believe domestic activity is actually a different concern to international influence.

The French Whale example is important because it was a non-US actor influencing the odds on a US event. Russian/North Korean troll farms must be licking their lips at the opportunity for fully anonymised chaos mongering. This is social media influence but in one big town square, with odds that are now officially broadcast on mainstream news outlets as events unfold, giving them ever more legitimacy and relevance.

Incredibly efficient insider trading

One of the most startling recent reveals about the never-ending Trump family kleptocracy is that Donald Trump Jr is currently an advisor to BOTH Kalshi and Polymarket.

I don’t want to sound too much like a CNBC/EU Commission pearl clutcher, but this absolutely stinks. The opportunity to rapidly and lucratively capitalise on insider information in a sector not currently regulated as gambling is simply too obvious to ignore. This will be old news by the time I publish this piece, but on January 14th this happened:

The same happened with Maduro’s ousting a week earlier. Someone joked to me the other day to get any insider bets I can in on one of these platforms before (proper) regulation comes in - and while this regulation is inevitable, my concern is that given the ease of operating across borders and anonymously, regulation will have a very hard time catching up. This will be especially challenging when the government responsible for regulating the platform in the US (and so most of the world via VPN) appears to be as crooked as they come.

Reality as a derivative of the market

To take this one final level weirder - what happens if the markets then end up influencing the nature or timing of the events?

In a life-imitating-art moment back in November 2025, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong spewed a string of crypto jargon at the end of a Q3 earnings call that happened to exactly match a series of polymarket bets, resolving $84K of wagers in the process:

While he claimed afterwards this was a joke, did he say “Web3” because he found it funny, or because he bet on it? Could the raid on Maduro have happened when it did not because it was strategically necessary, but because a whale needed the contract to settle before Jan 31? In a world where we seriously consider flooding the zone as a genuine tactic to avoid Epstein file releases, stranger things have indeed happened.

Journalist Kara Swisher predicted recently that 2026 would see the first major prediction market driven negative incident (e.g. a murder that was not going to happen anyway occurring due to big upside on a prediction market). This is dramatic (and I believe quite unlikely), but, what about an older sports-person fluffing a few timely shots to make a quick buck before they retire, or a politician dropping out of a race at a very specific moment then riding off into the (as yet unregulated) sunset, cash in hand?

Prediction markets threaten to turn reality into a derivative of the market. My head is now hurting. (If you want it to hurt even more, read this brilliant deepdive).

Real time polling, real time engagement

Now, enough with the hand wringing. These platforms scares the hell out of me, but there are also some very valid potential upsides. Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin made some neat points:

I particularly like the idea that these markets provide a “skin in the game” way to publicly take stakes. Much like buying equities or voting, the positive spin is that this is a leveraged way for individuals to have a voice, and that the average of the (incentivised) commons could well end up more accurate than legacy polling methods.

The wonderful Benjamin Graham quote that "In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine" applies here - but in some ways collapsing the two into one measure. Prediction markets can become both a way to vote on the news and a source of news themselves.

There is something amazing about the ability to have a real time barometer of thousands of individuals’ aggregated opinions on world events. In a internet-as-democratising-tool way, the participant to voyeur could also be viewed as participant to pundit, but where the pundit has a real (financial) reason to take a stance.

Perhaps in fact this staking has the opposite effect of distancing individuals from reality? The techno-utopian take would be that this democratisation drives civic engagement, creates an immediate incentive for individuals to read up on topics, and broadens the market for news consumption. It remains to be seen.

Short odds on bad stuff

It’s important to note that prediction markets are not new - there’s five hundred year old evidence of betting on Papal Elections for example - and society doesn’t seem to have collapsed in the interim. Perhaps this time it isn’t different, and my concern is as unfounded as the millennium bug or crypto-induced collapse of the financial system.

However, what puts me in a “this time it’s different” mindset here is the aforementioned speed, scale, publicity and lack of rules. This moves so fast, has so few guardrails, is run by what seem to be a pretty dubious bunch, looks harmless yet contains so many avenues for malicious activity, is SO public, doesn’t look or feel like gambling, and crosses borders without the slightest friction.

I have always felt that the internet is this vast, blind amoral beast. It just doesn’t care about good or bad, whether you win or lose, are happy or sad. At once it contains contains both the most wonderful things on Earth and the most terrifying things imaginable.

Which is exactly why it needs consistently thoughtful, endlessly iterative, exhausting forward thinking regulation. This may well be a short term pain that ends up looking more like traditional gambling or public equities, but my worry is the damage done in the interim could be very hard to undo.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives, while investing in start-ups via Kindred Capital and Anti Ordinary. Loved it, hated it? Neither? Tell me, or just binge my content @ maxbray.xyz

+ Thank you to the Nerdy White Guy Copy Editing Club © (Titas, Will, Rob, Alex and George) for thoughtful feedback / input here.

It was like the talking heads had a collective Damascene realisation that China was no longer “copying” Western innovation, and was actually making all the best stuff, way cheaper and way faster than anyone else could, and that this would be really rather bad if we ended up in direct conflict, say, over Taiwan.

While the importance of this has in no way abated, over the course of 2025 this narrative began to shift a layer deeper - to focus on critical minerals supply. This is an area I find particularly fascinating, believing that the supply of critical minerals is even more important to economic and military sovereignty than owning the factories.

Why? Well, everything important to the modern economy is absolutely full of critical minerals. Our whole economy is downstream of these elements, and it doesn’t matter how many factories you have if you don’t own the supply of stuff to fuel them.

Not only are these magical materials axiomatic to the modern world, but it turns out (much like most manufacturing) that we largely don’t own their supply or processing in the West, yet our growth in demand is far outstripping our ability to dig them out of the ground.

Technology is going to play a major role here - the following is my attempt to dig into some ideas around how.

They’re called critical minerals for a reason

For the uninitiated, critical minerals is an umbrella term for those minerals considered to have a role in a country’s strategically important economic sectors - changing by nation but generally including copper, lithium, nickel, gold, graphite, cobalt, manganese and the rare earth metals (17 heavy metals found throughout the earth’s crust).

Global demand for these elements has been increasing since societies industrialised, rising steadily (~2-3% YoY) in the 20th century. Around the turn of the century this rapidly accelerated, driven by the rise of China then the push towards electrification and green technologies, with growth rates looking more like 5-15% on average since the turn of the millennium, with specific materials (e.g. lithium 25-30%, cobalt 10-15%) growing considerably faster.

This is because these minerals are central to just about everything important in an electrified society - batteries, magnets, motors, chips, advanced/power electronics, fibre optics, cables, touchscreens etc. For example, your average electric vehicle looks like this:

Given that an EV is, as of 2026, in many ways a massive smartphone with wheels - these same laws scale down to microchip level and up to massive electric devices like wind turbines or industrial batteries. Everything we use today that involves an electronic component, from a printer to a fighter jet, is stock full of critical minerals.

And this historic growth is only accelerating. Lithium demand is forecast to triple by 2040 relative to current levels, driven primarily by the ubiquity of lithium-ion batteries in EVs and stationary devices. Cobalt demand is projected to more than double by 2040, driven by its role in stabilising battery cathodes, while copper (literally known as the “metal of electrification”) demand is expected to add 50% by 2040 - with a structural deficit of 12 million tonnes predicted by 2035. Nickel & rare earths have similar predicted trajectories, with significant pressure on supply chains for high-performance magnets and high-nickel battery chemistries.

Yet the fundamental challenge here is that we currently can’t match supply to meet this exploding demand.

It turns out mining is really quite difficult

This comes down to a number of reasons, but the main ones is that developing a new mine is very uncertain and takes absolutely ages.

The average time from discovery to first production for a new mine has ballooned to ~18 years from ~12 in the 2000s. This delay is rarely caused by the construction of the mine - instead its a combination of deposits being buried deeper under the ground (the easy, near surface finds have all been discovered in a well trodden world), the explosion of bureaucracy and permitting needs in many nations (e.g. the US average time to mine is now more like 30 years), and the financing challenges for the smaller (Junior) miners who are often those to discover new seams but get stuck raising capital with which to fund drilling.

Given the lag, the mines required to meet 2035 demand should have been discovered in 2017. In large part they were not.

Alongside this, the quality of available ore is degrading worldwide. For copper, average head grades (avg. concentration of valuable metal or mineral in the ore as it’s delivered from the mine to the processing mill) in Chile have fallen from >1.5% to <0.6% over the last two decades. Lower grades require moving more earth to extract the same amount of metal, increasing energy costs, timelines and capex even further.

Zero sum diplomacy

And this is before one considers the concentration of supply chains and the geopolitical relevance of these elements. The supply chain for many critical minerals is dangerously concentrated, and not in nations necessarily friendly to US or European interests.

While around 75% of raw lithium supply comes from Australia and Chile, China owns 60-70% of the processing. The picture is similar for cobalt - while ~75% of of supply from the DRC, China dominates 70% of processing. And the same again with rare earths - more or less 90% Chinese owned. Copper? You guessed it - China owns just 8% of mine output, but over 45% of refined production. So while supply may be more distributed, when it comes to refining, there’s really only one buyer of relevance.

This is also complicated and often nasty business - developing countries with unstable regimes, unclear/corrupt regulatory frameworks, varying geopolitical alignments and interests, labour forces at times employing quasi slave labour, and entrenched Chinese economic power wherever you look.

This is what the EU and US have finally woken up to in recent years. The 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act offered benefits for domestic production, while in 2024 the EU Critical Raw Materials Act mandated sourcing 10% from EU extraction, 40% from EU processing, and 25% from EU recycling, while limiting single-country import dependency to 65% for any raw material.

However it was in 2025 these bureaucratic conversations really hit the mainstream, in large part driven by President Trump’s return to the White House. In April and October last year China imposed hefty rare earth export limits as a response to US tariffs, and the Trump administration has subsequently very publicly prioritised non-Chinese critical minerals deals and even taken direct stakes in critical minerals producers to shore up supply.

Viewed through this lens, many of the US’s more dramatic actions and proclamations (e.g. striking Venezuela, threatening Cuba/Greenland/Mexico, or forcing Ukraine into a minerals deal in exchange for aid) begin to reveal an underlying pattern. Per the FT:

Given that mining directly accounts for 1-1.5% of Global GDP (rising to 5-7% when bundled with oil, gas and coal), and the electrification wave shows no signs of slowing down, this geopolitical relevance is only going to grow in coming years.

It is within this context that technology comes into play. Mining has not traditionally been viewed as start-up friendly, being hamstrung by regulation, geographically fragmented, dangerous and about as “analogue” as a sector can get.

However, it is also legacy, oligopolistic and largely resistant to innovation - three things technology companies have been licking their lips at since long before Bezos declared “your margin is my opportunity”. This, combined with the start-up shift towards bigger, bolder hardware-driven bets in recent years has gradually cracked this sleeping giant of a sector open for innovation.

Large models applied to resource discovery

The first (and arguably most important) area of value creation is in optimising the mine discovery and selection process.

Traditionally, identification and selection is done by expert geologists who combine large amounts of topographical data and well established heuristics (e.g. X mineral often occurs alongside Y land formation) with walking prospective sites, taking soil samples, and conducting various surveys (e.g. seismic, gravity).

While based on deep and broad expertise, this approach is human-led, time consuming, manual and limited by teams’ capacity to interpret data. The industry rule suggests around 1/1000 (0.1%) sites make it from initial identification to a revenue generating site - an awful, and time consuming ratio.

Machine learning and agentic solutions are particularly useful here - where humans act both as APIs (transferring data from one point to another) and pattern matchers in large datasets. It is no surprise therefore that a host of companies have emerged trying these approaches but for mine discovery.

These start-ups and scale-ups exist on a continuum from pure-play software providers (building software tools for Juniors/mid-tiers/Majors to pay for on a recurring basis) through to companies attempting to become full stack mining firms themselves.

On the pure software end, Terra AI and ExploreTech both combine proprietary models and geologist expertise to provide mining discovery companies with insights to better identify and optimise drill sites, similar to UK based new entrant Material Difference who use novel explainable models to optimise site identification and selection - currently as a service to mid-tier miners.

Fleet Space Technologies take a space-based approach employing micro-satellites and proprietary models to aid mineral discovery, while Germany-based Deep Earth is mapping the subsurface world to build a broader 3D picture of the underground for multiple industries. These approaches all focus on software revenues - potentially remunerative as mid-tiers / Majors could easily pay multiple million dollar contract sizes, but equally beholden to powerful, concentrated buyers (~250 mid tiers / ~50 majors controlling 60-70% of the market) and the whims of a slow moving sector.

Where the opportunity gets colossal is when technology companies look to shoulder the risk and temporal uncertainty themselves, leveraging tech to optimise the discovery and operations, but capturing royalties from the output of the mines in place of software revenues.

The household name and first real mover in this space is KoBold Metals, a Breakthrough Energy backed “Google Maps for the Earth’s crust” claiming to have ingested millions of data points into large models to correlate broad variables and optimise mine discovery. KoBald was one of the first tech companies to shift from serving third parties to taking on the risk themselves - looking to replicate the work of Junior miners but in a tech-enabled, hyper efficient manner.

It is of note that they transitioned from being a broader exploration company into owning a single Zambian copper mine - due to the massive royalties (+$100m) on offer once the right site has been selected, but also likely due to the slow moving and high uncertainty nature of marginal site identification. As of January ‘26, they appear to be exploring a second site in the DRC.

a16z backed Mariana Minerals have built on this approach, looking to develop a “mine in a box” solution to rapidly deploy new mines across the globe, capturing the site output in the process. Their focus is on post discovery implementation, buying sites or permits off cash strapped discovery companies. Per a16z’s blog post “Mariana is full-stack. It designs, permits, finances, commissions, and operates. It pours the concrete. It operates the haul truck. Where incumbents take twelve years to get a single lithium project into production, Mariana has set a target that sounds like heresy: 10 mineral projects in 10 years.”

Also in this space are Australian Earth AI that began as a pure-play software provider and moved into a verticalized offering, claiming an astonishing 75% identification hit rate. French start-up Lithosquare is building a multi-agent full stack discovery company, combining the initial ML-driven discovery work with workflows designed to optimise the whole prospecting process, while US-based VerAI is going after the same pie with their own data-driven approach.

