Philosophy

Invest in high-integrity founders making products people love and that our LPs will be proud to back. We talk a lot about ethics at Loup Ventures. Debate might be a better term. The themes we invest in — AI, robotics,…

A while back, I laid out an argument for why I think neurotechnology is an important and compelling field: it entails investigating, fixing, and enhancing the brain—the substrate of human phenomenological existence. Here, I want to discuss the ethics of…

Happy belated Thanksgiving. One of our four closely held values is what we call intentional generosity. We believe that giving with a purpose is a powerful tool for good. It’s baked into the venture capital model and baked into our…

Two weeks ago, I tested using a distraction-free iPhone – no social media, no email, no entertainment, no news, and no web browser. I loved it so much that I named the device the “Good Phone” in my settings. I don’t think I’ll ever go…

Technology is neither purely good nor evil. At Loup, we remind ourselves of that construct often, especially when discussing social media as it seemingly moves across the spectrum toward evil from good. If Facebook is truly committed to being a…

A couple weeks ago, Loup Ventures went phoneless. We turned off our iPhones and tested Apple Watches as our only source of connectivity. That experience was both freeing and frustrating. There were times when more connectivity would have been useful,…

Loup Ventures went phoneless last week. That is, some of the Loup team turned off our iPhones for a full week and only used Apple Watches for connectivity. It was freeing. And frustrating. Tech addiction is something we’re spending a…

Elon Musk’s desire to win every battle may cost him the war. Last week, in an attempt to achieve some mental “victory” against the SEC after settling charges related to his go-private tweet earlier this year, Musk needled the agency…

Smartphones have made us superhuman by bestowing on us the intelligence of the world’s information at our fingertips persistently; however, few would disagree that our omnipresent devices also create undesirable outcomes. We spend so much time on our phones that…

We pride ourselves on contrarian curiosity. When that curiosity leads us to new conclusions, we change our minds. As part of that exploration, the areas that we find most interesting evolve over time. What was once frontier eventually becomes commonplace.…

As a former stock analyst turned VC, I still spend time thinking about public company investment opportunities. To that end, I recently read Seth Klarman’s Margin of Safety, a hard to find, but very insightful book about value investing. The…

Our conference room has a small library. In it are 19 books (so far) that are important to us in some way, be it a gift, a guide, a reminder, or a fundamental truth. We also have a small shoe…