Why I take founders on a 3-mile hike before writing a check
My team often jokes about the “Vulcan Mind Meld.” They say I need to share a brain with a founder before we can write a check. They aren’t wrong, but the process isn’t science fiction. It’s usually just a walk.
Specifically, it’s a walk to the Stanford Dish.
The path is a 3.5-mile loop in the foothills above the university. It’s steep, exposed, and offers little place to hide. I don’t take founders here for exercise. I take them here because the controlled environment of a boardroom practically demands rehearsed answers. The trail does not.
I don’t prepare a script for these walks. In fact, that’s the point. The pitch is already done; I know the metrics. Now I want to know the human. I want to build the trust required to hear the origin story—the raw, unpolished reason why a founder believes a worldview that everyone else thinks is misguided.
As we hike, I’m listening for that drive, but I’m also mapping their story against my mental framework.
The Map: Consensus vs. Contrarian
For me, every founder sits somewhere on a mental grid defined by two axes: Is your view consensus or contrarian? And if it’s contrarian, how and when will the world come around to your worldview? How will you be proven right?
Being in the consensus is a safe place. We can see this as we start the hike, looking down on the Valley. It looks safe, connected, and crowded.
In market terms, investing in the consensus, assuming good execution, still yields a market return. But because everyone else is doing the same thing, the excess returns are competed away. And if the consensus turns out to be wrong, you fail safely, alongside everyone else.
We are looking for the outliers. We want to find the founders starting in the lonely territory of contrarian. But the secret isn’t just standing there. The secret is movement.
The Incline: The Energy to Move
As the trail steepens, I’m thinking about movement. We don’t yet know if a contrarian founder is right or misguided. That’s the risk of my job. But the goal is to back founders whose conviction is strong enough to pull the rest of the world toward them—until what once looked contrarian becomes the new consensus. That journey, from lonely outlier to obvious winner, is where outsize returns are generated.
The energy required to make that journey is enormous. A founder must survive a long stretch where nearly everyone is convinced they’re wrong. Even if they are ultimately right, they look foolish for a long time. They look stubborn. They look unreasonable.
That’s why the incline matters. As we hit the steep part of the trail, the physical exertion acts as a kind of truth serum. You cannot maintain a polished persona when you’re breathing hard on a hill. I have seen brilliant executives with perfect pedigrees crumble here. In a conference room, their slide decks are flawless. On the hill, stripped of breath and polish, the camouflage falls away.
I’m listening for obsession—the kind required to survive that lonely stretch. When a founder stops selling and starts agonizing over a specific customer pain point, ignoring the discomfort of the hike because they’re so consumed by the problem, that’s the fuel that moves a market.
The Dish: Validating the Signal
Finally, we turn a bend and face the Dish itself—a massive, 150-foot radio telescope listening to the sky.
I have always thought of the Dish as a metaphor for the contrarian founder. It stands in silence above the buzz of Silicon Valley, tuned not to the noise below but to faint signals others miss—distant pulsars, quiet stars.
We are in a hype cycle right now where consensus is loud and expensive. There are 20 firms chasing every inference chip company. That is the noise. To back a founder, I need to believe they have found a signal in the silence—that they’re not building for the current cycle but have identified a fundamental truth that will eventually force the market to come to them.
The Return Loop
By the time we loop back to the parking lot, the Vulcan Mind Meld has either happened or it hasn’t.
The biggest risk in our business is not losing money on a failed startup; that downside is capped. The biggest risk is passing on a founder who successfully moves the world from contrarian to consensus. That lost opportunity is infinite.
You cannot identify that kind of conviction in a conference room. You have to climb a hill with someone to see if they have the strength to move a market.