While potentially longer to revenues, the upside for these royalty-driven discovery companies is uncapped. The challenge will be whether they can materially alter the structure of the mining sector - either prospecting a sufficiently large number of sites so as to hedge their bets across dozens of projects, or achieving a suitably high level of accuracy to enable “one shot one kill” approaches to site identification.

The fundamental tension is this time to revenues vs. risk. Majors (e.g. Rio Tinto, BHP) have dozens of projects and massive balance sheets, enabling them to trade at 6-20x P:E multiples (share price / earnings per share) and ride out failed projects or slow timelines. However the smaller discovery companies (Juniors) are highly leveraged into single exploration projects, trading at very low P:NAV ratios (i.e. enterprise value vs. the potential value of the ore discoveries) as a result of this concentration and the awful, slow throughput of initial site identification to profitable mine.

So, if novel, vertically integrated technology players can improve this 0.1% hit rate / 18Y lag in a meaningful manner - through tightening the funnel of initial sites, optimising drilling, or getting mines up and running more quickly (and so increasing no. of bets) - they can act like Majors at the scale of Juniors - unlocking massive revenues and accompanying valuation multiples accordingly.

This will take a level of ambition and operational brilliance akin to tech enabled drug discovery, neoprimes in defence or challenger space exploration companies. Bringing best in class machine learning talent together with legacy geology know-how, shortening time to revenues and site discovery uncertainty, and building expertise and network in a difficult, dangerous sector, all while likely stepping on the toes of the mining Majors - organisations it wouldn’t generally be advised to wilfully irritate.

I believe the technology opportunity here is largely untapped and hugely exciting. Evidence from legacy miners suggests they are very early in their tech adoption journey, and will no doubt struggle to incorporate many of these innovations in any meaningful way. Put simply - there’s a +$1tn industry ripe for disruption.

To be continued

Part two coming shortly - going deeper into net new ore sources, solving the mineral processing concentration challenge, mine management, teleoperation, automation and more. Have I missed anything? Let me know.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives, while investing in start-ups via Kindred Capital and Anti Ordinary. Loved it, hated it? Neither? Tell me, or just binge my content @ maxbray.xyz

To follow-up on the former, I’ve been itching to dig into a number of ideas on where I think the world could be in a decade, considering specifically how this might impact technology - as in venture capital we’re realistically more crystal ball gazers than real time market analysts.

The first of these is the fundamental demographic shift the world is undergoing, including imminent population decline (and accompanying labour shortages) in developed countries, continued population growth in the Global South, and climate induced mass migration.

I believe these will impact physical labour automation, our societal focus on fertility and longevity, how we think about border security in nations fortunate enough to be desirable destinations, and the need for global cooling efforts.

Read on for my thinking around how this could play out.

—

Fewer people to go around

After hundreds of years of sustained population growth (and a veritable explosion in the second half of the twentieth century), we’ve crossed the tipping point towards population decline in much of the world.

Many nations in the Global North are looking at imminent decline, and those in the Global South are seeing the rapid growth numbers of the last half century slowing with predicted drop off coming by the latter half of this century.

Much has been written on this topic recently - the Economist had an excellent reader on this a few months back, Ezra Klein discussed it last year, the brilliant Unruly team covered it (in perhaps slightly more dramatic framing than I would be comfortable with) a few weeks back, and David Runciman took >7000 words in the LRB to go into this subject in great detail earlier this year.

Tl:DR? On most models, we’re pretty screwed. Once birth rates drop below 2.1 babies per couple, population declines. (Because a couple is 2 people, so without replacing them +0.1, population inevitably declines)

Many expectations suggest the global population will peak around 2080, although ONS expects the UK to level out (without continued large scale immigration) as early as 2029 - many European nations look similar. Given this prediction came out before we saw a +60% drop in net migration YoY into the UK, this number could come even sooner in a low immigration environment.

Once you cross that key 2.1 replacement threshold, you start running out of young people to look after old people. You start running out of productive workers. And without major productivity increases, the productive capacity in the economy falls and tax receipts drop.

As we’re all living longer, this tends towards top heavy populations with the dependency ratio (of expensive old people to tax-paying young) worsening over time. Between 2000 and 2100 the proportion of the world aged 65+ will triple. The scariest part about this is that the lag is huge - not only does it take a long time to show, but it takes literal decades of population re-growth to re-set.

The reasons for this decline are multiple - educational standards increasing, especially for women, shift priorities from homemaker to active participant in the economy. Cost of living increases have pulled children per parent down across the West - as the Wired team noted in their recent podcast on the topic, the ultimate San Francisco status symbol is “three kids and a Rivian”. And declines in religious superstition and instruction have removed the divine imperative to go forth and multiply.

Hold on - what about the Global South!?

Yet within the next half century, we’ll also still see populations continue to grow in many developing economies (in part due to the lag in decline once a nation falls below the 2.1 rate), and a strong correlation between these young, fast growing populations and susceptibility to climate change.

As of 2025, India is growing at ~24 million people a year. A country of 1.35bn people adds the population of Mali (or 35% of the UK), annually. And even though the replacement rate actually dropped below 2.0 in 2020, it will still take until the 2060s for population to peak (somewhere around 1.7 billion).

Indonesia keeps growing +1% annually, expected to hit ~320m by 2060 (from 284m today), while the population of wider Sub-Saharan Africa is growing at an annual rate of around 2.3-2.7%, expected to reach approximately 2 billion by 2050.

Now in many ways this signals a natural correction to the decline of the tired, developed world. Empires rise and fall, and this is certainly shaping up to be the century of the Global South. You only have to fly through an airport in the Middle East to feel this shift. However, the correlation between developing nations and vulnerability to major climate shocks and broader temperature rise throws an uncomfortable spanner in the works.

In a highly cited prediction, the World Bank’s worst-case estimate for climate induced migration is that some 216 million people could move internally by 2050 (~2.6% of the predicted global population in 2050), +80 million of which will be in Sub Saharan Africa.

As noted by the Migration Policy Institute, climate-driven migration generally begins within nations, with climate-related disasters pushing populations internally. This has already happened within countries such as Somalia and Guatemala in recent years.

As these disasters develop into broader ecosystem collapse, with rising temperatures, rising sea-levels, and droughts, such migration will inevitably bleed across borders, and will push populations of (generally less well off) nations towards refuge in their more temperate (and wealthier) neighbours. 2015 saw the first asylum claim by a Kiribati islander to the New Zealand government based on sea level rise. It was rejected, but it felt like a sign of things to come.

The numbers around international migration are difficult to predict, lacking both precedent and underlying thesis, but the 2015 migrant crisis Europe saw based on the Syrian and Afghan conflicts suggest a pattern for a problem we’re set to grapple with for the next century. When conflicts break out over diminishing resources both between and within nations, this problem is likely to compound - supercharging the population movement in ways we cannot yet predict.

Once regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent hit unliveable temperatures for extended periods each year, or crop failure becomes genuinely widespread, greater numbers of people will be forced to become ever more nomadic. If even a small percentage of these move west and north, the impact on Europe could be seismic.

Shifting labour markets

And herein lies the strange cocktail. As populations age and shrink in Europe, they will continue to rise elsewhere, while being forced to move in ever greater numbers. On paper, a logical exchange as younger, poorer populations seek refuge and opportunity, and older economies seek productive capacity to prop up ageing populations.

Yet the rise of nativism and anti immigration sentiment complicate this trend. Even if the data shows European populations have only slightly cooled on their 2010s bullishness towards migration, the popular narrative has shifted, and pro-immigration is a challenging stance for any European or US party to take into 2026.

There is now a disconnect in the political landscape between the need for workers and perspectives on migrants. And in some ways there is logic within this - the UK has 9 million economically inactive adults, easily enough to offset a very large percentage of new arrivals if coaxed back into work effectively (but I have no desire to delve into these politics here).

Regardless, we still need pretty much every type of worker, but especially those who serve ageing populations - carers, logistics, hospitality workers, etc., alongside skilled positions including engineers, technicians, teachers etc.

Welcome to your automated future

As humans struggle to fill the labour shortages, and robotics continues to advance apace, the opportunity for automation within this landscape is going to be considerable. As Roman Hölzl of RobCo (a Kindred portfolio company) cited recently, there could be as many as 4 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US and EU by 2030. And this is before you add in many of the sectors facing shortages cited above.

Some of these gaps will inevitably be filled by renewed focus on local retraining and migrant workers, but we’re also going to observe a massive shift towards robotics-led automation. Not only are robotics rapidly approaching cost parity with human workers in many sectors, but we’re already seeing impressive deployed applications across factories, warehousing, transport, logistics, farms, shops, kitchens, precision manufacturing and much more.

We will undoubtedly also see artificial intelligence throwing another spanner into the works here - the warnings of great job displacement are sounding increasingly prescient as major services companies begin to announce large-scale job cuts. On a positive timeline, AI/ML-driven systems automate dull jobs where humans serve as APIs (connecting bits of data/processes). On a darker timeline, we see large scale unemployment due to AI/robotics efficiency with no clear path to productive job replacement.

My uncontroversial ground take is that we’ll see a reorganisation from repetitive white collar jobs back towards hard to automate services industries. As the growing dependency ratio highlights, caring for the elderly is an ever-increasing concern - yet the care sector feels a decade or two out in terms of robot development.

Humanoids are still pretty clunky, and older populations will likely remain distrustful of autonomous assistance for some time. Moreover, the dexterity, complexity and soft touch requirements of working with vulnerable or elderly people are a far cry from pick and pack in an Amazon warehouse. Dexterity will be a major focus for robotics companies in the next decade as the “hands problem” remains unsolved.

Similarly, trades such as physiotherapists, plumbers, electricians or lab technicians will far outlast most email jobs- and with this we’ll likely see a rebalancing of the relative social status of skilled physical labour versus its desk-based equivalents.

We need to make more babies

At a more basic level, expect considerable effort applied to getting more humans to make more humans.

Government efforts to boost populations (such as cash for having kids, tax breaks for working parents, free childcare etc.) have generally fallen flat. Yet it feels inevitable technology will be employed on top of these to both ensure high levels of efficiency in fertility, reduction in negative outcomes, and innovation in early years care.

The concept of artificial wombs is a fascinating one, essentially grow-in-a-bag babies, which could eventually help overcome challenges faced by older couples or those with personal reproductive issues. While decades out at the minimum, the ethical challenges are obvious - whether we move towards a world that changes its attitudes to family structures and how we procreate, with science fiction having done an excellent job at imagining corporate owned reproduction, children without parents, or cloning for all sorts of nefarious ends.

On a shorter (and less terrifying) horizon, expect also to see even greater focus on IVF, egg freezing and conception aids to open up more chances to conceive to older or work-focused couples. Early years childcare could also see innovation - offsetting the insane costs paid by parents in urban areas for nurseries by optimising the childcare model with new technologies.

IVF costs continue to fall, and both egg freezing and IVF have normalised as work benefits, signalling their popularisation, with novel products emerging to reduce the financial burden on prospective parents or employers. Kindred backed Gaia a few years back, offering fixed price IVF + insurance to offset the high medical bills offered when going direct to clinic.

Longevity as a social imperative

As populations age (and shrink), maximising productive capacity across the life of an employee will be ever more important, and if cost of living continues to plague populations, quality adjusted life-years (QALYS) and skill retention/retraining will be extra important as retirement will look less viable for many workers.

Cognitive decline is already being tackled with focuses on neurodegenerative conditions, supplements for brain function, and preventative medicine, while physical decline, muscle density and mobility are major focus areas for the longevity movement in the past decade.

Punting out a bit further, (largely stealth) start-ups and Big Pharma are riding the GLP-1 wave, trying to apply the technology to alternative areas - addiction, mental health challenges, and even reducing the hours of sleep needed by humans - all of which could benefit productive capacity by enabling longer, more productive careers, or more output per worker during their best years.

Defence tech for border security

An uncomfortable reality is that alongside focusing on growing domestic populations, this climate induced mass migration will likely continue the decadal trend we’ve seen in anti-immigration sentiment across the West.

If the numbers continue to rise, defence technology applications may well be repurposed for border defence use cases - with drone technology, autonomous boats, positioning systems, heat sensors etc. employed in civilian environments.

Internally, this may well look like a greater use of surveillance and identity tracking for domestic populations. There is already controversy in the UK around expanded police use of facial recognition alongside age estimation for recently arrived migrants - but in a world where identity cards are employed more widely and civilian attitudes harden towards illegal immigration, the end state feels somewhat inevitable. While hard to stomach, ICE (and their relationship with Palantir) feels like a bellwether more than an outlier.

A perhaps less dystopian angle here is technology employed to enable and support short term itinerant work, such as automating short term visas (already used at scale in US agriculture), and tracking their use vs. traditional, outdated paper systems.

Global cooling, at scale

Given the speed and intensity of global temperature increases in the last decade, there is a not-insignificant chance we end up deploying some form of large-scale global cooling - and this could well be driven by the short term pressures of population movement from countries that can’t afford this themselves into countries that can.

The theme of geo-engineering is one that has broken through in recent months, such as solar radiation modification (or solar geo-engineering), an umbrella term including stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), marine cloud brightening (MCB), cloud thinning, space sunshades etc - all of which can provide short term temperature reduction in a rapidly heating world.

How these technologies pan out commercially, and indeed how the public views them is as yet unclear (we invested in Stardust this year). This could look like a multi-national coalition of the willing (e.g. UN/NATO led efforts), rogue nations deploying their own efforts, or insurance/private enterprise deploying to protect global assets/portfolios. However it happens, this sector will both increase in public relevance and attract more funding - both public (e.g. ARIA’s £56.8m explorative programme) and private (e.g. Lowercarbon leading a $60m round into Stardust) - in the next decade

Where do we go from here?

These trends are broad, long duration and complex. I personally have a quiet suspicion that population decline is not inevitable as I find the “end of humanity” argument to be a little overdone. To me it smells more like a Millenium-bug panic than something that ends our species, especially as we humans have a startling ability to surprise ourselves and not foresee the unknown unknowns.

There are many things that could offset this decline. Genuinely reducing the cost of living while creating a vision of the future founded in optimism (not fear) is a scenario I still have some hope in. There’s also the relevant chance AI fundamentally alters how we understand growth and output, changing the fabric of how governments raise tax revenues and deploy welfare support, unlocking both resource and time for parents.

