Some of these things could be learned in a textbook, but when you see it in person it’s clear that they’re more likely from experience and instinct possessed by someone that’s been obsessed with their craft for decades. They’ve made the mistakes, earned insight from long feedback loops, and have an intuitive sense of when something will just work. This is what makes them an artist.

We see this in the best entrepreneurs. Often they do things that defy logic and physics, but as a result create things that are only possible with enough experience and instinct. It’s this very specific (but intangible) thing that makes what they build defensible. There’s no set of steps someone can take to replicate the output, just a series of judgement calls that compound (positively or negatively) over a long period of time.

Understanding this is one of the main drivers of why the best early stage investors index so heavily on team and track record. What the “film” is about matters less than the unique experience the “director” delivers to viewers. A great movie isn’t made by a great script, or a great lead actor alone. It’s the output of the million small decisions made every day on set.

All that to say…if anyone has a 70mm IMAX Odyssey ticket they’d be willing to spare, please reach out :)

Though companies still make their best attempt to call their contracted revenue ARR, what they really have is backlog. Backlog is revenue that is contracted but hasn’t yet made its way through the production queue into realized revenue. This can be AI implementation service revenue, hardware sales, or government testing data collection, as a few examples. In this world, pipeline is king.

For investors, this new normal also changes how we diligence companies as they grow. Instead of doing SaaS cohort analysis and applying revenue multiples to companies, investors now need to prioritize a more rigorous pipeline analysis. They need to do customer references, analyze contract termination clauses, evaluate cash conversion cycles, and really understand where the marginal revenue will come from when they can’t safely assume that every year there will be a 10% price increase per seat license.

So if we’re headed into a world where backlog is the key metric, what should we look for at each stage of a company’s lifecycle to determine company progress? We look to answer four (often qualitative) questions:

1. Why are customers choosing this company (defensibility, product differentiation, GTM effectiveness)?

2. How big is the pipeline (TAM, “surface area for luck”)?

3. What is the near-term and long-run margin structure for the products and services sold to this pipeline? (e.g. what are the substitutes, how urgent is the need, how unique is this product, etc.)

4. How repeatable is the current sales motion? Has the team distilled GTM down into a core capability or is it scatter shot?

Depending on the category a company is operating in, the answers to these questions vary.

In hardware, product differentiation and defensibility are two of the easiest things to see. Relative to the digital world, building in the physical world is slower and has a more limited universe of alternatives to assess. The risk in hardware land more often tends to be TAM, margin structure, and sales repeatability.

In software today, long-run defensibility is the challenge. Short-run numbers may be great, but avoiding margin erosion and slowing top-line growth feel increasingly difficult to avoid. Without a hardware or network effect moat, unique GTM motions/unfair advantages and extreme talent advantages on the path to economies of scale are more important here than ever.

TLDR; Fun times and lots of opportunity for those willing to forego heuristic-based investing and go back to business valuation basics!

One of the most common are money problems.

There’s two types of money problems:

1. “We don’t have enough money”; and

2. Problems you can throw money at to make go away.

Number 1 is a separate blog post. Today I’m focused on number two. Call them “Type 2” Money Problems. Here’s some examples:

• Your supplier can’t ship for 4 weeks, but your customer needs the product in 3. Solution? Pay 2x to expedite it.

• An engineer you needed yesterday doesn’t want to leave their stock options on the table? Give them a signing bonus to exercise.

• Going to be late to a key meeting? Take an Uber. Unless you’re in NYC, then always just take the subway. It’s faster.

For startups that raise large rounds, it’s almost implied that an increasing proportion of the problems they face are Type 2 Money Problems. The assumption is that speed to scale and market position win, and that money solves that.

The challenge is being sure that’s the case and you’re not papering over another core deficiency of the company. No amount of money can paper over bad culture or leadership. No amount of money will fix hiring if the mission is uninspiring. And no amount of money can will materially accelerate the delivery of truly innovative technical solutions. Only talent and a culture of high iteration speed can do that.

