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This Spring my co-founder Jenny Fielding and I expanded the scope of The Fund to be everywhere, and rebranded as Everywhere Ventures. What started as a New York experiment had expanded beyond the five boroughs to six continents, so it was time we zoomed out to articulate the scope of our portfolio and ambition.
Over the last months we’ve continued to invest across what we call the “Table Stakes Economy,” namely the three pillars of Money, Health and Work. When looking at our portfolio of 250+ companies we recognized that out of broad complexity were three themes driving the world around us; the future of money, health, and work. Around these three themes emerge new trends and new forms of consumer behavior.
Particularly around the future of work we see a bifurcation in how individuals and organizations interact. The traditional model has put the individual as subservient to the organization. The emergent model puts the individual as owner of the organization. This atomization of productivity is putting individuals as owners of organizations, of companies, of tools, rather than people as the instruments or employees of companies. This fundamental inversion of work is interesting to us, and we’re investing both around tools making organizations more internally efficient in these hybrid (in-person and digital) collaboration environments, and also in the new platforms enabling individuals to escape and then command their own organization.
Finalis is one good example of this. What started as a regulatory filing platform for independent broker-dealers has become a marketplace of loose collections of broker-dealers sharing access to moments of monetization (deals, sales, originations). In much the same way that a home construction project, a circus, or a movie might come together with a loose but independent assortment of skilled practitioners (gaffers, directors of photography, sound technicians, wardrobe designers, etc) Finalis is now enabling brokers and dealers to assemble their own crews to do deals independent of larger organizational structures. Technology is enabling the rapid agglomeration and disassembly of loose-ties, and thus obviates the need for permanent organizations as bodies which attempt to monopolize particular strong ties under one roof.
We’re looking for businesses like Finalis that enable this atomization of productivity across not just investment banking, but every industry that can be disassembled.
In many ways I call this the rise of the “Thin Company,” thin because the headcount need not monopolize all strong ties, but rather simply some digital tools that enable rapid assembly and disassembly of skills around a given need in time. Thin Companies are also enabled by the rise of AI which amplify human skills, and enable a business of one to project greater strength and productivity than ever before. Since the 1950s pundits have debated artificial intelligence (AI) versus intelligence amplification (IA), and I for one am in the camp of the latter. IA is going to supplement and enhance human skills rather than replace us, and the consequence will be a 10-100x increase in the productivity of IA adopters, stewards, and masters.
Check out our new podcast, Venture Everywhere, to hear more thoughts weekly. The premise is that we’ll have founders interviewing founders, showcasing in a many-to-many way, our portfolio and its diversity across stage, sector, and geography.
Season One Episodes:
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