Alternatively, I do fear the spectre of an intellectual slowdown that welcomes in a new cultural dark age, where artificially super-intelligent computers take the cognitive slack and man shifts into an HG Wells’ Time Machine style adult infancy of leisure-based decline, procreating at higher rates as education levels and expectations fall.

For the first time in centuries we’re getting dumber and more superstitious - our critical faculties are declining, our faith in institutions is falling, and religious fervour is once again on the rise - all of which could usher in a new era of social norms.

What is clear however is that the challenges around short term labour shortages and people movement feel as pressing as they are politically explosive.

Without unforeseen innovation in reversing climate change, population decline or at-scale automation, we are approaching a period where the needs of old economies could best be served by their younger counterparts, but the appetite does not feel there as of late 2025.

How this plays out, and where new technologies can be of use will be key questions as we continue into the latter half of the 2020s and beyond.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives, while investing via Kindred Capital and Anti Ordinary.

Loved it, hated it? Neither? Tell me or hate binge my content @ maxbray.xyz

Having spent a year trying to raise a fund, speaking to +300 LPs, +100 other GPs (and countless founders) across Europe and the US, I’ve got a very strong feeling something major is afoot.

I believe that within a decade the number of funds will be 30-50% less than it is today, even if the money into the sector remains similar. This will kill the middle of the industry, bifurcating venture into massive scaled platforms who look more like offshoots of government-come-hedge funds, and a long tail of specialists who will capture all the value and the best returns but do so with smaller fund sizes than today.

The former will return considerably lower multiples, feeding off state/regulatory capture and monstrous management fees, but playing a role in scaling technologies into maturity and picking winners, while the latter will be the drivers of innovation and economic dynamism - concentrating talent around both the best funds and the best founders, backing fewer, better companies, and pushing verticals deeper into expertise and excellence.

While this will be uncomfortable, I’m not sure it’ll be a bad thing. This is my attempt to make sense of it, because no one really seems to be having this conversation in public, along with proposing what I think might transpire and what could be potential courses of action to take.

*here defined as funds that make high-risk minority investments in companies that have the potential to generate outsized returns, generally focused on technology

Uncertainty rips, but so do public markets

Firstly, the macro is pretty weird right now, and not exactly conducive to raising venture capital funds, or indeed returning them.

ZIRP is well and truly over - we’ve got persistent +3% interest rates across most of the developed world, making borrowing expensive, and saving look considerably more solid than it did in 2015. There’s negligible growth in basically every major developed economy (excluding the US, which is propped up totally by 7 stocks that increasingly move cash in a circle to pump valuations), but no recessions, and somehow most liquid assets (stocks, commodities, crypto) plus bonds/gilts have been on a tear for the last two plus years.

Alongside this, we have uncertainty indexes off the charts, the constant fear of Trump vs. whoever-he-picks-on-that-week, a return to multiple concurrent global conflicts, major climate disasters on a strong upwards trend, a less predictable multi-polar geopolitical environment, and a return to a high-tariff world for the first time since the 1920s. Within this, public market investors are a very unusual combination of bullish for short-term gains, but shaky and cautious around making long term commitments.

Alongside this macro environment, venture is at best a solid performer vs public markets, but on average, pretty poor.

For UK venture funds the average IRR (2003-2023) sat at 11.2%, while European funds in the 20 years to 2024 offered 12.87%, and their US counterparts 13.03%, all slightly above the S&P’s average 10.48%.

The challenge here is that this average includes a handful of top performers that skew the numbers. The power law also exists across funds, with 80% of European funds returning <10% IRR in the period, and also an average time to 1x DPI of around eight years currently, with real returns more like +13Y.

Anecdotally, many LPs are questioning why to lock their money up in such a long duration illiquid asset. The search for secondaries funds, later stage investors and a (misguided) flight to major brand names is all throttling the sector, especially for early stage managers.

Bluntly, these factors combine to make venture look like a tough sell in 2025.

Then you layer on to this the insane overallocation into funds in the 2019-2022 fundraising bubble, with many LPs from sovereign wealth through to pension funds and large family offices already highly leveraged in the asset, and the proposition as a new entrant or pre-DPI yielding fund in late 2025 is not exactly straightforward.

Software start-ups don’t need venture like they used to

This is all before you consider how companies are born, grow and exit is also changing rapidly, leaving less and less space for equity-hungry venture investors.

Founding a start-up has never been easier from pretty much every angle - there are tools for everything from company incorporation to payroll to marketing development to hiring freelancers. AI has not just supercharged company foundations, but also driven considerably higher output per employee, and therefore less headcount needed - a direct proxy for the amount of money a start-up needs to get going.

This, combined with the post-2023 focus on time to revenue/profitability, and drives towards capital efficiency (after the bull market of the 2010s/Covid era) has changed how many early-stage founders think about getting going.

Anecdotally, the concepts of Seed-Strapping (one round to get going, then drive towards profitability fast) and “minimum viable venture” (the smallest possible angel/VC round to minimise dilution early on) have rapidly normalised.

Deep/frontier tech still require relevant upfront investment, and a relevant number of generalist funds are being forced to get more comfortable with investing in physical stuff - but these still feel like edge cases, especially so when you consider most GPs’ discomfort with longer duration deep tech investments and lack of understanding of how atoms function vs. bits.

Excluding more IP-driven applications, I believe this also changes the way companies will mature and exit. There will still be major IPOs and M&A activity, of course, but as many more companies are now built as wrappers on large models, growing rapidly but building moat/defensibility around brand and speed of execution more than any product differentiation, it is unlikely we’ll see so many category-defining multi-billion-dollar companies.

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10 months ago · 47 likes · 6 comments · Kyle Harrison

In their place will be a long tail of smaller acquisitions; smaller, profitable, few-employee companies in the <$100m revenue range, or roll-ups of these types of tools by funds / Bending Spoons-style players who bundle together multiple companies into verticalized offerings.

All of which don’t really work that well for venture - either as a way to fund these companies, or in terms of the returns they generate.

Most VCs have never really added that much value anyway (as much as they would like to think they do), some even behave actively badly, and this power shift from supply side to demand side feels like a natural re-balancing of an industry that has wielded far too much power since the mid 2010s.

None of this is to say venture is no longer viable, it just very much feels like the pool of companies available for venture funding is getting smaller. Software just doesn’t need venture like it used to, and while more IP-driven deep-tech applications will pick up some of the slack, the pie is still shrinking as the barrier to entry for bootstrapping almost anything gets ever lower.

Yet the competition is greater than ever

Alongside this, the competition for deals has never been higher. [Come with me while I do some really suspect back-of-the-envelope maths to explain my point]

Firstly, there are 202 unicorns (+$1bn valuation private companies) in Europe (as of late 2024 - this isn’t discussing exits, just “venture scale” valuations that at least look nice on paper). For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to imagine they were all founded post-2009 (so 14 years of equally distributed unicorn generation).

As of end-2024, there were 4,044 funds involved in at least one deal in Europe (down 30% from 2023)*. The data on funds by stage is murky, but given there are ~60 growth stage funds operating in Europe (30 of whom do +80% of the deals), I’m going to assume we’re splitting funds 70% pre/seed, 25% A-B, 5% growth.

So at the early stages, there are 2831 funds looking for 13 companies per year - 1:217 odds (0.45%). Or, per fund, you have a 1/217 chance of finding one in a given year.

Play the odds 5 times over your fund lifecycle and its a 1:43 chance of finding one -> worse than the power law distribution of 1:25 typically vaunted by early stage funds.

Then on the top end, 2024 European tech exits totalled €61.8bn across 858 deals - or £71m per exit. US exits are hard to calculate as tech isn’t split from broader M&A in the figures, but corporate backed exits hit $48bn across 387 deals ($124m average) within a broader 1,032 mergers and acquisitions of venture-backed companies in the US (no deal value provided).

Or, to put it simply - exits are still really hard to come by, and not that big on average. The ratio of funds and investments to meaningful exits is consistently poor. This makes the job both very difficult on entry and on exit.

*This (very large sounding) number most likely includes family offices, corporate funds, VCTs etc.

So what the hell is going to happen?

Firstly, I think we’re going to see a lot of funds die or quietly disappear, and while it might take a few years to show up in the data (as funds rarely advertise going dormant, plus 10+2 fund cycles give a lot of leeway for a quiet disappearance), you can definitely feel this when you spend any relevant time with GP/LPs.

My bet? 40-50% fewer funds by 2035, but aggregate AUM that’s somewhere similar - concentrated in hyper-scalers and then a long tail of specialist boutiques who are very good at one or a few specific things.

This barbell-ing of venture may well replicate private equity before it - a handful of monster shops, then many small specialists. Just 30 firms raised 75% of all capital in 2024, and 9 of them took 50% of the total, while everyone knows micro-funds are the best performers. Those trapped in the middle ($200m-1bn funds) are the ones to worry about.

I still don’t really understand how the platforms expect to return their monster vehicles - a16z’s targeted $10bn fund would in theory require 10x $10bn exits at 10% ownership (with no dilution), a truly astonishing hit rate, or 2x $50bn, essentially betting on backing the next OpenAI, twice.

Realistically these funds have begun to look more like something between hedge funds and organs of government, not just skimming off hundreds of millions in management fees annually, but influencing policymakers, moving markets and making money in new ways that enrich their teams at the expense of LPs.

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I’m Lawrence, a pleasure. I’ll be investing from somewhere new soon. Stay tuned. lawrence@stateofthefuture.io if you want to know more…

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9 months ago · 20 likes · Lawrence Lundy-Bryan

But at least the long tail can make this work: a $100m fund can be returned comfortably with ~10% of a $1bn exit or 10% in 2x $500m exits, with anything below being proportionally more straightforward. It’s hard work, no doubt, but it’s manageable even within a low-exit environment.

But not just across fund sizes, I think this market shock will force (/is forcing) more creativity around how investors deploy capital and how LPs back managers.

I’ve long joked venture is finance for people who don’t understand how money works, and it really has felt like this for a while - with certain exceptions there has been minimal innovation on the 2% management fee, 20% carry model in the 25 years venture has been active in Europe. Perhaps little wonder when you consider the classic path of founder/operator → GP, no bankers in sight.

We’re seeing this shift in the plethora of secondaries funds that have popped up, essentially as a short term drive for liquidity, but also in novel blended financing models, “sight unseen” / “option cheque” vehicles within bigger funds, the PISCES plan to bring liquidity to private company shares, VCs taking stakes in roll-ups, VCs experimenting with public equities, VCs trying to incubate, VCs buying crypto, funds of funds within funds etc.

As mentioned, LPs are also responding - pushing for access to later stage funds, buying GP-led commitments for more mature vintages at a markdown, and running towards secondaries funds or reliable brand named platforms - that realistically no one will be fired for backing.

Overdue innovation in the sector

This overdue business model and fund size innovation speaks to a series of scenarios for venture in the latter half of the 2020s. Here are a few predictions:

I foresee funds barbell-ing towards either data-driven and programmatic - index the market, or at least the top decile. E.g. Tiny, Onstage, YCombinator, Unruly or high conviction, low velocity deployment strategies a la Thrive, Benchmark, Kindred (where I’m very lucky to work). Again, mid ownership, mid fund size, mid deployment cadence seems to lose out here.

We’re already seeing it, but more funds will look to do option tickets alongside their main strategy. a16z does it, Sequoia/Accel have scout programmes, EF does it, and countless others do it on the sly. This will become the norm for anyone deploying from +$100m vehicles as buying optionality and increasing network are ever more important.

The competition for early-stage deals will continue, pushing investors to be even more creative in how they market themselves to top founders who are now more choosy and less desperate. This is funds backing hacker houses, running conferences, having grant-making vehicles/fellowships, hosting more hackathons / legitimately valuable events, and meeting founders where they are - in universities, while still as operators in scale-ups etc.

I venture we’ll see more bankers in the sector doing more banker-like things. Novel innovations on blended fund models across stages, merchant banking for efficient early stage company fundraising, multi-manager GP structures, investing into things that didn’t traditionally feel venture (drug development, NVIDIA stock, video game studios, crypto, secondaries etc.) and selling portions of the GP sooner to generate liquidity or double down on SPVs for top performers.

The best returns will continue to come from super specialists - either geo experts, sector experts or “archetype” investors e.g. operator focused, second time founder focused, technology or character trait focused. Taste will be paramount as the key driver for the long tail of smaller funds, and sub-sectors (deep-tech, climate) will further specialise (chips, energy) with value compounding in those comfortable with getting creative around new sectors, business models, technologies or markets.

We’ll also see more blended models where funds look more like hedge funds or PE shops - bigger ownership stakes, lower multiple (lower risk) investments alongside moon-shot bets etc. We’re seeing it with the platforms, but expect this to move downstream as others work out how it works and look for quicker routes to liquidity.

And we’ll likely also see a fair few older funds just ride the management fees until the lights finally turn off. There’s just too much cash flowing around legacy brands with mediocre returns for this party to end just yet.

All said, I’m ok with this

Fundamentally, I think this is all a good thing.

It’s not going to be hugely comfortable, and a lot of people won’t enjoy it, but it should gradually re-set the industry to something lower status and higher value - closer to how it was in the early 2010s.

The platform funds have become something that isn’t really venture capital anymore, and so are hard to assess through this lens. While their size, political might and market setting capacities raise eyebrows, they also provide both the capital and patience to help risky, profoundly impactful technologies mature before hitting the prying eyes of public markets.

The boutiques are where the value will accrue - specialists, hustlers, risk takers and zealots who will take crazy bets on IP-led companies at the earliest stages, then ride the growth with them and return outsized multiples to their backers. This feels like a return to venture in a purer form - taste driven, risk-on capital that’s founder-focused and in it for the societal impact as well as the exits.

For sure, we will see a lot of talent move out of investing and (ideally) into start-ups (but probably back to McKinsey), a lot of funds disappear (really, not a bad thing - there are way too many), and a lot of zombie start-ups as a by-product of their previous investors ceasing to exist (a shame, but ultimately something that will concentrate talent into the winners).

Sequoia might be 53 years old, but most of venture capital is a nascent industry, 25 years old at best (especially in Europe). It’s been a child and a troublesome teenager since the turn of the century, now’s time to grow up - into something more solid, more lasting, and hopefully more beneficial for all involved.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives. Loved it, hated it? Neither? Tell me.

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing Turnstile in concert. The Baltimore-native hardcore group are the current darlings of the performative east-London male, having managed to cross over into appealing to guys who think looking like Matty Matheson is a sufficient substitute for having a personality.