• The largest IPO ever, funding a mission to explore the stars (and minting over 4,000 millionaires…)

• Father-son duos winning NBA championships after 50+ year droughts; and

• The beginning of the World Cup, an event that has historically brought the world together and created moments many citizens cherish forever.

For the romantics, it’s hard to experience these events and not feel something. Feeling something (inspiration, opportunity, potential) is what motivates people to take big risks. And people taking big risks is what creates the potential for change.

Contrast this romantic worldview with the more data-driven and measured view, the “classical.” In “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, author Robert Pirsig explains the distinction well:

“To a romantic, classic mode often appears dull, awkward, and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it’s run through the computer a dozen times. Everything’s got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force.”

Both views, romantic and classic, have a role to play in effecting change. But I’m excited that it feels like we’re entering a world where people are beginning to believe ambitious things are possible again.

As unapologetic romantics, we’re always looking for the reasons something might just work, not just the 10,000 reasons it won’t. It’s also a way more fun way to live!

Anyway!

There’s one metric I watch to predict what will happen in venture markets.

It’s not dollars deployed.

It’s not average valuation.

It’s the NUMBER and YoY GROWTH RATE of startups funded in a given year.

Case in point…from ‘95-‘99, number of startups funded nearly 3x’d.

We know how that ended…

Why is this so highly predictive? Because a greater absolute numbers of startups creates an unsustainable dispersion of talent and growth capital that bottlenecks companies getting to large outcomes.

So where are we today? Round count is actually DOWN from ‘24-25. Below even 2019 levels.

Makes you think…🤔

This could be true. But the reality is that any new technology deployment cycle will always oscillate between the euphoria that drives massive amounts of capital behind it and the disappointment when it fails to achieve the massive expectations behind it.

The remedy, however, is not to ban bubbles. In fact, there’s good evidence that bubbles are a feature of the innovation economy. My friend Tobias Huber wrote an entire book on the idea, titled “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation.” Highly recommend a read!

To quote Tobias’ book preview:

“In a series of case studies tracking some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to fracking and Bitcoin—they reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. They conclude that financial bubbles, while often maligned as destructive and destabilizing forces, have in fact been the engine of past breakthroughs and will drive future advances.”

In other words: Bubbles aren’t all bad. :)

A VC saying this is blasphemy, I am aware. But it feels great to get my view out in public.

The last two decades of software made investors lazy. 80% gross margins meant “this is investable.” There was no need to do the harder underwriting of balance sheets, return on capital, and how nascent markets would evolve.

But in this new venture era where investing in hardware is back in vogue and balance sheets are getting bigger, we need to primarily care about two things:

1) Aggregate profit DOLLARS (“Contribution Margin”); and

2) Total capital invested to get there

Profit dollars fuel continued R&D, which deepens the moat and increases enterprise value. And the more profit dollars we generate, the fewer equity dollars we need.

The optimization should always be for the most DURABLE profit dollars generated as QUICKLY as possible with the LEAST about of capital required.

High gross margin (%) is just a proxy for doing that well, but focusing just on that will cause one to miss great opportunities.

1. Building before planning. You ship sub-optimally, then you can’t hire because no one wants to own the mess.

2. Raising while building. You come to market with an MVP and no talent moat. The story doesn’t close/lacks credibility.

3. Building because it’s comfortable. Technical founders are good at it. So they do it. Then they can’t let go and the company stalls.

4. Getting pulled into product minutiae. Small fires feel enormous when you’re the only one fighting them. They don’t when you have a real team around you.

This is why we feel so strongly about founders focusing on hiring early (“First Five”). It’s the difference between a founder running a company and a founder running a product indefinitely.

Instead of building early, hire for the roles that unlock everything else. Do it earlier than feels comfortable.

A quick refresher on how it works: The scout team spends the summer in person with us at our SoHo office, running their own pool of capital like a fund. They have full autonomy over deal sourcing, diligence, pipeline management, portfolio construction, investment committee presentations, and “LP” reporting. All of the carry on the pool goes to the team. Along the way, they also pitch in on a few special projects for the core Also Capital fund and our portfolio companies.

