Your Window Into the Innovation Economy

Jensen Huang recently suggested that “AI is about to change everything.” Whatever changes AI may bring to investment management, the regulatory standards remain the same. Those familiar rules mean that AI’s new frontiers in financial advertising include pitfalls and traps for the unwary.

For as long as humans have been human, we have been investors — not in the financial sense, but in the way we allocate our time, attention, belief, and collective effort. Before capital markets existed, we poured resources into the experiences that mattered most: temples to sport and skill, theaters to story and song, forums to gather and debate, libraries to learn and preserve, gardens to restore and delight. These were not just cultural institutions. They were the earliest marketplaces of human experience. Across every culture and era, the same instincts have shaped human progress: the desire to move, to express, to belong, to grow, and to savor life. Technology evolves. Capital evolves. Human nature does not.

AI doesn’t just change interfaces — it rewrites cognition. The companies that embed into daily routines and earn behavioral lock-in will become the next category-defining platforms. This is our thesis on why experience ↔ behavior fit creates the modern moat.

In the world of venture capital, our reality is governed by a mathematical principle that defies the intuition of the broader financial markets: the Power Law. While traditional equity investors often cite the “80/20 rule,” venture capital operates on a far more extreme distribution, typically closer to 95/5.

If you opened Google, scrolled on Instagram, streamed a YouTube video or a Netflix show last night, or ordered lunch on DoorDash, you’ve touched the Stanford ecosystem. The world knows the legend of the “PayPal Mafia.” Early PayPal employees went on to found generational companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Palantir. But there’s a deeper pattern at work. The most prolific “mafia” in tech history didn’t emerge from a single company. It emerged from a single campus: Stanford University.