The music is good if unexceptional - high energy bursts of throaty guitars; big, angry drums and lyrics that are memorable yet a tad uninspiring (“Never enough / It’s never enough / Love”). What was undeniably excellent however was the group’s sheer mastery of performance and content, the use of live streaming as an integral part of their show, and the feeling that this was how shared experience works in the era of everyone being Extremely Online.

Their set was short and snappy at 1h20 with sub 3 minute tracks and minimal patter (itself something that felt natural for our now goldfish-like attention spans). The band lined up on stage with a massive screen behind the drummer, alternating between tasteful colour palettes that clashed pleasingly with the group’s gritty sound, and streams of the crowd from constantly changing camera angles.

What felt novel and exciting was the two roving cameras moving through the masses, casting live to the big screen. The crowd were literally seeing themselves in real time, but not in classic front row hands in the air style - this was mosh pits from within, crowd-surfing from above, surprised onlookers confronted with the camera’s torch, heads banging and sweaty faces grinning.

There was also a camera behind the drummer, displaying the crowd as seen by the band, as if the big screen was itself a huge mirror. This reflected the writhing masses back on themselves, cutting the intimate close-ups in with collective self observation, like watching yourself take part in a music video - an out of body experience. The production was slick but raw, with a handheld grainy effect reminiscent of 1990s rave videos.

And this got me thinking about how live experience works in 2025. How, to generations that are now almost never offline, and are almost constantly documented by themselves and others, the line between a moment and the recording of that moment has blurred almost entirely.

Traditionally live experience felt like the purest form of content, both more real and more valid, with performance as something didactic - flowing from performer to viewer in one direction.

Yet in an age where everything is captured, shared and immediately pored over, and the viewer can now also be the star of their own content, both real vs digital and performer vs viewer have morphed into something new.

The streaming meant that the whole concert experience felt like it sat in some liminal space between reality and the online world. By seeing oneself on the big screen, or having the constant possibility that you might, the moment felt somewhat surreal - similar to the feeling when you pop up on a friend’s social media post without knowing they had taken a picture of you.

This circular watching me-watching you loop of the live stream big screen dragged the digital into the physical. Not only was something happening, but you were part of it - it was being captured, and so were you, and in that process, it was different - heightened, more textural, or differently textured perhaps.

Within this, I wonder whether the purely analogue experience is now no more real than the hybrid to generations who didn’t know what came before. The concert viewed through the phone screen as the norm - and because everyone is streaming and being streamed at once, the line is blurred between participant and performer.

Positively, this experience felt three dimensional and inclusive - by seeing the fans almost constantly throughout the show (and actually almost nothing of the band), it was as if everyone was afforded main character energy - that the band were merely the facilitator of a shared experience and the individual was as much a part of it as they were.

As my friend Archie noted, “one of the things that the internet was meant to bring was a total democratisation of exchange… no passive audiences gathered around a performance, just the exchange of ideas and entertaining information.” Social media took this and warped it, turning everyone into both performer and viewer at once. The concert felt like a real world manifestation of this idea.

I suppose this is the natural extension of the stadium jumbotron kiss cam, or getting on TV by catching a rogue ball, just in real time and somehow more raw. We have always liked our own reflections, and feel more committed to things we feel a part of - but now we’re in the age of the constant documentary of our own lives - and so like toddlers who know how to look extra cute for their parents’ cameras or influencers live streaming their daily routines, we have come to expect to be filmed - to perform.

I don’t believe these are totally new ideas - all of this boils down to very basic human needs - belonging, participation, vanity and our obsession with the new. The internet has not changed our core functioning here.

It is more that we’ve never had the capacity to blur the lines between self and other to such a degree. We are now able to bring tens of thousands of people into shared experiences like never before - something wonderful and fascinating - that in many ways does feel like it deepens the world we’re experiencing.

Yet simultaneously this constant digital observation of both self and other pulls us away from our real selves, turns us into voyeurs and performers - something innately unnatural to a species not designed for constant reminders of its own reflection. The private has now become the public, and I wonder what might also be lost in the process.

I’m Max - I write sporadically about things that interest me, often centred around technology and how it affects our lives. Loved it, hated it? Neither? Tell me.

As venture investors, we’re in the business of hunting extreme outliers. Of the ~2000 start-ups backed at seed in Europe each year, ~15 will get to a $1bn valuation (and even fewer will exit for something really meaningful).

This ~0.75% of businesses will, by and large, be built by very unusual people - obsessives and zealots who not only believe the reality they perceive is fundamentally broken, but that they are the only people capable of fixing it.

Having spent time thinking about world models and frameworks for making bets on the future, I wanted to spend a bit of time digging into understanding these spiky people - who they are, how they’re different from the norm, and how I try to spot them.

A caveat here: this exercise is based on personal insight, and is by no means objective. There are 1000 shades of great entrepreneur, and anything that occupies a tiny outlier portion of a dataset is likely going to contain major variance within itself. This is just how I try and think about investing in people - something I have no idea how good I am at to start with.

Just not giving up

The necessary (but not sufficient) condition of being an exceptional entrepreneur is resilience. Fundamentally, everything stems from not giving up - if you’re still in it, you can still win it. If you give up, nothing else matters.

Realistically, most people get bored of most problems pretty quickly, or stop when they hit resistance - solving compliance challenges, building multi-stage software, iterating on hardware prototypes, managing enterprise sales. This stuff is really hard, and more often, really dull - you need to have some insane drive to not give up when it gets difficult, or more likely, pretty boring.

One question that I find fascinating is “What’s the longest you pursued something with no external validation? How did you keep going?” - because realistically the extrinsic motivation of likes on a post or pats on the back dry up pretty fast. What remains is the inner fire to not stop.

This resilience can come from many places. Hummingbird built a (now memeified) brand on backing weird people, but the examples are there - second generation children of immigrants who’ve seen the graft required to make it in a new country (multiplied by the fact those parents were likely already outlier people for choosing to build a new life elsewhere - see here), kids who went through real adversity at a young age (like Jensen Huang’s accidental stint at a correctional school), child athletes who learned intense discipline from an early age, ex-military servicemen or endurance exercise nuts who are just wired different. It doesn’t matter where the resilience comes from, but that it manifests in an unusually high level of capacity to just not stop moving forward.

Unique obsession with a problem

Closely related to, and perhaps overlapping this is obsession with a problem or problem space.

The first start-up founder I worked for (the inimitable Will) spent over a year getting regulatory approval for a novel type of mortgage in the UK. Not only would most people never have ever considered that, the majority would have given up when they realised how many hundreds of pages of documents they’d have to read and submit.

He was so incensed by the challenges he had seen buying his own home having returned from abroad that he was willing to go through this pain barrier - a combination of obsession and resilience that allowed people to try and solve a problem previously considered impossible.

There are the vaunted stories of how this obsession manifests - the Collison brothers visiting customers in person to install Stripe directly onto their machines, the Airbnb founders designing election-focused breakfast cereals to keep funding their MVP, or the insane Steve Jobs x Jonny Ive obsession to detail. The clear pattern here is a bizarre need to solve a specific problem at a specific time, come hell or high water.

More often than not, successful obsession is customer centric - a desire to get so close to a customer base so as to understand their every need. To solve the problem they had, but also the ones they hadn’t even realised yet, This can often come from personal experience - being a hobbyist, studying part time, growing up surrounded by an issue.

This obsession also brings unique perspective into play. The difference in insight between a quick parse of a document and a deep reading can be in the orders of magnitude.

What do you believe that no one else does? Where does this come from?

To paraphrase Paul Graham, the best startup idea is a problem you noticed in your last company. The real obsessives are the ones who take that problem and go so deep on it that they have no option but to build the solution.

Strong beliefs, lightly held

There’s the adage that most start-ups don’t fail, they become zombie companies. Instead of disappearing through some dramatic event, they more likely fade into irrelevance - enough customers to keep going at some level, but not enough to grow or fund expansion.

While obsession and resilience are key - there is a very important difference between zealotry and dogmatism. The former is empowering and energising, the latter can be hugely limiting.

When entrepreneurs lack the capacity to understand the signals they are hearing from customers or the market, they often end up down rabbit holes - missing the wood from the trees.

There is always the interesting question of “what beliefs have you changed in recent months, and how did you come to that conclusions?” My partner Maex would call this coach-ability - not in the sense that he needs to go into a company and act as some kind of internal advisor, but in the sense that a founder needs to be able to see where they’re wrong, struggling or ill advised and alter their own beliefs and actions accordingly - have strong beliefs, held lightly, and course correct as appropriate.

Charismatic authority

My favourite of Max Weber’s types of authority is that of charismatic leadership. Using the example of Napoléon Bonaparte, Weber outlines this as a state where the authority of a leader derives from their personal charisma. Much as this was true for politicians or military leaders in the 19th Century, it is true for founders.

In the early days, start-ups are a really bad way to live a healthy life - long hours, high degrees of uncertainty and a really bad risk reward pay off in +90% of cases. As such, people have to be willing to go to war for you as a founder.

This doesn’t have to be cult-like obsession, but there needs to be something - a spark, a vibe, an energy that captivates people and buys them into the reality you’re building.

The intriguing part of this from the outside is how this manifests. Tom Blomfield and Nik Storonsky are both exceptional founders in the same field, yet they couldn’t be more different as people - finding the consistencies between them is the challenge.

Now, this can go too far - SBF playing video games on investor calls, Adam Neumann’s ability to persuade investors that property was a venture-backable asset, or Elizabeth Holmes’ charm and duplicitousness. This in isolation is hugely dangerous (especially when markets get frothy), but a healthy dose of charisma is vital for an ability to keep attracting talent, selling stuff and raising money - arguably the three ingredients of building a successful company.

Pulling the future into the present

We often confuse small businesses for start-ups because technology adoption across the economy has made them look ever more similar - but there are key differences. These are generally desired scale and the speed of execution.

Desired scale is a helpful proxy for the founder’s ambition - not just wanting to build a great accounting firm, for example, but wanting to change how accounting works. Or not wanting to build the best propulsion engine, but wanting to build the next NASA.

Scale and impact are not always directly correlated - some things can be hugely impactful at smaller scale, or in less remunerative ways (e.g. open sourcing a product and giving it to the world for free, for $0 revenue). But for a start-up to succeed for their venture investors, a large exit (and so scale) is paramount.

And speed goes alongside this. It’s highly unlikely as a founder you’re the only person trying to solve a problem in a market - in fact more often than not, in today’s fully connected global economy, being the only one is a negative sign.

As such, time to action is vital. The best founders have an intense bias for action, and work accordingly - things get tried. Things fail quickly.

One of the analogies I like is how someone tries to pull the future into today. If a market isn’t ready, make it so - reading Gambling Man, you see Masayoshi Son’s outlier ability to both change reality for the people around him, and alter the speed at which things can progress.

Clarity of thought

And last but very much not least - the need for incredible clarity of thought. Start-ups often succeed or fail on the back of very few decisions - when to raise money, who from, which customers to prioritise etc.

These decisions are not just existential, but also often happen very quickly. The more unique individuals I’ve come across have an ability not just to focus in on the key variables, but to make these decisions rapidly, based on limited inputs.

When you don’t have enough information, how do you move forward without betting the company?

This scales up from things as small as the type of profile someone wants to hire for a key role, to whether to pursue a horizontal vs vertical sales approach. Outlier founders have a strong, gut sense of what they want, believe strongly in that decision in the moment, and act decisively.

Now, I reiterate - this is not exhaustive, nor is it scientific. Some of these areas overlap, and not all are required in every case. It is as much based on gut feel as anything, and I look forward to analysing my own decision making down the line, when many of the businesses I’ve backed come to maturity.

But in the meantime, open sourcing decision making, thinking and approach are never a bad thing. Think I’m an idiot? Let me know.

Britain is exceptional at inventing things, but not very good at turning them into businesses. I think this is as much a cultural problem as it is an economic one.

The internet, the jet engine, the telescope, the telegraph, the vaccine, carbon fibre, the lithium ion battery, stainless steel (and the bessemer process), animal cloning and many many many more all came from this green and pleasant land. Even the first light bulb patent was filed in the UK - by Joseph Swan, just under a year before Edison’s design in New York.

But much like many after him - Swan never managed to turn that idea into a lasting economic success.

How many of these incredible inventions ended up in UK-domiciled companies that captured the value of the original innovation? Deepmind is the modern example I often refer back to - Demis is arguably one of the greatest brains the UK has produced, at the helm of a world-leading AI-research lab that solved protein folding, generalisable AI models, animal communication and more. Yet it exited for ~£400m to Google before things really got going - with all that ongoing value captured by the US.

And why do I care about this, you ask? Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, things aren’t that wonderful right now - growth is non-existent, inflation is persistently high, consumer and business confidence is low, public services are faltering, and we’re lacking ideals and role models to push the nation forward - what do we stand for, who are we, where are we going etc.

So I take this personally. If we have the ideas and the talent, but not the economic benefit, we’re losing something in the process.

There has been much written about the structural challenges to capturing the value from innovation - our stock market is sclerotic and values current unit economics over potential upside, we lack the deep institutional capital seen in the US, our investment community behaves more like landed gentry minimising downside than swashbuckling risk-on venturers, and we’re simply not a big enough market to build monstrous companies without going abroad.

But I don’t think this is all of it. Small countries capitalise on local innovations and build great businesses in the 21st Century - look at Estonia, Switzerland or Sweden right now.

I think the elephant in the room is that we’re uncomfortable with entrepreneurs. We quietly resent them, and we cut them down like tall poppies.

I posit that we have a deeply engrained mistrust of success. For someone to be acceptably successful in Britain, they have to go through a redemption arc - the gauntlet of growth into failure back into growth. Lazarus-like, from the ashes. This isn’t just with entrepreneurs - look at David Beckham, James Dyson, Lewis Capaldi, Martha Lane Fox, Andy Murray, Kate Moss, Amy Winehouse, Hugh Grant, The Gallaghers, Ben Stokes, Tyson Fury, Lily Allen etc. We build you up, watch you soar, resent the success, cut you down and can only accept the person who comes out of that - like the process was a necessary hazing ritual to be acceptably successful.

Tom Blomfield of Monzo talks about this in an interview on Secret Leaders, explaining how the British press hyped him and Monzo up on the rise, created a huge buzz, then cut them down, “delighting” in the process of telling their readers that this new bank was going to lose all their children’s money.