In what’s become kind of a new tradition, we have a scout from the summer prior returning as Managing Partner of this year’s team. We couldn’t be more excited to have Esha back, and to add some new faces to the mix. Without further ado, here are the 2026 partners. As always, reach out to them directly to say hello or chat about what you’re building.

Esha Cyril, Managing Partner

Raised by two founders, her mom in fashion and dad in tech, Esha Cyril grew up on a healthy dose of delusion and the instinct that the hardest problems reward people who think across disciplines. She came to Johns Hopkins as a premed but quickly learned her generalist wiring wasn’t something to narrow to solve the problems she cared about most.

About to graduate with degrees in public health and economics, Esha has spent years researching rare disease drug development, previously authoring and proposing California’s now-passed hepatitis screening bill, and now building an AI tool for n-of-1 trials, a bespoke but slow process usually run by parents of children with rare diseases. Her work alongside founders spans clinical trials at a Series B immuno-oncology company, GTM at an early-stage AI startup tackling substance abuse, and sourcing deals at Soma Capital. Through college, she has mentored over 50 lab spinouts and companies from Parkinson’s therapies to low-wind-speed energy capture. As a scout at Also Capital last summer, she had the chance to learn fast about a lot, from what hiring great early talent looks like to the hands-on work of building conviction, whether on the future of railroads or biotech supply chains. While the sheer learning velocity was great, the people were better, and she’s thrilled to be back investing in outlier founders alongside them.

Outside of this, she believes in always keeping the mind and body moving. She’s a philosophy lover and has recently been working on maternal care and, relatedly, solar-powered water system projects for the mountainous regions of Bangladesh. She has also played racquetball for a decade, representing Team USA with 15 national medals and four international titles, now training for the U.S. Open with her doubles partner (and twin sister).

Rushil Kukreja, Partner

Rushil is an incoming Physics student at Princeton University with a deep passion for space technology, building systems for extreme environments and defense applications. While only in high school, that drive has pushed him to research with an MIT AeroAstro professor to prototype autonomous satellites, launch a payload 400,000 feet into space from NASA Wallops Flight Facility, lead the world’s first HS team building a liquid-fuel rocket, and even work on Lockheed Martin’s THAAD missile defense system. Along the way, he also won a Gold Medal in the USA Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad and spoke at the United Nations, drawn by the same desire to understand the universe he’s trying to build for.

His path into startups came through a different kind of extreme environment: disaster zones. After watching how chaotic and slow search-and-rescue could be, he built WiFind, an aerial device that uses Wi-Fi signal analysis to locate survivors trapped under rubble. After winning 1st Place internationally in the Conrad Challenge, WiFind earned $45,000+ in grant funding and landed him at the Founders, Inc. accelerator in San Francisco. Building WiFind under real constraints, with the first prototype hacked together from a salvaged home router, gave him a visceral sense of what it actually takes to push something difficult into existence.

In his free time, Rushil writes poetry, which turns out to be more compatible with physics than most people expect (turns out even Schrödinger wrote poems!). At Also Capital, Rushil hopes to source and back the outlier founders operating in the same territory he’s drawn to: too deep or too early in the frontier for most to even take seriously yet.

Trevor Xing-Xie, Partner

After years of volunteering in his local neurodivergent community, Trevor first ventured into the lab to build neuromodulation devices for locomotor dysfunction. Recruited to write infrastructure software at Google after his first year at Vanderbilt, Trevor now brings seriously intense grit and tact to all affairs; while the nervous system remains a raison d’etre, he’s since extended into affective computing, energy landscapes, intrinsically disordered proteins, and naturally, deep brain stimulation.

A Computer Science and Neuroscience student, he believes computation should celebrate the complexity of being human, using technology to shift our Overton window instead of medicating those who don’t conform.

