We learn what we want to become — Venture capital can be a solo, transactional game. Meeting founders, building conviction, and making a case to an investment committee before allocating capital. Some firms learn how to exploit the aggregated super-power of their whole group to discover unique investments and unlock value. What we don’t talk about enough is…

We just gathered as a Main Sequence portfolio and learned a lot from each other. — We recently hosted Peerless — an annual gathering of the Main Sequence portfolio. We haven’t done this at scale, in the same room since the pandemic and thank goodness we are back! Most of this session was under Chatham House Rules, so I can’t tell you about most of the…

Empty seats and no moderator. Trust me. — Portfolio days in venture capital firms can be transformative … or excruciating. Taking a whole day out of building a business is a big ask of a startup founder, so it matters to me that we strive for the transformative. Founders don’t want to be lectured to or attend ‘startup…

At Tech23, we flexed our imaginations to position our companies with the wind on our backs. — Some people think it is futile to think about the future because however hard we try to predict what will happen, that’s not what happens. Well, that’s true. But. Imagining stories about what might happen allows us to explore different possible futures, both opportunities and threats. We can throw what…

Get your team thinking ‘on rails’ towards building a big company from science — The very, very hard thing Making a company out of science is hard. Really hard. There’s just more to know and more to do than other kinds of company. Before we have even got started, we are probably staring at a near-and-present ‘Valley of Death’ that comes because it's taking too long to get to…

The first tool in our new Venture Science Toolkit — The purpose of the tool When we imagine the future, we tend to think in linear steps. The problem is the world doesn’t work this way. Change happens in a fractal pattern where billions of people and events react with each other to bounce the world into a new future. This is a future our…

Main Sequence is hiring again — are we looking for you? — You might be surprised about what makes a great VC. In Main Sequence we have engineers, product managers and doctors as well as experienced VCs who have helped build the Australian venture system from the earliest of times. Me, heck, I’m an ex-theatre director. None of us have got here…

Deep tech (or frontier tech, as it is sometimes called) will be a mainstream venture category in the near future. There is still plenty of SaaS investing to be done, but I think we’ve passed the peak of digitising real-world workflow, media, and commerce. Alpha lies elsewhere. SaaS investors must look at deep tech The next waves…

No two deep tech investors are the same. Some are very technical, trained in science and able to go deep into the foundations of an invention. Some are from entirely different backgrounds. It is helpful to understand the science, but it is not core because we are investors, not scientists…