Launching Irreverent Capital

A fund that builds important businesses.

“If the culture is heavily infused with respect and worship of ancient wisdom so that any intellectual innovation is considered deviant and blasphemous, technological creativity will be similarly constrained. Irreverence is a key to progress” - Joel Mokyr

What is Irreverent and Why I’m Starting It

Irreverent is a fund that builds important businesses, similar to ARCH Venture Partners, Shaper Capital, and 8VC Build. We are currently working on several theses and will start by building one company in 2025, likely with one great partner.

This model is the fund of the future, and I find it inspiring for reasons that follow below. I will start many companies with the venture creation model over the next 50 years and Irreverent will be a proper vehicle to do so. 

Vision

In 2024, The United States faces many challenges, including a lagging military-industrial complex and rising geopolitical conflict, difficulty finding skilled labor, and the continued lack of understanding of the human condition. 

On a more optimistic note, technological advancements today enable us to solve more problems than ever before. New solutions can be created daily and much of the world will look incredibly different 5, 10, and 50 years from now as the impact of technology grows exponentially.

The Bottleneck to Progress is Innovation

The main lever for progress in an industrial society is technical innovation. However, many ambitious people are working on problems that don’t move the needle for the next generation or are working within likely, structured systems that don’t innovate.

The future must be pioneered by everyday citizens individually choosing to solve important problems. Richard Hamming of Bell Labs asks us, 

"What's the most important problem in your field right now? How come you're not working on it?" 

A Cultural Solution

Startups have taught me that culture is critical. Values such as irreverence, curiosity, agency, and industriousness are necessary to challenge the status quo. While the demand for new solutions remains high, the supply of innovators and courage is relatively low. Irreverent will build upon this inefficiency. 

Lessons From Shaper Capital

After joining Shaper Capital at the ground floor, I learned great lessons from the incredibly smart and nice people that I worked with. It was the best job I’ve ever had, and I left a better person and professional. Many of these lessons are also documented in the Medium Essays of Travis May.

My experiences over the past year have shaped my view on velocity, culture, impact, venture creation, and the future that should exist.

“Shaper was built on the philosophy of Shaperism, the belief that individuals can shape the world for the better. Too many people are too quick to accept perceived constraints and don’t deeply believe they can change the world; they view outcomes as luck or destiny. Yet much of the world we live in was built by shapers who believed in exceptionalism and believed that they could change the future — and worked relentlessly to shape it.” 

What Irreverent Will Do

Irreverent is a venture creation firm that will launch one company per year. Launched portfolio companies will lean into cultures of execution and focus. We will tackle industry-agnostic problems using AI and Middleware that:

(1) we are well-positioned to solve

(2) have strong business economics 

(3) are important for society

(4) are not popular and largely ignored 

Problems Our Model Will Solve

1. Focus: Human focus is the most misallocated resource on Earth. The bottleneck of progress is hard work, agency, and great engineering. 

2. VC Model: The venture capital model is broken. VC is oversaturated, incrementalist / lacks conviction, and investing has continued trending downstream. The best way to win the deal is to create it.

3. Broken Risk Calculus: Many people miscalculate the risk of entrepreneurship. Impact is an equally important consideration.

4. Structure: Many large companies impose too much structure, which hampers the ability to create and the freedom for individual growth. Both of which are crucial to new companies.

5. Equity: Humans are meant to have heavy equity in solving important problems they are all-in on.

Irreverent Capital Structure

Irreverent will have three arms. We are high-conviction and are comfortable making big bets. 

We are not a VC. We build important companies and often partner with a great entrepreneur, academic, or company. We focus on maintaining lean, high returns and expand at the rate we can maintain density of culture. We will not take outside capital until the model is proven. 

“Reflexivity”

Money runs the world, technology changes it, and we use both. Our companies reinforce our fund and our fund reinforces our companies. We reinvest our winnings.

1. The base layer and first arm of Irreverent will be a liquid capital base meant to be the soil in which we spring new companies. This will be the least important arm of the company.

2. The second arm is a venture investment arm that makes rare, insider, opportunistic investments in early-stage companies in which we have high conviction. 

3. The venture creation arm will be the cornerstone of our fund. We will operate lean. We will consistently build strong companies.

2025 Onward

Society faces more problems than it can field. Irreverent Capital will play a role in shifting the culture to solve them.  

We will recruit a deep bench of partners to join us in engineering the future that should exist. Working with Irreverent means maximizing your growth and impact on the world.

More information to come through the rest of 2024.

If you are incredibly curious, ambitious, and a bit irreverent, we would love to speak with you.

Contact: jonathan@irreverent-capital.com