Trevor has worked with startups across noninvasive cognitive load quantification and emotionally expressive robots, and brings a rigorously technical lens to pricing meaningful ideas. Outside of startups and science, Trevor is a marathon runner, lackluster ex-athlete, and enjoyer of Calvin and Hobbes, The Kekulé Problem, and Adlerian Psychology (courtesy of Mike).

I think the ones that stay relevant consistently do two things: love the process of pursuing greatness, and continuously evolve their edge.

LeBron James, now 41, talks about his love for the process of playing basketball at a high level keeping him relevant.

Jamie Moyer played professional baseball until he was 49 and at the time of his final game had the most wins, losses, and strikeouts of any active MLB pitcher.

In Moyer’s case, staying relevant for so long meant finding an edge any way he could, even when his physical talent had diminished. From the Society for American Baseball Research:

“Moyer’s changeup could make his low-80s fastball look like a high-80s fastball. Besides changing speeds, he kept hitters off balance by constantly moving the ball up, down, in, and out. The crafty lefty also used psychology to his advantage. He often approached the batter’s box in between pitches and talked to the hitter. “As a hitter, that would drive me crazy,” said Boone, “but as a teammate I loved it.”24 The unusual tactic was one example of Moyer getting an edge any way he could.”

The similarities between athletics and entrepreneurship abound. Markets change. Talents evolve. Networks grow and shift. But if you want to stay relevant, one needs to love the process and consistently evolve their edge.

And of course, have fun doing it!

With this approach, the small wins along the way end up becoming the markers of success. You’re helping your friends win! Things like Radiant Nuclear moving into the DOME after nearly a decade of hard work and planning, Harry O’Connor being awarded the Thiel Fellowship, and Grounded shipping Colgate’s Bright Smiles, Bright Futures fleet that increase access to pediatric dentistry services.

Selfishly, this also makes the day to day grind of entrepreneurship and investing more enjoyable. Early stage investing has a long feedback loop, so strictly optimizing for outcomes is a way to either make short term-oriented decisions or burn out.

Choose hard problems. Back good people. Celebrate the wins with them along the way.

A good vision is “A thousand songs in your pocket.”

A vision is NOT “Everyone in the world will have free electricity.”

A good vision is “shooting stars daily that return critical materials that improve life on earth.”

A vision is NOT “a future where we have abundant resources for all.”

A good vision is simple, tangible, and exciting. If a vision is obvious, it’s likely not that visionary. If it’s intangible, it loses meaning.

Founders that set a clear vision well hire better, raise capital more easily, and ultimately find success at a higher rate.

Iterate. Find your message. Then tell it on repeat!

As VisiCalc (and eventually Excel) proliferated, what remained as unfair advantages were relationships, insights, information (collectively, “Intangible Assets”). If you had better information on a business’ growth prospects, your Excel model would prove more accurate. If you had unique relationship, your purchase price in the model might be advantaged.

The same thing is happening now with AI and knowledge work. If we trust the analogy, then we know the volume of knowledge work is about to explode (I recognize the irony as I write a weekly blog, full of words). As a result, insights, information, and relationships are more valuable than ever.

In this new paradigm, it’s a company or investor’s Intangible Assets that will create an unfair advantage—unique information that feeds the tool, the way one uses the tool to move faster, and the relationships and reputation one builds that AI cannot automate away.

• The future will be better than the present;

• Technology will take us there; AND

• The craziest (sounding) ideas tend to be the most impactful.

The challenge on point three is striking the line between optimism and delusion. Is Company X a camera company or a “distributed global intelligence network”? Is Company Y “elevating global consciousness” or are they just a real estate sublessor? I could go on…

The bright line test is the specificity with which a founder can articulate what must go right along the way for them to win. “But what if it works?” is fine. “Here’s the playing field and the calculated risks we’re taking along the way” is much stronger. Hyperfluency on the messy middle of a company tends to distinguish the dreamers from the winners.

Happy hunting!

