AI makes the path of least resistance very easy. Ask, accept, ship. Fewer people stop to question fundamentals, and fewer are comfortable sitting with ideas that conflict.
Progress has often come from exactly that discomfort. Holding two incompatible ideas long enough to find what reconciles them is a deeply human skill, and the one machines are least built for. A purely engineering-driven culture reaches for precision where none exists, and searches where the light already shines.
The founders we back can work in the dark. They can hold a contradiction, see the value that can’t be counted, and still have the technical skill to build.
Tabula rasa is a blank slate. We back founders who arrive with a full one.
Read the full thesisWho we back
The humanities and a technical field.
- Trained in the humanities or the artsClassics, philosophy, literature, history, art, music or design.
- With real technical depthA second major, minor or master’s in computer science, math, physics or engineering.
- A student or recent graduate starting a first companyAt the universities that teach both at the highest level.
The degree is a rough proxy. What we are really looking for is a founder who is comfortable with contradiction, and who knows that not everything of value can be measured.
Signal and noise
What we look for.
Signal
- Six coherent pages on a hard idea
- An argument made, then argued against
- A question nobody assigned you
- Work in two fields that don’t usually talk
Anti-signal
- Optimizing only what can be measured
- A perfect sleep score
- Certainty where the evidence is thin
- Looking only where the light already shines
Write to us
Send us six pages.
No deck required. Tell us what you are building, why it matters and why now, in writing. Argue against yourself somewhere in those pages. If you have a thesis, a paper or a body of work you are proud of, send that too.
Write to us