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I feel like I’m standing on the table waving my arms, shouting, “Hey, I’m right here!”
But the venture capital world keeps looking right past me. They stare at the wall behind me, the deck next to me, the guy beside me with the Patagonia vest and the Stanford ring.
I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve built, scaled, hired, shipped, and survived. I’ve done everything founders are told to do—hit the metrics, check the boxes, live in the trenches.
And yet, to them, I’m invisible.
So are thousands of founders like me—brilliant, battle-tested, obsessed with making something real—and somehow unseen.
Why? Because we didn’t go to the right school? Because we don’t speak the insider dialect of venture? Because no one’s willing to “warm-intro” us into the club?
The truth is, the entire concept of a warm intro has become the aristocracy of venture capital.
A centuries-old inbreeding ritual disguised as due diligence.
The industry has become the Habsburg dynasty of innovation—a closed loop of wealth and ego, muttering about disruption while producing weaker, smaller, more recessive ideas with each generation.
Venture capital claims to fund disruption, but it’s addicted to pattern recognition.
And patterns don’t disrupt anything. Patterns repeat themselves.
You can’t find what’s next if you’re only looking for what already worked.
But that’s what most funds are built to do: find the next version of the last thing that made someone rich.
The result? An industry obsessed with talking about innovation that hasn’t funded a truly new idea in years.
When you filter for familiarity, you get copycats. When you fund only what feels safe, you get sameness.
You think you’re optimizing for risk, but you’re just protecting your own reflection.
It’s not just venture capital. The same decay pattern is showing up everywhere.
Consumer products. Finance. Media. Politics.
Every system eventually becomes its own Habsburg line—so inbred by pattern recognition and fear of deviation that it mistakes replication for progress.
What begins as innovation devolves into imitation.
The institutions built to find the new start defending the old.
In consumer goods, founders with fresh ideas are pushed back into formulas designed by conglomerates masquerading as innovators.
In venture, investors who once chased risk now fund only what looks like their last success.
Everywhere you look, ingenuity collapses under the weight of familiarity.
When everything goes wrong—and it always does—it’s not the cap table that saves a company.
It’s the founder’s energy.
The way they think, move, adapt, and refuse to die.
That’s the force that creates disruption, not the spreadsheet measuring “founder-market fit.”
You can’t quantify that. You can only feel it.
But you’ll never feel it if you keep demanding warm intros, because warmth kills truth.
It keeps you comfortable. It keeps you blind. It ensures you’ll never meet the person crazy enough, smart enough, and relentless enough to actually change something.
You want to meet the next founder who rewires an industry?
Step outside your loop. Stop relying on the same intros from the same funds who recycle the same ten names.
The next big thing isn’t in your inbox.
It’s in your blind spot.
Go looking for the outliers. The misfits. The ones you didn’t expect to find.
The ones who make you uncomfortable—because they should.
There’s a difference between what it takes to build something that’s a success
and what it takes to build something that’s a moonshot.
One follows a playbook. The other writes one.
One scales what exists. The other builds what doesn’t.
One fits the model. The other breaks it.
If you keep searching for what’s familiar, you’ll keep funding the former—
while the real moonshots walk right past you, invisible, waving.