We talked about what makes a great cold email (and when a warm intro might be worthwhile if you can swing it), what I hunt for when a new deck comes through, the distinction between pretty and well-designed, why I’m trying to lean more into consistency of principle than judging whether something is the “right” answer, how we think about diligence at a concentrated fund – and why you should reference us back the same way we’re referencing you. We also got into the importance of strong relationships through the whole process, which is really what most things come down to. Mat put together a great first batch of investors for the series, and there are a lot of easter eggs in those conversations – give it a listen if you have a few minutes!

Every investment, every factory, every startup, and every specialization of labor is fundamentally a bet on tomorrow. If people stop believing that tomorrow will be larger, they stop deploying capital and start protecting it.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is often reduced to the idea of the “invisible hand.” But the real engine in Smith’s work is productivity growth. His famous pin factory example shows how specialization dramatically increases output. Break a process into small tasks and let people get good at them. Suddenly one factory can produce thousands of pins a day instead of a handful. Multiply that dynamic across an entire economy and you get growth.

But for that to happen, people need to believe the future is worth investing in.

A merchant builds a factory because he thinks demand will grow. An engineer specializes because she thinks her skills will matter. An investor funds a startup because, against all statistical evidence, it might actually work.

Take away that optimism and the system stalls. Which means optimism is not just a nice cultural trait. It is economic infrastructure.

If capitalism depends on optimism, then societies need to create reasons for it. New technologies, ambitious companies, scientific breakthroughs, and visible progress all reinforce the belief that the future will be larger than the present (we’ve written a bit about this in the past). The job of builders, founders, scientists, and investors is to make that belief rational.

We first met Shaur as part of our initial investment in Northwood in 2023. When we asked a mutual friend about him, the friend was unequivocal—“Shaur’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. Also the kindest.”

Close to 3 years since that first interaction, our lived experience has proven that friend’s assessment remarkably accurate. In that time, he helped take Northwood from inception through a $100M Series B, scaling the org from 3 co-founders to over 60 FTEs. Last year, the market also took notice of his contributions, with him receiving the Matthew Isakowitz Rising Star award and being named to Forbes 30 Under 30.

From day one Shaur’s been generous with his time and network, sharp and thoughtful with his technical and market insights, and a staunch supporter of Also Capital and our broader community. Most importantly, he’s values-aligned with everything we stand for–high integrity, low ego, and finding joy in the daily grind of solving hard problems. Bringing him into the fold in a more intentional way was a no brainer.

Shaur joins Will, Colin, Jamie, and Daniela, our incredible group of Venture Partners whose lived experience helps them understand the challenges and complexity of building in Hard Tech. They’re an amazing resource to us and our portfolio companies as they navigate hiring, fundraising, strategy, and manufacturing at scale.

A fun fact about Shaur: at one point he served as a volunteer firefighter, graduating as valedictorian of his fire academy class – a small glimpse into the kind of intensity, commitment, and service mindset he brings to everything he does.

Welcome to the team, Shaur!

About Shaur

Shaurya Luthra is a technology leader and entrepreneur focused on solving one of the space industry’s most pressing challenges: scaling ground infrastructure to handle the rapidly increasing volume of satellite data. As Co-Founder and Head of Digital at Northwood Space, he is building software-defined ground networks that enable high-throughput, pervasive satellite communications at global scale.

Before founding Northwood Space in 2023 with Bridgit Mendler and Griffin Cleverly, Shaur worked on advanced space systems at Lockheed Martin Space and Capella Space. His career spans satellite communications, RF systems, and scalable aerospace software — all focused on enabling the next wave of commercial space innovation.

At Northwood, Shaur is driven by the belief that reliable, scalable space connectivity infrastructure is foundational to unlocking transformative applications for science, industry, and humanity.

Shaur’s dedication to meaningful impact has been recognized by the Matthew Isakowitz Foundation, where he was named a 2025 Rising Star and as a selection for Forbes’ 2026 30U30. His journey into space technology began with a strong sense of purpose instilled by his family and community after moving from India to the United States. He pursued his passion for space at Cornell University, earning both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Judgement is the ability to effectively allocate time, capital, and talent under uncertainty. Startups are information sparse environments. Data is incomplete and often misleading. Strong founders make directional decisions with imperfect inputs and adjust without flailing. They understand which variables matter and which are noise.