I think a lot of this comes from a deeply entrenched class system. One that looks at wealth as either a source of inherited status (to be resented), or as someone usurping their position (also to be resented). Either way we can’t abide by it - as if the sheer concept of social mobility is anathema.

But what this resentment does is it suffocates our great entrepreneurs, and stifles the creation new ones. We don’t celebrate them - because that’s not our way. We resent anything that looks like self aggrandisement, and in not celebrating those we have, we remove the role models for those coming through, hampering the growth of those on the way up.

Consider this - who is our current best known British entrepreneurial success? Steven Bartlett? An impressive guy no doubt, but one as hated as he is adored. Known for? A podcast and a media company. As close to being an influencer as you can be without actually admitting it.

This needs to change. We need more entrepreneurial role models. We need success stories. UK tech, an inherently entrepreneur-driven sector, adds an estimated £286bn (2024) to the UK economy (+13% of GVA) and employs nearly 3m people (5% of the workforce). This is before you consider the value of all the non technical entrepreneurs across consumer, manufacturing, the arts, life sciences etc.

Having been raging against this for a while now, I think we need to triple down on a few key areas.

We need a generation of story-first entrepreneurs. Like him or loathe him, Musk controls the narrative. Bartlett is a PR machine. YCombinator start-ups have been pioneering content first strategies across both B2B and B2C in recent years, and we need more of this in the UK. Marc Andreessen calls it creating a “cult of personality both inside and outside of the organisation”. It goes against our innate British desire to under-sell ourselves, but it’s holding us back. And if the media won’t support founders and tell their stories, they need to do it themselves.

There is considerably more thinking required around this - how this plays into education (across all ages) primarily - something that merits further analysis.

But we also need a new media landscape that can tell these stories - specifically aimed at celebrating entrepreneurs and innovation. The founders are the core ingredient, but the media is the catalyst. If the traditional press won’t do it, we need more TPBN, Substack authors like the Generalist, Plugged, London Founder House, Digital Frontier (RIP), podcast hosts, TikTok channels, YouTubers. We build robots and reactors and drones and large models and self driving cars in this wonderful country. Tell these stories and inspire the next generation of founders.

As Josh put it to me recently, “we need to smash the the consultancy-industrial complex” where our best and brightest are funnelled into low risk high status jobs that do little to nothing for our economy. We agreed this is happening in part because they don’t see the opportunity or the viability of a more risk-on, independent lifestyle.

Tied to this, I want to see more Matt Cliffords, Greg Jacksons and Poppy Gustafsons - brand name entrepreneurs having a go at being in the public eye. Being out there, taking the flak, selling the vision, and themselves as role models. Building the policy and the narrative from the inside out.

And frankly, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and how we view success. We are a deeply ambitious, wonderfully creative and eccentric bunch. The nation of Isaac Newton, Greyson Perry, Cole Palmer and Adele. We punch above our weight so heavily it’s absurd. But we need to get over this frankly teenage jealousy and discomfort with those who are brave enough to stick their heads above the parapet. Because it’s only our futures at stake.

—

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but I don’t have all the answers. Ideas? Drop me a line. Thanks to Josh, Andrew, Leone for input here.

And in my travels, I’ve been struggling to get away from the feeling that these cities are all starting to feel increasingly similar.

I’m not for a second suggesting local culture is dead. Every one of these places is wonderful in its own way, and the diversity of experience in such a densely populated region is what makes Europe so magical and unique. And full disclosure at this point - I live in the west. I know the west. I don’t know what life is like in Phnom Penh, Jakarta, Guangzhou or Dakar - but I would venture many of these trends feel increasingly recognisable.

What I’m suggesting is that the globalisation of culture is flattening out many of the kinks that make us different - gradually reducing our individuality by location, and tending us all towards a vibe that is as palatable as it is dull.

Let me explain.

I was in Tokyo with a friend in 2017 - staying in a quiet corner of the city in an airbnb. We rolled out of our apartment - groggy, jet lagged - and on the corner was a speciality coffee shop. Low bench outside a big glass front window. Clean, if slightly overly self aware aesthetic, low fi hip hop on the speakers, and a barista with tattoos beneath his rolled up checked shirtsleeves and neckerchief.

It felt immediately familiar - reassuring, cosy - because it looked exactly like the coffee shop on my road in London. But not just homely, it also gave me a sense of belonging - like my “tribe” had been exported elsewhere - the effect I believe some people get when walking into a Soho House.

I remember this moment because it was the first time that I noticed globalisation hitting independent retail - the point at which the McDonalds experience crossed over into the world of owner-operated coffee shops.

The weirdest part about this was a few years later I stumbled upon this 2024 episode of the Ezra Klein podcast - one of those moments where you wonder whether any thinking is ever totally novel - where the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka tells almost exactly the same story as I outlined above.

He speaks of noticing the “coffee shop aesthetic” of “Subway tiles on the walls and mid-century Scandinavian furniture and handmade ceramic mugs” in Mexico City, New York and Tokyo in short succession.

He correctly diagnoses this as a symptom of social media platforms that feed a type of person a type of vibe, creating a “kind of lowest common denominator of aggregated taste”. Like him, I am less interested in why this commoditisation of taste is happening and more what this says about us and where this goes.

Especially so because since 2017, this trend has only accelerated - from identikit coffee shops through trinkety homeware shops with coloured woven candles to cocktail bars with Little Simz on vinyl and members’ clubs with bathrooms full of Aesop soap.

Firstly, it highlights an obvious point - that the global supply of goods has become standardised and interconnected to the point that even a woven candle is as easily purchasable on the West Coast of the US as it is in the middle of Turkey. This really is a marvel, and something I feel we don’t wonder at sufficiently often.

Secondly, it tells you something about people - that this idea of belonging has become totally transnational in the age of the internet. My feeling like part of a tribe - of rolled up trouser wearing, chore jacketed young people who float between these international hubs, comfortable as long as there’s a flat white on offer - is a reflection of a world where belonging is suddenly less national and more based on choices, feelings and aesthetics.

I feel this charts alongside the increasing trend of political differences playing out as struggles within generations vs. between them - where your urban liberal elite in France is closer to his English equivalent than to his lower income countryman.

And it also asks the question as whether the shift to a more nativist mindset in many major economies is fighting this internationalisation. Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Vance etc. all hark back to a type of national culture and heritage that is particular and local. They diagnose the root cause as immigration, but it feels a symptom of this world they no longer recognise is perhaps a very digitally-driven type of globalism.*

But I think most worryingly, this aesthetic shift speaks to a flattening of culture and cultural output. The Klein podcast also mentions this commodification of taste, of interests, of aesthetics and ideas. And my question then projects this out - how does Bauhaus emerge if everyone’s references are the same? Who is Le Corbusier in the age of Pinterest? How does the Arts & Craft movement develop when the coffee shop in London is the same as the one anywhere else?

My worry is that much like AI-generated slop, this internet-driven standardisation of experience pushes us all towards the median cultural experience - both digitally and physically. It’s hygge, cheugy, mid century modern, goblin mode, brat. The long view of this is everywhere feels like an airport World Duty Free.

When I moved to Madrid, my initial source of familiarity was these places - the speciality coffee bars that reminded me of London. But after a while I sought out the gritty old tavernas with €1.50 coffee, sticky surfaces and 24/7 local news on in the background - I didn’t realise it immediately, but came to think I did it because these spaces felt real, and grounded me in the place in which I lived.

There was an authenticity to them that fed into the idea I had of Spain, the identity Spain had created for itself - that not only could be traced back through Lorca, Cervantes, Almodovar or Picasso, but importantly was Spanish because it wasn’t the same as everywhere else.

And so I suppose I ask - if we gradually swap those kind of places for high margin, international, internet-slop friendly coffee shops, bars and restaurants, what else do we lose in the process? And what will sacrificing individuality and idiosyncrasy for familiarity and comfort cost us long term?

*thanks to my pal Estia for this neat idea and some great thoughts on the piece

The if question is important, but we want to do the uncomfortable work of imagining the consequences of the when.

What follows is a working theory in three acts: Year 0, Year 10, Year 30 - all with testable predictions. We hope you enjoy reading as much as we enjoyed writing - and thank you to all our Ripple participants for their thoughtful contributions.

Year 0 (2035): First of a Kind (FOAK)

Prediction 1: By 2035, at least two grid-connected fusion plants will average ≥100 MWe net output over any continuous 90-day period.

Commercial fusion will most likely arrive with terrible economics. First-of-a-kind plants face capital intensity that dwarfs most energy technologies, with 70-80% of levelised costs from financing rather than operations.

Solar+battery systems will likely sit somewhere between $35-50/MWh at this point so we don’t expect fusion to compete on price with renewables + storage, but it doesn't need to compete everywhere. The value prop will be as base-load power with high capacity, small footprint, and flexible siting.

So expect to see the FOAK facilities in remote industrial facilities (e.g. mining - 2-4% of global energy use as of 2025), co-located with data centers requiring ultra-reliable power (potentially up to 10% of worldwide energy use by 2030) or off-grid energy resilience, and heavy manufacturing avoiding grid interconnection.

So it’s expensive, but there will be customers prepared to pay for off-grid ultra-reliable base-load. Like every technology before it (except fission, for weird contingent reasons), fusion reactors will get cheaper over time via learning curves and economies of scale. We are mapping against semiconductor adoption, where aerospace and military applications subsidised the learning curves that eventually enabled consumer electronics.

Regulatory frameworks determine whether this progression occurs quickly or slowly - and given work done 10 years earlier to clarify the regulatory differences between fusion and fission, efficient project approval is enabled. The key is to avoid fusion getting caught up in the morass of nuclear fission regulation.

In Year 0, despite the differences in categorisation, fusion plants still suffer from classic developed economy challenges - environmental red tape, NIMBYism / local disputes, planning permission admin etc. - adding years to every project. Public acceptance matters less than permitting speed, though clear messaging helps: no chain reaction threat, inherent stability, manageable waste streams. Perhaps this is the technology to unite left and right: clean, green and abundant.

Two strategies could accelerate deployment.

1. Repurposing decommissioned fossil fuel sites - leveraging existing infrastructure including transmission connections, water rights, and experienced workforces. Grid interconnection represents one of the scarcest infrastructure elements in developed markets.

2. Building up the necessary supply chains to enable fusion that can also support adjacent industries - e.g. maximising neutron utilisation through medical isotope production, designing specialty superconductive materials also used in defence/grid power, building out the gyrotron industry across telecommunications etc.

Depending on the geopolitical drivers for fusion - either expansionist or defensive - the emerging ownership structure will combine state-backed demonstration projects, private technology platforms consolidating IP, public-private critical industries partnerships and traditional utilities managing grid integration.

Oil and gas companies will most likely enter the market aggressively - either for newly viable synthetic fuel production, to de-risk flagging oil/gas revenues, or both - leveraging their superior molecular handling capabilities and massive scale/deep pockets.

—

Year 10 (2045): Scale

Prediction 2: By 2045, more than 25 commercial fusion reactors operate worldwide, with median LCOE reaching ≤$80/MWh.

Right, we made it. We have twenty-five operating plants globally. Absolutely not evenly distributed (likely the United States, China, Europe and across the Middle East). This probably depends on which way the race to AGI goes and who moves fastest.

Depending on the geopolitics of the age, there is a plausible scenario where the Great Powers compete to build fusion reactors in less developed countries. Ostensibly to help these countries develop economically but also likely to tie these countries more closely to the West or East with debt / access to outputs.

At $80/MWh, fusion is still premium while remaining competitive with dispatch-able technologies, though still above renewables plus storage. This positioning proves advantageous as electricity systems evolve around variable renewable penetration and distributed generation. Solar dominates daytime generation, wind provides seasonal variation, batteries handle short-duration balancing, but extended weather-driven shortfalls create substantial value for reliable dispatch-able capacity. Fusion fills this role with 90%+ capacity factors - the new base-load back-up for the developed world.

Supply chain development and learning curves compound these advantages. High-temperature superconductors transition from specialty materials to manufactured commodities. Skilled labour pools expand through targeted training. Capital costs decline as the technology graduates from venture backing to infrastructure financing. If the lessons of fission are learned, modularisation reduces customisation costs while maintaining flexibility.

These developments reshape industrial patterns around reliable power in previously constrained locations. Manufacturing returns to areas with poor renewable resources but excellent transportation links. Coastal desalination scales dramatically. Direct air capture transitions from demonstration to commercial operations. Climate change can be mitigated at large through cap-ex not political or consumer will.

The transformation extends beyond traditional electricity applications. Data centre growth (compute factories) accelerates as energy constraints lift. If scaling laws persist, AGI becomes something attainable as the energy-driven limits on compute begin to disappear. Advanced manufacturing becomes viable in high-labour-cost countries as energy-intensive automation eliminates wage differentials.

Politics begins to shift - countries that have moved quickly, removing red tape and building rapidly, become energy exporters. As this technology matures, the classic correlation between GDP/economic might and population size begin to uncouple - energy abundance is distributed unevenly. Countries with large excess space and strong supply links (Spain, Poland, Canada, Middle East etc.) see the benefits before others.

Domestically, questions begin to be posed - what do production and consumption look like in a post scarcity world. Those holding the means of production see hypergrowth-driven inflation but also exponential rise in tax receipts. Discussion of UBI or similar payouts, akin to a hugely expanded Scandinavian welfare state system, is taken seriously.

Year 30 (2055-2060): Abundance

Prediction 3: By 2060, more than 250 fusion plants operate globally, with dedicated large-scale applications including gigawatt-class direct air capture and major desalination systems.

At 250 plants, fusion becomes fundamental infrastructure. Base-load energy scarcity effectively disappears in developed markets. Marginal costs for new high-energy applications drop to levels making previously uneconomical projects viable.

This abundance enables climate applications at unprecedented scale. While renewables continue providing majority electricity, fusion removes energy constraints from industrial processes requiring continuous high-temperature heat. Carbon removal becomes economically competitive at gigatonne scales, transforming atmospheric management from demonstration to systematic industrial process.

Water management transitions from energy-constrained to logistics-constrained. Coastal desalination serves populations as needed, limited by brine disposal and distribution infrastructure rather than energy availability. Questions are raised about increasing ocean salinity as this occurs at scale, but temperature driven water needs outweigh these concerns.

