I'm very excited to share that I have joined Anorak Ventures, an early-stage emerging technologies fund. Our aim is to be the partner for seed-stage deep tech founders whose companies have a clear vision of how to push humanity forward.
“Vision” is an intentional word here. In building a business, it’s everything. I’ve been lucky to learn something about that over the last near-decade across strategy, product management, and most recently founding Avie AI.
At the DeepTech accelerator Entrepreneur First in London, where I started Avie, founding teams learned a mantra: “Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held.” That’s Alice Bentinck’s and Matt Clifford’s abstraction of how to never lose sight of your vision, while remaining adaptable enough on how to get there. We were regularly pushed to present our visions for the company we were building. It was clear, very early on, which companies were going to raise the money they needed, hire the team members they wanted, and sell to their target customers. Those companies had the most ambitious and clearest visions.
Perhaps surprisingly, the hardest businesses to build are often those with the greatest visions. Technical founders building frontier technologies in robotics, AI, VR/AR, and deep learning usually find it easier to envision how the world might be in a decade compared to an MBA building a B2B SaaS solution (no offense to those building brilliant, high-margin software businesses). From my experience at Avie AI, we never struggled with the question “How big could this be?” when we started. My co-founder and I had a deep belief that biometric data from multiple wearables was the future of preventative health and that chat interfaces would be the future of interrogating data sets (contrarian at the time), making it incredibly easy to present the size of the opportunity.
Since then, Avie partnered with and was eventually sold to the UK’s largest health and wellness retailer, a company that bought into our global vision. I, however, have become a “vision junkie” (trademark pending), hell-bent on finding those with the most grandiose visions for how the world can be in the future and supporting them in any way I can to make those visions a reality.
I met Greg Castle three years ago. He not only shared the perspective outlined above but had spent the previous five years supporting and investing in some of the most exciting entrepreneurs and their visions, including Oculus, Flexport, Mux, Anduril, Flock Safety, and Rec Room. So today, after moving to the Bay Area from London, I am incredibly excited to join forces with Greg and continue to find, fund, and support the most ambitious people and their visions for the future.
If you’re a founder with a clear and ambitious vision for your company and team, please get in touch at charlie@anorak.vc.