May 13, 2026
A thousand years ago a man named Han Yu wrote a single line that has outlived almost everything else from his time. There are always thousand-mile horses. There is rarely a Bo Le.
To understand the line you have to know the story.
Bo Le was a real man. His name was Sun Yang. He lived long before Han Yu, and he was the best horse evaluator anyone had ever seen. The king gave him one task. Find a horse that can run a thousand miles in a single day.
He went from state to state looking. He found nothing. The fast horses were not fast enough. The strong ones could not last. He kept going.
One day on a back road he passed a horse pulling a salt cart up a hill. The horse was thin. Its ribs showed. It was worn down from hauling weight it was never meant to haul. Everyone who walked past saw a tired animal at the end of its use. Bo Le saw a thousand-mile horse.
He bought it on the spot. He brought it home, fed it, rested it, and let it recover. Then he presented it to the king. The king did not believe him. So they ran it. The horse covered a thousand miles in far less than a day, exactly as Bo Le had said it would.
The horse did not become great when Bo Le found it. It was great the whole time. It was great while it was dying slowly in front of a salt cart, because nobody who walked past had the eyes to see what it was.
That is the part people miss. The tragedy is never the horse. The horse exists. The tragedy is the absence of the person who can see it.
Notice what Bo Le actually did. He did not point and walk away. He saw it, he bought it, he brought it back to strength, and then he put it in front of the one person who could give it somewhere to run. Recognition was the first act. It was not the job.
This is why, in China, Bo Le came to mean something specific. Not someone with talent. Someone who recognizes it in others, early, before it shows, and gives it a chance to run.
When people meet someone who made it, they ask the wrong questions. What did you build. Where did you go to school. I have learned to ask a simpler one. Who was your Bo Le?
Ask anyone who became who they were meant to become and there is always an answer. A teacher. A first boss. A stranger who replied to the cold email. One person who saw it early. Nobody arrives alone.
This firm exists to be that person. To find the thousand-mile horses while they are still pulling salt, and to back them before the world can see what we see.
That is talent investing. Everything after this is detail.
The world does not have a talent shortage. It has a recognition shortage.
Every generation produces more extraordinary people than the last. More minds, more range, more raw capability pouring out of more places than any sorting system was built to handle. And every generation, most of them are missed. Not because they hid. Because nobody was looking where they came from, with eyes trained to see what they actually were.
Understand what a salt cart is. It is not failure. The horse was working. The horse was working hard. It was simply pulling something far beneath what it was built to pull, and it would have done that until it died, and the loss would have been invisible to everyone including the horse.
That is the ordinary condition of talent. Not idleness. Waste.
Talent comes first here. Before thesis, before sector, before stage, before whatever this quarter's narrative happens to be. We do not start with markets and look for people to fill them. We start with people and trust them to find the markets that matter. Every decision this firm makes runs through that filter first.
We back people early. Earlier than is comfortable.
Credentials are a lagging indicator. By the time someone is legible to the institutions that grant approval, the alpha is gone. The OpenAI offer, the Thiel Fellowship, the tier one seed round. These are receipts for value already created. We are not interested in receipts.
Slope over credential. Trajectory over title. Rate of change over current position.
A nineteen year old whose side project has ten thousand users is worth more than a thirty year old who has been promoted four times. Someone who taught themselves the frontier is worth more than someone who waited for the frontier to be assigned. We are not anti-credential. We are pre-credential. We commit before the world agrees the person is worth committing to, because once the world agrees, the bet is no longer ours to make.
We bet on the out of distribution.
Henrique Dubugras taught himself to code at twelve to pirate a video game, had the cease and desists by fourteen, and built Brex at twenty-one. Vitalik Buterin cried himself to sleep over a World of Warcraft nerf at fifteen, decided centralization was the enemy, and built Ethereum at nineteen. Palmer Luckey turned his garage into an electronics lab, burned a permanent blind spot into his own retina with a laser, and reinvented VR before he could legally drink. Daniel Ek was running a twenty-five person web shop out of his bedroom at thirteen, paying classmates in pizza.
Wrong country, wrong age, wrong school, wrong family, wrong moment. Every one of them was dismissible right up until they were inevitable.
The most consequential people in any field were strange before they were great. The strangeness was not in spite of the greatness. It was the source of it. Whatever made them impossible to place in a normal sorting system is usually the same thing that made them capable of the work nobody else could do.
The system was built to screen them out. We were built to find them, while they are still strange.
We back our friends. This is not sentiment. It is the strategy.