Industrial restructuring accelerates around new energy economics. Steel production without coking coal becomes cost-competitive through hydrogen-based processes. Ammonia synthesis relies on clean hydrogen, eliminating the largest industrial carbon source while reducing costs. Cement addresses process emissions while abundant heat eliminates energy cost pressures.

Abundant energy plus mature AI creates powerful manufacturing synergies. Automated systems operate continuously without energy constraints, enabling domestic manufacturing revival in high-cost countries and supply chain reshoring. New infrastructure is now only limited by the time taken to build - as if more energy is needed, more reactors can be built. Robotics is at a level where much of the heavy lifting can be done automatically.

Geopolitical implications intensify as resource-based power structures erode. National competitiveness correlates with institutional capacity to execute large infrastructure projects rather than natural endowments. Countries managing multiple gigawatt-scale projects simultaneously gain systematic advantages.

Conflict persists - but no longer over resources for their use. These wars look more like medieval kingdoms fighting over territory and pride than any specific need for land/materials. International bodies develop renewed purpose and vigour as governments understand the need to collaborate, manage output and deal with squabbling factions.

Economic effects become sectoral. Energy-intensive goods experience sustained cost reductions while land near transmission infrastructure, rare materials, and skilled project management command increasing premiums. Constraints shift from thermodynamic limits to institutional capacity.

As humanity approaches absolute abundance, many grand questions begin to be asked:

• What does purpose mean when work is removed?

• Is space the next frontier based more on curiosity than resource scarcity?

• What role does the government play in an abundant society?

• How rapidly can scientific discoveries be made in an era of energy and AI abundance?

• How much industry can be outsourced to orbit to re-wild and settle the Earth?

• As the global human population has peaked around 2060, are we entering the twilight of our species?

So, what can we do today?

Well, not much. It’s still on the scientists to solve tritium breeding, first-wall materials that survive neutron bombardment, and magnetic confinement systems that maintain stable plasma for commercial durations. But we see three things that can be done:

1. Messaging and political support: Unite the left and right. Economic growth for the right, and clean energy for the left. But avoid the term “nuclear” and negative connotations. Let’s drop “nuclear” and just use “fusion”.

2. Supply chain development for critical components should begin before commercial deployment. High-temperature superconductors, tritium breeding materials, radiation-resistant alloys, and specialised cryogenic systems need sovereign manufacturing capacity rather than dependence on potentially constrained international suppliers.

3. Develop policy architecture for neutron utilisation beyond electricity generation: Medical isotope production, specialty materials processing, and fission waste transmutation represent additional revenue streams that improve project economics during crucial early deployment. These markets need regulatory clarity and procurement frameworks now, not after the first plants come online.

4. Consider a world without limits: philosophy and debate are often underutilised in the fields of science and technology, but can prove hugely valuable in predicting the challenges of the future. Have these discussions, ask these questions, and test out hypotheses - before this future is upon us.

—

We love thinking about this stuff. Want to chat more? Ping Lawrence or Max directly.

Next week, Lawrence and I are hosting a roundtable entitled “so we have nuclear fusion, now what?”, examining what stops, starts and changes when nuclear fusion is an actual functioning technology - thinking about this brave new world at year 0, year 10 and year 30 of deployment.

In advance of that, it felt long overdue to put down a few thoughts on the fusion space, from the perspective of a layman with a history degree (🥴), but one who has spent 6 months tearing his hair out over what is simultaneously the most fascinating and frustrating technology of this century so far.

[As an important primer, if you want to understand the tech - dedicate 90 mins of your life to the first half of this excellent podcast. It’s hard to imagine anyone explaining it better than the wonderful Dennis Whyte].

The promise of limitless energy. And by energy I mean AI.

For the uninitiated, the implications of this technology are pretty simple: nuclear fusion should generate (nearly) free, abundant energy.

When you have a reactor that spits out orders of magnitude more energy than it needs to run, you unlock a genuine step-change in human progress, moving from a world where energy is a scarce resource to an abundant commodity.

In an era of large AI models whose development is limited (mostly) by the amount of computing power you can give them (which is in turn limited by how much energy you have to both make chips and power them), this means that energy in = AI out, and if you can scale compute exponentially, you are, in theory, only limited by the scope of imagination and speed of execution, not the limits of your power sources.

The implications are as fantastical as they are terrifying:

• Super intelligent models (presuming scaling laws remain constant [caveat 1, 2, 3]),

• Large scale direct air capture to undo climate change

• Cheap cooling for both industry and individuals

• Large-scale desalination for unlimited clean water

• Colocated power generation for manufacturing, with the constraint becoming time and materials, not energy

• Large-scale industrial agriculture meaning fewer limits on food production

• Genuine step changes in space travel

• etc. etc.

Always 10 years away

But the long standing joke is that fusion is always a decade away, and has been since about 1980 - a suitably nebulous, but fundamental scientific goal (it is, after all, how the universe is powered) that has fascinated scientists since the splitting of the atom, yet has remained chimeric and mercurial since first conception.

However, with market leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems building a reactor to (supposedly) go online in the early 2030s (and recently raising +$850m to do so), China building a monstrous +$1bn fusion plant in Sichuan Province, and investors like Lower Carbon Capital raising whole $250m funds just for fusion companies, there is a strong feeling the market is approaching something approaching viability.

The old adage may still apply (as let’s see what happens with the rubber hits the road of CFS’ new plant x US planning restrictions x engineering constraints), but at least this ten years feels like it might be the last. Or maybe I’ll look back and laugh at myself for being so naive in a decade’s time.

However, this still doesn’t answer some of the more fundamental questions in the space…

Physics vs engineering

As a well-informed Reddit user posted last year:

“One thing that's interesting about fusion is that in principle it absolutely works. We have the core physics all worked out. There's no question about if the mechanism is possible. There's also no obvious concern of “well to make it work, this key parameter would need to have a totally ridiculous value.” So it's hard to ever just let go.

On the other hand, it is an INSANELY difficult engineering challenge. An analogy my [stellarator PhD holding] friend gave was imagining trying to compress water by squeezing a water balloon in your hands. You have to squeeze it really hard and for a long time, but you can't let it suddenly squirt out through some tiny gap in your fingers.

Compressing plasma is nontrivial, and we have to compress it a lot and in a stable, sustainable way. To make things harder, you have to squeeze it without letting anything touch it, because it's stupid hot and radiating. And it can destabilise in a tiny tiny fraction of a second. It's like the mother of all feedback control problems combined with a crazy long list of constraints. The only way nature ever gets it to work is by using a crap ton of gravity that can pull on the plasma from the inside (intrinsically stable), rather than trying to push on it from the outside (intrinsically unstable) -- aka a star.

So I think it's plausible we will actually get it one day. But in my understanding it's primarily a (very complex, very interesting, and very formidable) engineering challenge. Unless, of course, some cool physics breakthrough can come up with a completely novel mechanism that makes it more practically tractable.”

So, while there’s an insane amount of money going into the space, and the physics is, at least in theory, solvable, there are still massive engineering challenges across the three main types of reactors - Tokamaks (plasma donuts contained by magnets), Stellarators (plasma pretzels running along magnets) and inertial confinement reactors (tons of lasers directed at a tiny fuel pellet), including (but not limited to):

• Confining plasma - getting very hot, very angry hydrogen to do what you want

• Superconducting materials - developing magnets that can be super cooled, super conductive and super strong

• Alloys/ceramics that can withstand neutron bombardment - i.e. materials that don’t just fall apart under constant bombardment of high-energy neutrons

• Heat exhausts - components strong enough to sit around the super heated plasma without melting

• Tritium breeding + handling - creating a self-sustaining (radioactive) fuel source within the reactor

• Control systems - sensors + AI to manage this chaotic super heated plasma donut

• Extracting the damn energy - turning heat + neutrons into a form of heat we can actually use

• Scale / supply chain - building all the crazy parts (gyrotrons, HTS tape, and the materials listed above) at a scale and cost that’s viable for mass use

And all of this is before you even consider a viable levelised cost of energy [LCOE] (“all-in average price” of electricity from a power plant over its whole lifetime) that makes fusion competitive with solar, fission, wind, natural gas etc.

The LCOE is likely a function of time (and learning curves) more than anything, but given how we mismanaged fission in the west, it’s worth taking seriously as a limiting consideration.

As one fusion founder said a few months back, “nuclear fusion is frontier tech, in about six fields at once: it’s the bleeding edge of plasma physics, chemistry, nuclear engineering, materials science, machine learning and power conversion. No wonder it’s difficult”.

Now I’m rarely one to bet against humans when there’s power supremacy and theoretically unlimited revenues on the line - but understanding the scale of the challenges here can be instructive in grasping why these things have taken so long.

The Manhattan Project for the 21C

And one last area I’ve been thinking about a lot is how this all develops, given the geopolitical implications of this technology.

The Fusion Industry Association (sort of like a guild for fusion co’s, worldwide) noted a record breaking $2.6bn raised in sector in the 12 months to July 2025, bringing the total funding for the 53 fusion companies in the FIA to $9.7bn (5x what it was in 2021). This is an arguably unsustainable amount of companies given the likely winner-takes-most nature of major breakthroughs, and the concentration of capital (e.g. +$800m of that $2.6bn was into CFS alone) in a few very large companies.

When I spoke to a number of the reactor companies in a short period, the elephant in the room was, of course, China. Given their manufacturing excellence, centralised planning, long-term thinking and comfort in over-funding a sector then letting the dead weight die (lots here, here and here), plus the fact the government is literally run by engineers - it feels hard to bet against them.

A number of founders commented that they expect some major QEng > X (i.e. a reactor produces more power than it uses up, including the power needed to run the wider plant) breakthrough from China in the next few years, that will define the course of the next half/decade in the space.

Given the insane promises of limitless energy listed above, this is how I think this could play out:

1. Major Chinese breakthrough of QEng > X

2. Furore in Western fusion sector to work out where, how, what exactly etc.

3. Lobbying of governments to explain that fusion supremacy essentially = economic supremacy, and that lagging behind here would be very bad

4. [6-12 months waiting for the bureaucrats to wake up to what this actually means]

5. Panic across the west, and Manhattan Project style consolidation of fusion companies and talent into a few clear regional champions

6. Large-scale public + private funding of remaining champions with open-sourcing of the key breakthroughs

7. Long tail is acquired or dies, fusion becomes an established sector

Now this would mean that the 50 companies ends up looking something more like 5-10, with a few European champions across the major reactor types, two or three in the US, and potentially some others collaborative networks (e.g. AUKUS, NATO, EU + UK, US + UK etc.) in the mix.

Which is all well and good - as it will no doubt supercharge the development of this space in the developed world, but what does this mean for all the lovely people who put money into these companies?

What looks like a venture return?

I am, after all, a lizard in human skin venture capital investor, so I have to frame all questions through the lens of “does this make sense to invest in?”. And the short answer is to this question is: I’m not sure.

Despite the fact the returns for winning companies will likely be in the trillions not billions, and this really is one of the most profound technological opportunities humans have ever created, there are a bunch of open questions:

• 2025 is probably no longer the right time to back a reactor company, given the deep pockets, talent concentration and embedded knowledge of the +50 extant players (although maybe there are lessons to be learned from these over-capitalised first movers).

• What do venture returns look like in the event of major consolidation? Is there a fire-sale of the smaller co’s for <$100m, or is it equity driven so everyone ends up with a stake in a few larger players. Neither work well at all with venture fund timelines, unless you own a chunk of one of the few big winners.

• Do the consolidated reactor companies become semi-public? Do governments step in here, or does nuclear look like big energy (Exxon, Armco, Chevron etc.) with a handful of global monsters. Or, do the companies even get acquired by big energy (who are perhaps the only global corporations with deep enough pockets, government relationships and infrastructure expertise)?

• How do nation states interact with one another? Does each nation need a national champion, or are allies happy to work with just one regional player (e.g. a German champion powering all of Europe)? I can’t see Europe being happy with one nation owning all the upside, so do we end up fragmented and un-competitive? The ITER project feels instructive here.

• What are the enabling tech opportunities to make this industry work (e.g. physics-based modelling/simulation companies, gyrotron manufacturers, HTS tape players, tritium breeding companies), and do any of these look like venture-scale outcomes or venture-friendly timelines?

I don’t have the answers to any of these questions (yet), but I find them very interesting - if you do too, or you really hated what I’ve written here, drop me a note and we can argue: max@earth.now.

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I invest in climate + frontier tech stuff at Earth and Kindred Capital. UK/EU/Israel and a bit of US, pre-seed + seed. Email or Linkedin to get me directly.

There are a lot of really brilliant companies across this space that deserve highlighting, especially those who were nice enough to speak to me. Here are a few: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Pacific Fusion, Renaissance Fusion, Marvel Fusion, Tokamak Energy, First Light Fusion, Helion Energy, Proxima Fusion, MWB Industries, Zenithon, Kyoto Fusioneering etc.

Investing in early stage start-ups is as strange as it is difficult. As venture investors, we make decisions based on very little evidence, often very quickly, that involve predicting returns over crazy long timeframes - then waiting for history to do its bit and hoping we’ve picked a winner.

As I see it, this there are essentially two key core skills involved in this process - (1) the need for a robust yet flexible psychological model to assess people - their motivations, their abilities, their strengths and weaknesses - and (2) a world model (often called market thesis) to understand the vision they are building towards and how this overlaps with or diverges from reality as you perceive it.

The former merits deeper examination later (and is arguably the hardest bit of the job) - here instead I’ll spend a bit of time thinking about the latter - how I think about building world models. This is an attempt to open source this thinking, so please - pull it all apart, ask questions, suggest improvements 🤗.

The first key thing to understand about these world models is that its not a one-sided exercise - you are always trying to marry your own beliefs with the imagined reality a founder presents to you.

Generally an entrepreneur pitches you a dissonance in the world they live in, and suggests an alternate, better future. Like Alice Through The Looking Glass, you see into a fantastical, colourful world where things work better, cost less and make tons and tons of cash.

These realities are wonderful and addictive. Not only do they, if correct, have the potential to fundamentally alter the reality in which we live, but there is something deeply engaging about the cognitive dissonance of an entrepreneur insane enough to believe the world is wrong and they are right.

The craft of the job is then trying to assess the viability of this vision by fitting a proposed reality into the world model you already possess, to make a shape out of the two that is more beautiful and compelling than either on their own.

