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Infinite Games

2026-02-26 22:58:49

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

- James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Friends,

Evolutionary biology has the concept of “allopatric speciation,” the process that occurs when a species develops separately from those on the mainland. Saved from some evolutionary pressures and exposed to others, a vole, or reptile, or bird, becomes something different. To survive and thrive, it develops different strengths. In some cases, when the species is reintroduced to the mainland, it is strangely, superbly fit — able to compete, precisely because it does so differently.

In late 2023, I published what I considered one of The Generalist’s best pieces. It covered a little-known fund called Hummingbird Ventures, which had quietly delivered some of the best returns in the asset class, despite being founded in Belgium, far from the gravitational pull of Sand Hill Road. They had done so while actively shunning the spotlight whenever it happened to search in their direction, and by taking an approach that seemed devised from scratch, free of puffery or mimicry. More than any firm I’d studied, Hummingbird obsessed — and this was not merely hyperbole, but euphemism — over the psychology of founders.

Speak to Barend van den Brande or Firat Ileri for even a few minutes, and you can feel the speciation at work. The conversation moves in unexpected directions before landing on a counterintuitive truth; a discussion of a startup is liable to shift into Dostoyevsky, the functionality of the brainstem, or Orson Welles at any moment. Martin Amis, one of the great prose stylists of the last fifty years, decried the use of “herd words” — clichés and banalities dog-eared by overuse. The tech industry is a great rancher of this herd. Sit in a Palo Alto coffee shop, and you will hear different people have the same conversation, the same version of a conversation, in an infinite loop. With Hummingbird’s partners, I found none of it.

Even after I’d finished researching the firm and published my piece, it remained a creature of strange fascination to me. An odd, iridescent species zipping across the startup landscape to its own music.

Perhaps that is why, when Barend and Firat approached me about potentially joining the firm, I surprised myself. For six years, I had built The Generalist on the conviction that I am only truly myself inside a structure of my own design. When I thought of prior versions of myself, they always seemed ponderous and hazy by comparison. Because of that, similar approaches from funds to join forces over the years had been met with an automatic refusal. But, in this instance, for the first time, a refusal did not instinctively arrive. Intuitively, I sensed that rather than being forced to fit a certain form-factor, to evolve in a specific way, Hummingbird might actually sharpen what made me different rather than sand it down.

At the start of last year, I began working with Hummingbird as a venture partner. I saw it as the right way to deepen my investing craft, learn from what I considered to be the best founder-focused firm in the world, and for both sides to discover how we might work together more deeply.

Over the past twelve months, I’ve been struck by the depth of Hummingbird’s craft and how natural the collaboration has felt. I have come to appreciate what seemed like tiny nuances in a founder’s story, ask better, more interesting questions, explore the virtues of ambiguity, and stretch my thinking in new, unusual ways. Getting to do so alongside two superlatively interesting, high-integrity thinkers has been a genuine privilege.

It is because of this that I’m glad to share that I am joining Hummingbird as a partner. I believe very strongly that it is the best long-term home for my investing practice, and that Hummingbird is positioned to be one of the dominant firms of the coming decade.

Naturally, this raises the question of what happens to The Generalist. The answer: it remains 100% owned by me, and I intend to keep building it. Writing is not only a source of endless joy but also the way I do my best thinking. My hope is that my work with Hummingbird will sharpen my analytical lens and open the door to new people and stories to share with all of you.

But the partnership has also clarified something I’d already begun to feel about the kind of publication The Generalist should become. As our profile has risen, we’ve earned the ability to spend time with some of the most interesting organizations in the world and assess them with a depth and fidelity closed to outsiders. It’s only by taking this time that we’re able to produce series like “No Rivals,” our four-part chronicle of Founders Fund. The response from all of you validated the eighteen months I spent pulling this story together – it became our most popular work by an order of magnitude.

Increasingly, these are the projects I want to test myself against as a writer. My ambition has scaled alongside the publication, such that I want to focus on the biggest possible pieces, those I feel only I can write. (Ah, the ego of the writer!) As with “No Rivals,” these necessarily take a great deal of time and effort, involving long cycles of research and reporting. But they are what tests and intrigues me most. I have spent nearly a year studying what I think may be the most important company of our era, and I cannot wait to share it with you in the coming months.

