Extraordinary outcomes do not arrive evenly spread; they concentrate in a very few companies. A fund built to cover the field is built to miss them. So we run a deliberately small book — a handful of early-stage rounds a year — and when the evidence holds we double down rather than diversify away from our own judgment.
Note Fewer decisions, held harder.
Almost every category-defining company was built by someone the market had not yet certified to build it. Experience tells you where a founder has been; it is a poor guide to how fast they are moving. We look for the people doing the thing they are not supposed to be able to do, learning quickly enough to make the objection stale.
Note We read the slope, not the position.
Europe’s engineering depth means hard things can be built here for a fraction of the capital they require elsewhere. What has been scarce is not the talent but the distribution. We sit on both sides of that gap — Paris, Berlin, San Francisco — and treat the crossing as part of the company’s design rather than a later problem.
Note Built where building is cheapest. Sold where scale lives.
Over 200 limited partners stand behind this fund: operators who have scaled billion-dollar factories, executives running global corporations. They are not a logo wall. They are who a founder calls when a process fails at three in the morning, and the reason a first industrial customer takes the meeting.
Note Over 200 partners. On call, not on a slide.
Hard companies are not built in a straight line. They are built across a decade of turbulence that no plan survives, and the constraint is almost never the idea — it is whether the people can keep going. Our team came out of sport, music, operations and companies of our own. We know what the bad quarters feel like from the inside.
Note No plan survives the decade. People do.
A company’s ceiling is set by decisions taken long before anyone can see they matter: what to own, what to standardize, what to refuse. Ambition is not a personality trait here, it is architecture. We back founders who set that ceiling high on purpose, and we would rather be wrong about how big than right about small.
Note Wrong about how big. Never wrong about trying.