This is really, really hard. Not only are you constantly interrogating the vision a founder is presenting, but you’re also examining your own vision - a series of hedges based on what you think, what you know, and where your gut is leading.

I think when pressed most VCs would admit they don’t have much idea whether they’re good at the job or not, and given the long feedback cycles, the only thing we can do is tweak the inputs and see what feels good or bad.

The outputs are so opaque as to make the inputs the only bit you really have any insight into, and so these tweaks are where I spend most of my time. My life is a constant process of adapting these theses to allow me to build confidence in ideas, but also to focus on the people I’m speaking to - so I’m not trying to interrogate GANS vs. diffusion models, fusion vs. fission, or lithium vs sodium batteries live on a call, and can instead focus on the wider trends and understanding the human in front of me.

“Man cannot control the current of events. He can only float with them and steer”
- Otto Von Bismarck

Importantly, the founder will always know considerably more than you do about their sector. So you need to know enough not to look like an idiot or waste their time, but focus on the broader picture and allow them to sweat the small stuff.

For context, a few of the “models” I’ve been thinking about recently include:

• Clean water is going to move from a commodity to a scarce resource in western countries. This will have profound implications in pricing, use and technological development.

• The energy grid will continue to decentralise, become more complex and have a lower barrier to entry year on year, while energy prices will fall worldwide. This will open up new business models, balancing challenges, and continue the push towards an electrified economy.

• Climate related disasters and temperature change will push mass migration from the global south to the global north. This will lead to political tension, polarisation, a renewed focus on defence/sovereignty, and a distrust in the migration that has powered the economies of the developed world since 1960.

• Large models will commoditise to the point where value lies in the product or hardware layer - likely the latter given the ever reducing barriers to entry in software. This will mean the main limit to building software products is imagination, but will also destroy technical defensibility in almost all simple software.

• Abundance will continue to be held back by planning regulation and NIMBYism excepting major geopolitical shock. Our main limiting factor on abundance will be emotional, not practical.

The fascinating questions baked into building these are of orders of magnitude and time frames. I.e., how broad should these visions be, and over what time frames. For example, the idea that “China will win the 21C” is probably too vague, while “CATL will continue as the dominant player in the battery space” is probably too specific.

Somewhere in the middle could end up with, “Chinese manufacturing supremacy will drive even greater consolidation of most hardware development over the next 25Y. Betting against Chinese engineering R+D and execution is unwise”.

Equally, considering something on a 100Y time frame is likely unhelpfully long as we’ll be dead by then. But a 5Y view is also too short, as no business will mature in that time. So you’re trying to walk a tightrope of a middle point - sufficient temporal proximity as to be useful, but not so much that it becomes myopic or lacks context.

Consider a real world example - the much vaunted world of vibe coding. A lot of people will make a lot of money backing Replit, Cursor and Lovable - all amazing businesses, all very much of a time. But what is the correct timeframe within which to assess these companies - over 5Y, totally sensible: commoditising models + democratisation of building software = product-led explosion. But over 10Y, betting against hyper-scalers with near-unlimited distribution capacity and very deep pockets? The Anthropic vs OpenAI B2B debacle is perhaps instructive here. And longer? What will software look like in 2045, will code even be intelligible to human eyes when its both written and read by intelligent machines?

Now, I don’t have a concrete answer to these challenges - I just try and work out what feels right and stands up to my own interrogation.

People call venture a “craft” because there’s no perfect way to do it, and no two people do it in the same manner. You can’t DCF a founder’s motivations or likelihood to win at pre-seed, or indeed what industrial automation will look like in 2035. You’re making bets, and trying not to overthink or under-think the process.

And that’s what makes it so fantastically engaging and frustrating at the same time - the challenge is in working out at which level and on which vectors you want to play, but also not letting yourself get lost in the onanism of over-analysis.

All you can do is have strong beliefs held lightly enough that you are never so arrogant as to believe in the infallibility of your own world models.

I invest in climate + frontier tech stuff at Earth and Kindred Capital. UK/EU/Israel and a bit of US, pre-seed + seed. max@earth.now to get me directly.

In building Earth, however, we’re now undergoing the process of moving from an angel vehicle to a structured fund - something that requires refinement and focus, not only structurally (the joys of LPAs), but also in terms of thesis. We’re going from backing teams with our own money based on gut feel to structuring a formalised investment strategy, process, and fund structure, to become effective money managers for our LPs while continuing to generate outsized returns.

Mid last year, we started this process, beginning with our thinking on why software in climate matters, before expanding this idea into our principle of Climate Dynamism - an action-oriented approach to planet-positive investing in 2025.

This idea came from the late 2024 climate backlash - our take on planet-positive investing for the post-ESG era. Investments must look like venture-scale (+$1bn) outcomes, must have the ability to scale to this kind of return in ~10Y (see: recurring business models), and can not rely on subsidies or regulation for their growth.

Climate Dynamism has become a lens through which we assess all opportunities. This has informed our decision-making in companies like Renaissance Fusion, Minimal, Aletiq, Cariqa, a TBA (stealth) mapping proposition for the subterranean world, a TBA (stealth) SAI start-up, Hula Earth, a TBA (stealth) foundational model for weather, and a TBA (stealth) chemicals supply chain business.

As we now build a venture capital fund, our thesis has crystallised across two pillars:

• 🦾 Building the future of industry through digitisation, decarbonisation, and electrification

• 🧱 Resilience technologies and adapting our world to a rapidly changing climate

Or - to put it simply, building the world in which we want to live, while ensuring the one we live in doesn't spontaneously combust in the process 🥵.

The below areas outline our thinking in more detail, along with why these make strong pillars, companies we like in the space(s), and why we win.

🦾 Building the future of digital-first industry through decarbonisation and electrification

Market opportunity

Manufacturing is a +$14tn market worldwide, spanning chemicals, textiles, advanced machinery, aerospace, automotive, consumer goods, electronics, life sciences etc.

The vast majority of these spaces involve legacy infrastructure and processes but are driven by concurrent needs: to create efficiencies to remain competitive, reduce costs where possible and reduce emissions (to meet regulatory requirements, ensure longevity and remain attractive to customers).

Although, as the Extantia team neatly elucidated with this post, the primary driver is (and will likely always be) cost, with all environmental considerations coming lower in the priority chain.

Political relevance

As the global political climate becomes increasingly febrile, supply chains get hit by climate shocks, and nations return to protectionism (+ mindless tariffs), the need for on-shored manufacturing, shorter supply chains and greater national independence becomes ever more important.

Layer on top of this the return of defence as a relevant global concern, and the baked in dual use nature of much of manufacturing, and the feeling is this space is set for a bumper decade.

We observe that as the marginal defensibility and differentiation of software trends towards zero, defensibility has to be found elsewhere. We firmly believe this comes through either hardware-driven solutions that create device lock-in, or through access to (or creation of) unique data-sets that exist in closed-loop processes such as physical manufacturing.

Environmental opportunity

From an environmental perspective, the manufacturing + industrials sectors account for roughly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Anything that makes industry more efficient is going to positively affect this percentage.

Indicative sub-sectors

These sectors are broad and varied, and we are particularly interested in certain sub-areas within them:

• Optimising manufacturing processes: AI-powered predictive maintenance, energy-efficient robotics and process control, emissions analysis, circular economy solutions. E.g. Foresight Data Machines, Ronja, AIloys

• New materials design: Bio-based materials, lightweight composites, foundational models for materials design/improvement, and clean alternatives to traditional industrial inputs. E.g. Cradle, Latent Labs, Zymvol, Change Bio

• Process improvement: Digital twins for process simulation, real-time process improvement using reinforcement learning, industrial IoT for real-time monitoring and optimisation. E.g. Atmospheric AI, Solve Chemistry, Carbon Re, Rectify

• Industrial electrification: B2B solar, technology for PPAs, DERs, virtual power plants, fusion, energy trading tools and everything within the broader B2B electrification space. E.g. Hephaestus, Renaissance Fusion, Ionetic, Taisan, Engrate, Electricity Maps, Heuris Energy

• Decentralised manufacturing: on-shoring production capabilities, countering dependence on global supply chains and leveraging novel tech for micro-factories to reduce transportation emissions and supply chain vulnerabilities. E.g. Isembard, Saeki, Pantheon

Why we’ve chosen this as a vertical

1. Excellent exit opportunities without the need for public markets - big pharma (Novo Nordisk, GSK, Eli Lilly etc.), manufacturing and energy majors (Siemens, GE, Bosch, VW, Airbus etc.), and heavy industry (ArcelorMittal, Ansteel, Cemex, Heidelberg, Dow Chemical, Exxon etc.) have both the budgets and the appetite to make +$1bn acquisitions, and do so frequently. This is vital in an era of reduced liquidity from public markets.

2. Defensible data flywheels - industrial processes are generally closed-loop, with manufacturers keen to protect data from competitors. This creates amazing opportunities for software-driven start-ups to build incredible products based on specific, proprietary data that enriches itself and allows rapid iteration cycles.

3. Tangible impact on both industry and the environment - tackling scope 1-3 emissions in industry is vital for the energy transition, and while many of these sectors involve “extreme whale hunting” GTM, the prizes are huge (+$1m contracts) when secured.

4. Playing into European strengths - Europe is an industrial powerhouse. Energy in Iberia/Nordics, manufacturing in Germany, biotech/AI in the UK, aerospace/luxury in France, agriculture in the Netherlands. These businesses will be born in Europe and then scale in the US as they grow - something we’ve done ourselves.

🧱 Resilience technologies and adapting to a rapidly changing climate

Market opportunity

Even with aggressive emissions reductions, we’ve sailed past 1.5 degrees - at this point, climate change is inevitable, and investing in adaptation and mitigation technologies are crucial for building resilience and minimising the impacts of a weirder, warmer, wetter world. Read this if you want to be terrified.

Climate disasters and freak weather are only getting more common - at its most conservative estimate, the Valencia floods cost €16.1bn, or 1.1% of Spain’s GDP for 2024. The California wildfires are estimated to have cost +$250bn (and counting), Spain shut down for a day, and this month the NCEI reported that the US alone had 27 +$1bn climate disasters in 2024. This was up from 13 in the 2010s, 7 in the 2000s, 6 in the 1990s and 3.3 in the 1980s.

Governments, private companies and individuals are ready to pay, because they have to - groups are rapidly waking up to the need to pay to both predict, protect against, then repair/replace following, ever-more frequent climate disasters

Indicative Sub-sectors

• Climate-resilient infrastructure: new materials for building, infrastructure retrofitting and monitoring, flood/fire-resistant building materials, smart grids. E.g. , Joltsynsor, Spruce, Manhole Metrics, GreenLite

• Weather prediction and geospatial analysis: longer range, higher resolution weather systems to spot disasters as they come in and better prepare for them e.g. Atmo, Jua, 2LW, askEarth, Waterplan

• Novel financial products and incentives for a rapidly changing world e.g. Illyapa, Residual Carbon, ClimeFi

• Geo-engineering: to buy us time while we try and sort things out, across solar radiation management, cloud seeding, ocean modification and re-wilding e.g. Make Sunsets, Stardust Solutions, Ulysses

• Precision agriculture: Drought-resistant crop development, water-efficient irrigation systems, and AI-powered crop monitoring e.g. Biographica, Phytoform Labs, Gardin

• Disaster response: Real-time data analysis for disaster prediction and response, monitoring tools, resilient communication networks e.g. Fire Dome, Pinepeak, Burnbot

Why we’ve chosen this as a vertical

1. The market fit is immediate and obvious - The Overton window has shifted, and we need to protect ourselves and short-term cool the planet as we work out how to fix it. Cynically, the worse climate disasters get, the bigger the opportunity here - but these solutions still need funding at the earliest stages to get off the ground.

2. Varied buyer and exit profiles - we’re uncomfortable with an over-reliance on governments as customers, but across construction, energy, water, farming, manufacturing, corporate etc., the opportunities here are exciting and varied.

3. Direct European relevance - Europe is leading the world on climate awareness and collaboration. While disasters and rising temperatures will disproportionately hit the global south in the immediate term, Europe’s academic prowess, combined with density of population and big-budget governments provide fertile ground for adaptation/resilience technologies.

4. No regulatory / subsidy dependence - it’s crazy we have to write this in 2025, but these technologies do not depend on the whims of climate-sceptic administrations. Disasters are impossible to ignore, and their effects will have to be paid for.

🥇 And why we win?

This is all well and good - but what’s our play here? Why take our money?

Well - we’ve built and exited five companies as a team, including two unicorns (Taulia, Centrifuge), and invested in over 150 start-ups in every geography you can think of.

We’re not messing around here - our angel fund has a MOIC of +13x (1x DPI), we push for access in every deal we love, and we’re always at the end of a WhatsApp for the teams we back. Beyond this:

1. We understand enterprise sales - we sold into the biggest big guys at Taulia (and exited to one of them - SAP!), and know what long sales cycles, complex stakeholders and procurement look like. We understand integrating into existing ERPs and persuading big organisations to change how they work. We’re not doing it for them, but we can help avoid some of the common pitfalls.

2. We love big bets - we’re not in it for mid-sized returns. We want binary outcomes, +$1bn or bust, and founders who were born to build this business. Our worst case scenario is a 1x - we’re not interested in anything mediocre. These spaces tend towards massive returns or nothing (unlike SaaS for SMEs). We’ve been there, we understand it, and we want to spend the next +10Y working with these people.

3. We’re founders backing founders - they want us involved from day one, as advisors, on their boards. We speak their language and this is different from the majority of professional investor-led European funds.

4. We’re pan-European with a US flavour - we have networks in the UK, Germany (+ into DACH), and Iberia as core markets, with deep expertise in San Francisco. We hope this is exciting to founders looking to scale internationally from day one.

–

Have something for us? Drop us a note.

In light of my experience running Climate Coffee, this got me thinking about the resurgence of unstructured in-person experiences, and how it feels like the popularity of these events says something relevant about the state of the world in 2025.

tl;dr - it feels like we’re kicking back against online dislocation, loneliness, polarisation and noise, in favour of something messier, more tangible, softer, and fundamentally more human.

💏 Snogging is back 💏

Before we kick off, I remember thinking how stupid Thursday felt as an idea when it launched in late, Covid-stricken 2021. In-person dating that only happens once a week? No online pre-vetting to weed out the weirdoes? Taking on the behemoths of Hinge, Bumble and Tinder?