A final consideration is the current publishing landscape. It is easier than ever to spin up a Substack and, with the help of AI, begin publishing passable articles or compilations. As the median becomes ever more crowded, I believe the optimal strategy for a publication like ours is to keep pushing toward the right tail. There can be thousands of publications that write thousand-word pieces on some aspect of startup culture, but very few will succeed in writing deeply researched, long-form epics of the most consequential organizations of our era. This is the version of the game I want The Generalist to play; to borrow designer Dieter Rams’ mantra: less, but better.

Of course, we will not only publish thirty-thousand-word series. In the coming months, I have several analyses of legendary entrepreneurs to share, alongside some thoughts on the venture landscape. On balance, though, you can expect to hear from us less often, while the work we publish grows in depth and value.

I’ve been thinking a lot about an Oscar Wilde quote that Barend introduced me to. Though Wilde is best-known for his witticisms, in this instance, he is pure profundity:

“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

It is, in a sense, an echo of Carse. A way of describing the value of fluidity and the importance of allowing oneself to be surprised. Over the course of my career, I have imagined many paths for myself, but the best have always felt like a mix of shock and inevitability. I would never have thought of running a newsletter, and yet, once I’d begun, it was strange that it had taken me so long. So many of the best things that have happened to the publication, to my investing, to my thinking have arrived from directions I didn’t anticipate. This is another. I look forward to sharing what comes next.

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Everyone Is Betting on Bigger LLMs. She's Betting They're Fundamentally Wrong. (Eve Bodnia, Founder & CEO of Logical Intelligence)

2026-02-24 21:03:32

“AGI should be just like natural intelligence. Something which plans, something which is able to predict, produce new knowledge, be cheap and efficient, and be adaptive to the environment. It should reason, it should not mimic.” — Eve Bodnia, Founder & CEO, Logical Intelligence

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Eve Bodnia is the co-founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, which is developing energy-based reasoning models (EBMs) as an alternative to large language models. She argues that LLMs, which operate by recognizing and recombining patterns within language space, are structurally incapable of genuine reasoning. Eve's alternative: Kona—an EBM that reasons in abstract latent space, learns rules about the world rather than surface patterns, and can interface with language models as one output channel among many. Eve traces the core ideas behind her architecture to decades of work in symmetry groups, condensed matter physics, and brain science—fields that share, as she explains, the same underlying mathematics. In a public demo, Kona solved a complex reasoning task for roughly $4 in compute, compared to an estimated $15,000 using frontier LLMs. With Yann LeCun serving as founding chair of its technical board, Logical Intelligence sits at the center of a small but growing effort to rethink AI beyond language-based models.

In our conversation, we explore:

  • Why Eve believes LLMs can’t truly extrapolate knowledge, even at larger scale

  • What energy-based reasoning models are—and where the “energy” concept comes from

  • The $4 vs. $15,000 benchmark, and what it tells us about the cost of guessing vs. knowing

  • How Logical Intelligence showed spontaneous knowledge transfer at just 16M parameters

  • Why systems like chip design, surgical robotics, and power grids need more than probabilistic AI

  • What formally verified code generation means for the future of programming

  • Why the math behind particle physics also explains how the brain filters signal from noise

  • How meeting Grigori Perelman as a teenager shaped Eve’s views on ego and ownership in science

  • Why Eve believes humans must remain the constraint-setters in advanced AI

  • How meditation, piano, and Eastern philosophy support her creative process

Thank you to the partners who make this possible

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Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction

(03:03) Eve’s encounter with Grigori Perelman

(05:38) Why bizarre people are Eve’s favorite people

(06:56) Her early obsession with math and physics

(09:02) The manifold hypothesis and language

(11:54) The Kekulé Problem

(14:05) Eve’s upbringing and her CERN research in high school

(17:40) Eve’s academic path

(20:36) Symmetry in nature

(22:58) Spirituality and creativity

(27:00) Theory vs. experiment

(29:03) Uncovering a critical gap in AI models

(33:45) What Logical Intelligence is building

(35:50) Logical Intelligence’s use cases

(42:08) Energy-based models explained

(45:06) LLMs vs. EBMs

(48:01) AGI defined

(51:22) Kona’s knowledge extrapolation

(53:20) The team behind Logical Intelligence

(58:09) Early investors in Logical Intelligence

(58:50) Feynman’s influence on Eve’s work

(1:01:15) How Eve sustains her creativity

(1:03:42) Final meditations

Follow Eve Bodnia

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eve-bodnia-351b41355

X: https://x.com/evelovesolive

Website: https://logicalintelligence.com

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

How Bolt Survived An 85% Revenue Crash And Became Europe's Ride-Hailing Champion (Markus Villig, Founder & CEO)

2026-02-19 21:03:12

“We don’t care that we’re from a small country. We’ve always had the view that if we work harder and [make] smarter decisions, we can beat [any] company in the world, regardless of how big they are.”

Listen or watch now on
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In 2013, on an Estonian island of just 10,000 residents, a teenager borrowed €5,000 from his parents and decided to take on Uber. Twelve years later, Markus Villig leads Bolt, a company operating in 50+ countries, generating nearly €3 billion in revenue, and standing as one of the only European tech companies competing at true global scale. Rather than going head-to-head with incumbents in their strongest markets, Bolt expanded through underserved cities, emerging economies, and overlooked segments of urban transport. When COVID erased 85% of its revenue in weeks, the company didn’t retreat; it staged a kind of corporate “eucatastrophe,” pivoting into food delivery across nearly 20 countries in what became a company-wide sprint. That same bias toward action now shapes Markus’s broader agenda: investing in defense tech for Estonia and Ukraine, pushing for capital markets reform, and advancing a contrarian thesis on autonomous vehicles.

In this conversation, we discuss:

  • How growing up in Soviet-occupied Estonia shaped Markus’s ambition and moral clarity

  • How Bolt’s European ethos and long-term focus on driver retention became a structural advantage

  • The marketplace models and capital discipline that allowed Bolt to outmaneuver better-funded rivals

  • Why Bolt found breakout success in African markets after failing in 12 Western countries

  • The 85% revenue collapse during COVID and the rapid food delivery pivot that reshaped the company

  • Bolt’s partnerships with Stellantis and Pony.ai and its long-term bet on autonomous vehicles

  • Why Ukrainian and Eastern European startups are often outperforming their Western peers

  • Markus’s blueprint for closing Europe’s tech deficit and building globally competitive companies

Thank you to the partners who make this possible

Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.

Explore the episode

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(03:32) How The Lord of the Rings shaped Markus’s worldview

(05:52) Bolt’s underdog story and its existential turning point

(10:22) Estonia’s startup DNA and its imprint on Bolt

(13:38) Europe’s ambition problem

(17:23) Europe’s defense tech gap

(23:09) The need for capital market reform in Europe

(25:13) Bolt’s origin story

(36:35) Frugality as strategy

(38:24) What running Bolt actually demands

(41:27) The hidden costs of being too lean

(42:50) Bolt’s shift to experimentation

(44:10) Bolt’s micromobility strategy

(45:50) How Bolt found the right markets

(50:44) The Serbian mob story

(54:00) Markus on venture capital and lessons from Klarna’s board

(55:40) Why Bolt never sold

(57:08) Bolt’s autonomous vehicle (AV) strategy and key partnerships

(1:05:50) The concept of culture-market fit

(1:07:48) How Bolt operates: writing, hiring, reading, and more

(1:13:15) Markus’s personal strengths

(1:14:15) What people get wrong about business

(1:16:27) Final meditations

Follow Markus Villig

X: https://x.com/villigm

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markusvillig

Resources and episode mentions

Books

People

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Subscribe to the show

I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Lessons of a First-Time Fund Manager

2026-02-05 23:47:00

Friends,

Four years ago, I set out to raise my first venture fund. The result was Generalist Capital, a $15 million vehicle to invest in a small collection of (hopefully) legendary companies.