The people around us are the next generation of founders. Not the ones who will be. The ones who already are. We have been in the rooms, at the dinners, on the late night calls, in the group chats, at the poker table. We know who is going to build the consequential companies of this decade because we have been watching them for years, in conditions where nobody was performing for an investor.
That is the part that cannot be bought. You cannot diligence your way to knowing how someone behaves at 2am when the thing is broken and there is no audience. You either were there or you were not.
Some funds treat proximity as a conflict. We treat it as the entire point. The best founder bets are the ones you would have made on the person before they were a founder at all.
Talent is finite. Recruiting is a life's work.
There is a finite number of generationally talented people alive at any given moment. Finding them, knowing them, earning the right to back them. That is the whole game. Everything else is downstream.
So we do not run this as a numbers game. No pipelines, no templates, no measuring ourselves by volume of meetings or response rates or how many people we touched this quarter. That is a different business that happens to use the same verbs.
Recruiting, done seriously, changes the trajectory of a person's life. The right introduction at twenty-two compounds for forty years. The right company at the right moment is the difference between someone becoming who they were always going to be and someone spending a decade in the wrong room. We have seen it firsthand. A single conversation, a single placement, a single person picking up the phone for someone they did not have to. These are the hinges careers turn on.
We take that seriously because we have been on the receiving end of it.
So we spend the time. We build relationships over years, not quarters. We follow people across continents and companies and life stages, remember the seventeen year old before they become the twenty-seven year old, and stay close through the bad years that the rest of the market only shows up for during the good ones. We will be the ones who picked up the phone first, and the ones who never stopped picking up.
This is not a transaction. It is a vocation. The compounding belongs to whoever is actually willing to do it, and almost nobody is.
This is not a venture fund. It is not a recruiting agency. It is a talent investing firm.
The distinction matters. A venture fund picks companies. A recruiting agency places people into companies that already exist. We identify the people we believe in and then invest in them, represent them, place them, build around them, fund them, and stay with them across whatever shape their career eventually takes. The company is one expression of the person. There will be others.
Capital is a commodity. Representation is not.
Michael Ovitz did not represent the eleventh best actor in Hollywood. He represented the franchise, and he represented it across decades and mediums and deals nobody else could imagine. The capital was incidental. The representation was the moat.
We are agents for the people we believe in. We open doors, put them in rooms, defend their reputations, and introduce them to their next ten years before they have arrived at their next ten months. The check is the smallest thing we offer.
Which means the founder is the main character and we are not. This is easy to say and hard to live, because the whole gravity of this industry pulls the other way. Investors put their faces on the fund, their names on the deal, their takes on the timeline. We are choosing the opposite. We carry the bags, make the calls, and stay out of the frame. The work is to make the person we believe in more themselves, not more like us.
When one of our founders is on a stage in fifteen years, we do not want to be standing next to them. We want to have been there early, and we are happy for almost nobody to know it.
We do not hedge.
Most funds spread risk because they are managing other people's anxiety. We are not. We make concentrated bets on a small number of people we believe in absolutely, and we go deeper than is comfortable on each one. A portfolio designed to look reasonable to a committee will produce reasonable returns. We are not here for reasonable.
But we should be honest about what that costs, because a manifesto that only describes the upside is marketing.
Concentration means most of these bets will not work. Not might. Will. We will be wrong about people, and being wrong about a person is heavier than being wrong about a market, because a person remembers what you believed about them. We will pass on someone who becomes enormous, and we will do it more than once, and we will have had good reasons every time. We will spend years on relationships that never become anything, and we will not get those years back.
We accept all of it. The only failure we refuse is dilution. Being a little bit involved with many people is the one outcome that guarantees we are nobody's Bo Le.
And we will be here for the full arc. Not one fund cycle. Not two. We will back the second company before the first one has failed. We will introduce the cofounder, the first hire, the late stage investor, the engineer who saves the company in year four. We are building an institution, not a vintage. The point is not to be right this year. The point is to be the person they call in year fifteen.
We owe everything to people who bet on us before we deserved it.
To the founders who let us in early and trusted us with the most important hires of their lives. To the LPs who backed a first time fund on conviction and a few pages, who wrote the check on the person and not the track record. To the talent who took the call, took the leap, walked into a room we put them in and made it their own. None of this exists without you. We know it, and we will spend decades proving we were worth the bet.
Every person worth backing was once a person nobody was backing. Every fund worth running was once a fund nobody believed in. We intend to keep remembering that long after it stops being true of us.
The point is not to be right. The point is to be early, generous, and useful to the right person at the right moment. The returns follow. They always have.
The horses are out there. They are always out there.
We are the ones who go looking.