How wrong I was. The post last month cited launching 72 new cities with 3000 events and over 200,000 attendees in the last year (while dating apps continue to struggle) - touching on a zeitgeist that feels like a (grown-up) cousin to what we’re doing with Climate Coffee.

While we’re not at the hundreds of thousands (yet), Climate Coffee - a recurring monthly meet-up for people interested in climate tech - has also grown like crazy since inception. Our events focus on in-person connection. We deliberately don't have an online “community”, nor Slack/Whatsapp groups, and we communicate with our attendees as little as is humanly possible (i.e. one email per month).

We’ve spent £0 on marketing, with a core team of two (very part time) co-founders, and have grown from 30 people in a cafe in Madrid in September 2023 to over 3000 signed up “members” as of March 2025, ~750 of whom meet monthly across 11 cities in Europe and Latin America, with a bunch more locations in the pipeline.

🌊 Riding the wave 🌊

I see us as placed firmly within a macro trend of individuals craving in person experience and community.

I’m not pretending people didn't hang out pre-Covid, I’m just suggesting that we’re seeing something different in 2025 - less structured, more intentional, and (to perhaps over-intellectualise it) looking to create a sense of collective identity and belonging in an increasingly atomised world.

We see it with run clubs, book clubs, gardening clubs, fitness events taking over drinks-based networking, Thursday, community clean ups, and whatever the hell Hyrox is. If people are choosing to hang out with one another at Climate Coffee at 8.30AM on a -2 degree February morning in Berlin, there’s evidently a relevant desire for in person connection that deserves examination.

My thesis here is based on two core ideas that feel intertwined:

• We’ve hit, and passed, peak social network

• We’ve hit (and are hopefully passing) peak urban loneliness

Leading to the conclusion that people are craving something intentional yet unstructured in a highly regimented world.

🌐 Peak Social Network 🌐

From the initial social media boom of the early 2010s, the mid 2010s through to post pandemic saw the verticalisation and fragmentation of online communities.

As the general public spaces we had all joined became noisier (and more dangerous), and the business model shifted from serving us our friends to serving us ads (read: enshittification), communities splintered into sub-groups, channels, interest areas etc.

And many of us joined a myriad of Reddit threads, Slack groups, Whatsapp groups etc. for our various interests, work topics or to create digital twins of our “real” lives in person - in a way craving the intimacy real-world communities could offer whilst running from the endless sludge of ad-driven social networks (that are literally making us stupider).

Yet how many of these died almost before they got going? Unless the value exchange was super clear in an online community (e.g. I want to sell X product and Y person is there to buy it, or I’m working on a very specific problem A and there are B experts in the same group), they died pretty fast.

This trend was then accelerated by us all being Extremely Online during Covid, and by 2025, it really feels like people are exhausted with existing in social spaces online. There’s a deep longing for the world pre-notifications, where you found out about things when you saw friends, and major events were shared and shaped collectively and in real time. A more serendipitous world, if you will.

🏙️ Peak Urban Loneliness 🏙️

Which ties directly into the second pillar - that in major cities, we’ve hit peak urban structure and loneliness. Fuelled and driven by our turn inwards, towards screens and ourselves, urban environments feel even lonelier than they did 20 years ago.

Even when in a relationship or close group of friends, the fact is that our routines have become so individual, our schedules so planned, and our lives so ruthlessly dictated by the rhythms of work and seasons that we can often still feel alone.

21st century urban society largely lacks that sense of community. How many of us know our neighbours? How many people comment on how hard it is to meet new people and make new friends? And how much does this play into our increasing sense of social isolation?

🫂 Meet new people, make new friends, belong to something 🫂

We have become desirous of the serendipity, the natural connection and the belonging that come with hanging out with other people - often that we don’t know beforehand. Choosing to exist in a space with a bunch of semi strangers, with no clear agenda, has gone from the norm to a bizarrely liberating experience.

Every single Climate Coffee I’ve been to has felt the same - it’s awkward, messy, but wonderfully human. Attendees regularly comment on their love for the novelty of new faces and real conversations. And they keep coming back - because they become part of it and they begin to belong.

🛥️ Where do we go from here? 🛥️

So the question worth asking is where this desire for deliberate unstructured screen-free time goes?

As the brilliant Estia Ryan commented when we discussed this idea, “we can automate a lot of stuff, but there is also a lot we can’t automate. As we accelerate automation with AI, we’re also seeing an equally accelerating need for stuff that we can’t digitise to be even more real”.

This is a fascinating concept - just as the algorithms hyper-optimise towards sucking in our every waking second of attention, we’re pushing, in a very human way, for things that cannot be replicated through a screen or via an agent to become as “real” as possible.

Banning phones in schools is now a serious conversation, we all suddenly love clubs again, and more urban environments are consciously being planned to encourage real-world interaction.

And in a counterintuitive sense, the tech that isolates us has a vital role to play here. As we’ve lost the traditional community pillars (church, union, working man’s club, office, women’s institute etc.), tech is rebuilding those bridges in ways we didn’t expect - by providing access to kindred spirits that are now linked by strands that can only be discovered through the internet - hyper-specific sub-interest, vibe, type of experience as well as typical signifiers like gender, age or professional status.

So bring on the Thursday, Hyrox, and Park Run of this world, but also the slew of new entrants like the Breakfast, maple, The Cliq, or Groundfloor Club.

Let us make communities in new ways, offline, that unite us more than they divide.

Fail we may, but sail we must - towards our analogue digital future.

Find out more about Climate Coffee here or drop me a line at max@earth.now.

But having spent a week in the (increasingly patchy) snow, the whole thing was too fascinating and bizarre not to write about. The following is my attempt to make sense of it all. Hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Twin Peaks

The first thing to say is that the aura surrounding the place is even stranger than the place itself. I heard it described separately as “freshers week for grownups”, a “corporate popularity contest”, and “hell”.

As far as I can tell, all of these are true, in parts. My initial sensation was one of disdain - at the opulence, illogic, and exclusivity. But, weirdly, there was also something almost charming, bordering on inspiring, about the week.

Amongst all the corporate-washing, posturing and ostentatious wealth, there is a sense of progress and energy. Things are happening, and people want to be here. You have environmental campaigners next to the big tech c-suite. Harvard professors take on TikTok execs on panels. Yo-Yo Ma does an impromptu recital half way up a mountain. And the vast majority of conversations are positive and engaging, with unexpected value around every corner.

However, not only does all of this feel like a lot of talking for its own sake, it is also impossible to avoid the sense of the world moving on. Attendance was notably down on previous years. The big hitters felt fewer and further between. Nationalism is trumping globalism, and governments appear split between internal gridlock and external bellicosity.

So has the macro moved on?

This was the question I found myself asking all week - and one way to view it was physical. Looking at the houses on the promenade, there were three main categories:

• Big powers (e.g. US, India, Google, Meta, Salesforce)

• Wannabe big powers (e.g. Brazil, Poland, Indonesia, Qatar, Saudi)

• [Those who service the powers (e.g. Deloitte, McKinsey, BCG, Bain etc.)]

The service providers remain constant and predictable, but the other two categories were fascinating. The newer entrants wanted to flex their growing strength - India, Qatar and Saudi had multiple, muscular structures, vying for their place in the new world order, while smaller nations pitched hilariously inviting tax regimes to draw in international dollars.

While amongst the G8 - only Japan and the US were present physically, and both pretty conservatively. Even the US were relatively muted - a small townhouse featuring only one obnoxiously large eagle emblazoned on a window. The absence of China or Russia felt notable. And there were no major European powers present (save Poland) in any formal capacity, giving off a sense of the US looking elsewhere, and the old world lacking either the interest or energy to even play the game.

Now maybe this isn’t that surprising. Trump was inaugurated on day 1 of the week, and all the big guys were at his party. He is both a cause and a symptom of this macro trend - the concept of a global gathering feels impotent and anachronistic in an age of protectionism, tariffs and war. European nations remain so myopically focused on their own problems that their focuses appear elsewhere - the best the UK could manage was the chancellor joining to pitch businesses to please be taken seriously.

As one panellist noted, “we’re in the era of individualism and everyone is out for themselves”. Ukraine’s presence felt like a cry into the abyss, and the “here we go again” feeling to Zelensky’s speech emblematic of the broader struggle - exhausted as we enter the third year of the war.

But this begs major questions for the +50 year old alpine gathering. If the shine is coming off it (as noted by Semafor, the Spectator, the FT, seen through Olaf Schulz’s half empty speech or Keith Rabois’ tweet), where does it go?

What replaces it? What would we lose for its absence? Or would anyone even miss it?

The 1% don’t help themselves

Switzerland. Mid Winter. Mountain Resort. Thousands of people. Deadlocked traffic. Talking shop.

The whole format of the gathering feels outdated and does zero favours to a global elite already under fire across the globe for serving themselves ahead of the average citizen.

The structure made sense in 1971, with “450 executives from Western European firms”, seeking an escape from the day to day - before social media, 24h news cycles and always-on politics and business.

But now we’re at +3000 annual attendees, before you factor in drivers, assistants, family members, security and Switzerland's finest escorts. The location of an event like this makes little difference, and everything is broadcast to within an inch of its life almost exactly as it happens.

There are so many questions. Why is it in one of the most expensive countries in Europe, during the least hospitable time of the year, in a remote town that can barely handle the infrastructure requirements, for a whole week?

Thankfully, one of the unexpected amusements of the whole get together however is that it has the power to make quite literally everyone feel inadequate as there’s always a cooler, more exclusive party. Drinks with David Beckham? Invite only. Round table with the UK Chancellor? Not even publicised. You didn't make it into Goals House? Such a shame.

You’re the 1%, until you’re there. You find that there’s always someone a bit higher up the invisible ladder. I’d be lying if this feeling didn’t infect me at various points. And this tension is what defines the place - on one hand you are constantly confronted with the maddening illogic, but on the other you brush shoulders with some of the most inspiring and impressive people on the planet.

AI for everything, but not the useful kind

According to the Davos promenade, AI is here to stay. Every major corporation’s frontage was emblazoned with the two letters that defined 2024 and are already defining this year.

Qualcomm, KPMG, Intel, Cisco, Cognizant, Deloitte etc have all “pivoted to AI”, and were using their buildings to pedal their wares.

This isn’t a problem in and of itself, except for the fact that it felt off the pace. While “Big Four €1m AI-Copilot For Customer Service ©” might be a useful way to persuade the board to get rid of a few hundred of those pesky humans you still have to pay, there was so little substance to it all that it almost felt like a parody.

This really wasn't helped by the fact that - having spoken to regular attendees - the space taken by “AI” was previously “crypto/web3” in the late 2010s, then briefly “metaverse”, before a foray into “ESG/climate”. It’s good to see the big guys have a good hit rate on their sector predictions.

I left none the wiser

Yet despite all of this, I return with a gloriously diverse stack of business cards and a feeling of renewed energy about what we’re building.

Yes, the sense was that the world is re-polarising, and that these two poles lie to either side of Europe - in the emergent developing nations of the middle and far east, and back in the hands of an emboldened US.

And yes, there was far too little panic about the state of the climate, nor practical action on the troubling state of Western Europe.

But I left Switzerland lacking a viable alternative. Where does one put these minds, these ideas, and these individuals looking for something new, better, or different?

Maybe we’re all sipping champagne and bemoaning regulatory headaches while the kindling is laid below Rome, or maybe that conversation is a vital part of our very human need to share, connect and interrogate our ideas against others.

I’m still not sure which one I believe.

Hardware, and atoms-based solutions will be the main driver in tackling the climate emergency. This has been made abundantly clear by a number of trends - the capital flows into solar and wind generation to power our economies, the roll-out of distributed batteries to manage this new generation, or the funding into engineered and nature-based carbon removal to offset our ever-increasing global emissions.

Beyond this, there are also the as-yet unproven solutions to come - novel types of carbon removal & sequestration for removing latent atmospheric carbon, much-needed developments in water capture, treatment and storage to tackle growing shortages, all sorts of physical solutions to climate adaptation (from building energy efficiency to flood defences), and the ever-closer revolutionary potential of nuclear fusion.

Within this, it can often be hard to see the opportunity for software in what is fundamentally an atoms, not bits, based problem.

Yet software is a core pillar within the climate space. Much as our whole lives have become software-driven, from ride-hailing to financial management, e-commerce, social networks, or data storage, the climate tech landscape cannot help but be defined by, and experienced through, a digital world.

As Climate Papa’s excellent article noted back in 2023, “Software can be the product, output the product, deploy the product, enable the product, or design the product. To give some analogies to current industries: Airtable or Slack are the product themselves. Stripe’s software enables payment actions via API. Airbnb’s software powers their marketplace for vacation homes.”

Looking at this through a climate lens, software will power grid and home energy management processes, optimise large-scale supply chain management, feed satellite imagery through machine learning models to predict climate risks, provide novel tools and products for infrastructure financing and optimise building retrofits for environmental standards and cost efficiency.

At Earth we come from software - having founded and scaled software businesses, including Taulia and Centrifuge as unicorns, operated within and advised many others, and invested in +140 more as angels. As such, we get it - how to build software, how to fund it, how to hire for it, and how to sell it to organisations - all the way from SMBs to global corporations.

Given this, we feel we have an unfair right to play in this space, and focus our efforts on the founders building category-defining, software-driven companies across the wider climate landscape. This all said, we are not scared of hardware - and do recognise the need for hardware enablement, or commoditized products/devices to go with software solutions, as long as the software provides the backbone for the offering.

Here’s a list of climate businesses (including those developing net-positive solutions for society that are not strictly “climate”) that are software-first or software with enabling hardware.

The notable “unicorns” in this space have raised +$7bn in their most recent rounds alone at a +$30bn combined valuation (as of Oct’24), across everything from b2b e-commerce, to home energy management, micro-mobility, new materials and grid management software (clickable links here):

Supported by a very strong cohort of “soonicorns” coming through the pipeline, having raised ~$1.3bn in the past 24 months, with a strong predominance in Europe:

And lastly, early-stage businesses, some from the Earth angel portfolio (*asterisked), that we view as potential future stars: 

This piece is the beginning of a longer series on climate software, building a thesis at Earth, and areas we think are going to be majorly impactful in the next decade. Watch this space for more, and drop me an email at max@withearth.xyz with any thoughts.