The beginning of this year marks something of a turning point. After closing on a few investments, Generalist Capital officially moved from the deployment phase to management and harvesting. That makes it a fitting moment to share the lessons learned along the way. Though venture capital is awash in content, in my view, there’s too little introspective writing on the mental game of fund management. Below, you’ll find my attempt to distill the most important lessons I’ve learned so far. To that end, these are best seen as the lessons of a first-time fund manager, relating primarily to the challenges of starting a fund and establishing an initial viable strategy.

Naturally, the gravity of these lessons will depend on information I cannot give you: my long-term performance as an investor. It will likely take another six to ten years to discover how promising a portfolio I have built with Generalist Capital, and even longer to know definitively if I am any good. As of our last update to LPs, Generalist Capital was performing in the top 10-15% in its vintage, but the data suggests that it takes about six years for a fund to settle into its terminal quartile. There’s still a long way left to run and too much uncertainty to read much into this. I am afraid that this is the best I can offer you.

Let this serve as a reminder, then, if any were needed, that you should take my lessons with a grain of salt. I have achieved little, and every investor must learn to play their own game. Though I hope they spark new ideas for you, these are just the observations of one manager at the beginning of what I hope proves to be a long career.

  1. If this is your first time managing a fund, be extremely skeptical of your early investment urges. You’re probably overly keen to validate your existence to your LPs.

  2. The best companies can go under the radar for a long time. When other VCs asked which of my investments I was most bullish about, I told them freely. It still took several years for a Tier 1 firm to lead a round into the company.

  3. You do not have to wait for a round. If you have enough to offer a company, they’ll find a way to bring you aboard ahead of a formal raise. When you see a startup you love, try to make something happen.

  4. Don’t assume you know your level. New managers often think they can’t get access to rounds led by Tier 1 VCs. With the right pitch, you may be closer than you think.

  5. It’s very rare you see everything you want in a startup: founder, market, traction, and so on. When you do, write a much bigger check than you ordinarily would.

  6. The first investor has a unique relationship with a founder. You can build good relationships no matter when you invest, but the first check in earns a special level of trust.

  7. Contrary to what you might expect, the best companies are not easier to access as round sizes grow. Competition escalates as they succeed, often through late growth.

  8. The best investors often need little more than a sentence to explain why they’ve invested in a company. The longer and more convoluted your investment rationale is, the more skeptical you should be of it.

  9. Find your pace. A generation of managers has been conditioned to deploy vintages in 18-24 months. There is nothing wrong with taking twice as long, or more.

  10. Just because a deal is hot does not mean it is good. Don’t let other people’s urgency influence your desire.

  11. Remind yourself: the best venture firms in the world make a majority of bad investments. Don’t index on a buzzy name.

  12. Conversely, if some of the best investors in the world are backing a startup you don’t consider promising, look again, extremely closely. There’s a good chance you’re missing something important.

  13. Remember, the best investors in the world ≠ the best known investors. Calibrate accordingly.

  14. Don’t assume the best opportunities will land in your lap. Outbound sourcing is a necessity.

  15. Progress is never linear. A company that you had more or less written off can suddenly catch light, and one that was on a breakout trajectory can easily stall or stumble.

  16. Don’t push your anxiety onto your founders. It’s not your job to let them know of every new company that pops up in their space.

  17. If you’re asked for advice, give it honestly, but recognize that you have 0.01% of the context a founder has.

  18. Fight for every dollar. Getting an extra $10K into a breakout company can make a huge difference for a small fund.

  19. Founders respond to conviction. Earnestly explaining to an entrepreneur why you’re excited about their business and showing a desire to move quickly can overcome any number of natural disadvantages.

  20. Be skeptical of a pitch that looks too rational. Great companies often have something paradoxical about them. If something doesn’t quite make sense, that’s a good indication you should lean in, not out.

  21. Be careful you don’t get stuck correcting your last mistake. If you invested too little in a startup that has just started to break out, don’t triple the size of your next check to compensate. Consider each opportunity anew.