Character determines whether a founder takes responsibility or looks for cover. Things break. Revenue misses. Key hires leave. Good investors understand this. Character shows up in how founders respond to these pressures, conflicts, and setbacks. Teams can tolerate bad news. They cannot tolerate volatility at the top.

Integrity ensures that internal reality and external narrative align. Early stage companies run on trust. Investors, employees, and customers are betting on the person. If internal reality and external narrative diverge, trust erodes. Once that happens, everything becomes more expensive.

Ambition is the desire to build something meaningfully large and the stamina to pursue it over a decade. Not performative vision, but scale of intent.

Test for them early, look forward examples. And as a founder, hone this skills through your actions and reflection. It’s the real key to long term success!

Our first fund, a 2023 vintage, backed 14 core investments. These were intentionally concentrated, high conviction bets on engineering-led teams. Since our initial investments, those companies have generated significant momentum, including:

• Winning a $50M Space Force contract;

• Shipping optical hardware to customers;

• Earning feature coverage in The Economist; and

• Demonstrating emergent behavior in robotic systems.

Meaningful market validation has followed this early, but tangible, progress. Although this portfolio is less than three years old, all 14 core investments have raised at least one round of follow-on capital, totaling more than $260M in aggregate.

We run a concentrated strategy because we believe early-stage investing rewards depth over breadth. We aim to work closely with a small number of founders and support them aggressively as they scale. So far, that approach has been fruitful, and we believe this is just the beginning.

From a market perspective, we see this moment as the front-end of a much larger wave. Compute is accelerating solutions to unsolvable problems. Communication is expanding coordination globally and beyond. Autonomy is redefining what can be done without human constraint. These are the foundations of the next economic era. The convergence of these three forces will define the next generation of category-defining companies, reshaping national competitiveness, industrial capacity, and everyday life. This is the world we want to help build. And it’s why we’re scaling up.

With our second fund, we’re expanding our ability to back founders early and support them more deeply. We’ve grown the team and expanded our operational capacity to better serve the next generation of builders, from first check through follow-on rounds. Our goal remains the same: be high-conviction, day one partners to serious founders tackling hard problems.

We take our work seriously. We just don’t take ourselves too seriously. To celebrate our second fund, we decided to have a little fun with the announcement, so we made a movie poster celebrating our founders :)

Mesh’s initial product, the Alpha C1, is an optical transceiver that linearly translates electrical signals to light at 1.6 Terabits per second and delivers better power efficiency, lower latency, and higher reliability for AI workloads and power-constrained data centers and, critically, is designed and manufactured in Los Angeles, CA (cCheck out the production video here).

From the Mesh team:

“Photonics today often focuses on advanced design and treats high-volume production as a downstream exercise. That model slows the feedback loop between device physics, packaging, yield, and automation. At Mesh, we believe the future of photonics depends on integrating design and manufacturing under the same roof.”

Across our portfolio we’re heavily invested in the idea that the biggest winners in Hard Tech will be those that tighten the loop between design and manufacturing of complex systems. Doing so accelerates development and improves product design, and is the best way to rapidly meet the urgent demand for the building blocks of compute, communication, and autonomy that are the foundations of our economic future.

Above all, we invest in people, and Travis, Cameron, and Serena are incredibly special humans. Prior to co-founding Mesh, the team spent years at SpaceX building critical hardware and software control systems for inter-satellite links (ISLs), a key enabler of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation and their future ambitions for data centers in space. This work positioned them extremely well to start Mesh as it is one of the few domains demanding optical alignment and thermal stability comparable to optical interconnects like their Alpha C1.

Since raising their seed, they’ve quickly scaled the team to 15 people (a highly impressive SHIP (Speed of Hiring Impressive People) rate…) and began producing prototype units off their initial production line. Their technical leadership and vision has been amazing, and we’re excited to partner with them.

Congratulations to the Mesh team, we can’t wait to see what’s ahead!