  22. If you’re not positioned to catch a wave, don’t chase it. You could burn an entire vintage on second-and third-rate AI companies.

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The Private Company Bringing Nuclear Enrichment Back to America (Scott Nolan, CEO of General Matter)

2026-02-03 21:03:34

“We [the U.S.] went from controlling something like 86% of global enrichment capacity to effectively last place.”

Listen or watch now on
YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

Roughly 20% of the U.S. power grid runs on nuclear energy. A quarter of the fuel behind it is headed toward a hard stop. In this episode, I sit down with Scott Nolan, founder and CEO of General Matter, to unpack why uranium enrichment has quietly become one of the most consequential industrial bottlenecks of the 21st century.

While at Founders Fund, Scott spent over a year searching for an American enrichment company to back. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to build it himself. Less than a year after emerging from stealth, General Matter secured a historic enrichment site in Paducah, Kentucky, and was awarded a $900 million Department of Energy contract—marking one of the first serious efforts to rebuild domestic enrichment capacity ahead of the 2028 ban on Russian supply.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • Why enrichment is the missing link in America’s nuclear supply chain

  • How the U.S. went from controlling 86% of global enrichment capacity to effectively none at commercial scale

  • The science behind uranium enrichment and why it matters for next-generation reactors

  • Why Scott applied the SpaceX playbook to nuclear after more than a decade in venture capital

  • How General Matter is revitalizing the historic Paducah, Kentucky enrichment site

  • The significance of General Matter’s $900 million Department of Energy contract

  • The bipartisan political support for expanding nuclear energy

  • Why Scott believes nuclear energy could grow 3-4x by 2050

  • The parallels between America’s space and nuclear industries

Thank you to our sponsor, Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.

Explore the episode

Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction to Scott Nolan

(02:24) General Matter’s mission to rebuild U.S. enrichment

(05:08) How the U.S. lost its edge

(06:24) The nuclear fuel cycle explained—and where enrichment fits

(08:31) Scott’s background: From SpaceX and Founders Fund to General Matter

(13:56) Lessons from SpaceX

(17:50) How Scott’s focus evolved over 13 years at Founders Fund

(21:00) How Scott landed on nuclear enrichment

(25:58) Why nuclear energy was off the radar—until recently

(30:10) Finding the right partner: Scott and Lee’s collaboration

(32:04) What downblending means and why it matters

(33:30) How U.S. uranium enrichment quietly came to an end

(38:34) The Russian uranium ban and the 2028 supply cliff

(40:38) How General Matter plans to compete

(43:09) Building a world-class team

(46:03) The market for enriched uranium

(49:30) Future bottlenecks

(50:56) What the U.S. needs to actually scale nuclear energy

(51:32) Uranium supply constraints

(54:16) LEU vs. HALEU: the fuels powering old and new reactors

(57:49) Why 20% enrichment is a critical threshold

(59:30) Why General Matter chose Paducah, Kentucky

(01:04:35) Legislation and executive orders easing nuclear friction

(01:07:06) The $900 million Department of Energy award

(01:11:08) Why mission matters most

(01:14:12) Final meditations

Follow Scott Nolan

X: https://x.com/ScottNolan

Resources and episode mentions

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I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

The Generalist’s Productivity Stack (2026)

2026-01-22 23:41:21

Friends,

Last January, on a whim, I shared a few of the productivity methods I’ve found effective in maximizing my output while building The Generalist. It was driven by a geekish obsession with tiny optimizations, a love for adopting niche tools, and a real belief that the environment you make for yourself impacts the work you are capable of.

To my surprise, it became one of The Generalist’s most popular pieces. With January in full swing and the year still stretching in front of us, I decided to sit down and outline the new tools and methods I’ve found effective over the past year. It turned into quite a collection. You’ll find 26 tools I recommend (both digital and analog) and 8 practices I’ve found invaluable.

I’ve avoided repeating last year’s recommendations (though I still use them), so if you’re as into these kinds of hacks and optimizations as I am, you may want to read that piece, too.

Tools

An exhaustive list of the programs, apps, extensions, and physical objects I recommend.

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