Cantos and Chicken Sexing
Joining Cantos & Investing in the American Dynamism Cinematic Universe
I recently left the American Dynamism team at a16z.
I’ll always cherish my time there, and be grateful for David and Katherine taking a chance on me; I will miss spending time with all of my former colleagues, and I want to also thank the founders we partnered with — together they all make Andreessen Horowitz so special.
In the ensuing few weeks since leaving, I’ve been busy moving across the country and saying Farewell to Fun Island.
I’m excited to finally share the big news: I will continue investing in frontier categories at the pre-seed + seed stages with Cantos. I’m thrilled to join Ian, Amee, and Natalie.
Before I talk more about Cantos, I want to quickly talk about chicken sexing.
Chicken Sexing
Venture is a lot like chicken sexing — it's really challenging, there’s no clear right or wrong answer, and you operate in an environment of incomplete and ever changing information.
The reason I know so much about chicken sexing is because I spent over a month researching and writing about it. I admit it is an odd comparison, but one I feel very strongly about. From Chicken Sexers:
The reason chicken sexing is interesting is because it strongly aligns with founder picking. Both disciplines operate in the confines of extreme variance and uncertainty, and both require meticulous observation and years of practice. And in each domain the guiding metric is picking precision.
You can read all the literature you want, but you can’t become a great chicken sexer unless you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, do the work, and get messy while doing it.
The end result is that most investors don’t want to be real chicken sexers. They just want to follow easy rules. The reason people like Tom Brady are drafted 199 in their draft class is because most people aren’t good at evaluating talent. They never learned, nor cared to be, great chicken sexers.
The only problem is that this entire game is about outliers, about people that don’t fit into the rules. It’s not feather sexing (if this, then that). Which means only the vent sexing approach will work. And that requires the most focus, practice, and experience.
This is undoubtedly hard. No question about it. Though I’m equally aware that the real work begins after you partner with a founder. You’re stepping into a new chapter of their story. You’re a guide on what will be an eventful, hopefully heroic journey.
That brings us back to Cantos.
Cantos and Quests
A constant thread through history is our desire to distill and share great acts of triumph.
The Greeks have Homer’s The Iliad & The Odyssey; Romans have The Aeneid; Persians have The Shahnameh; and Indians have The Mahabharata. The list of Epics goes on.
The world has changed, and yet some things remain the same. Our desire for stories of toil and triumph, of sacrifice, persistence, and victory — persists. Superhuman feats of willpower and spirit still deeply speak to us.
In many ways, the Cantos team considers startups the modern day Epic, each filled with their own tales of devotion, perseverance, and ascendancy. We believe founders are on a Heroes Journey. And we want to be dutiful companions on that path.
Definitionally, cantos are sections that provide breaks in an epic poem. They’re the chapters in the story.
Our firm is very much founded on this idea.
Here at Cantos, we want to be involved in the very first canto in your epic — the first chapter in what we hope will be a marvelous and glorious story. Our team deeply believes in supporting founders, and we specifically want to be the first investors to join you on your quest to greatness.
Not all quests are alike. Focus is a superpower, and we specifically focus on backing founders building in the Near Frontier. We want to back startups changing the world.
Some call it deep tech. We think of it as Near Frontier. We believe these companies have the best shot at improving billions of lives, and our planet. We partner with them from day one.
I’ve known Ian, Cantos’ founder, for a while now. We’ve worked together on a number of companies, and also collaborated informally on many others.
Ian shares a devotion to chicken sexing, even if he doesn’t exactly call it that. We, along with the rest of the team, believe in working closely with people as early as possible, and are comfortable taking chances on people that might not otherwise get one.
As I’ll discuss below, this is really important to me, because it’s the only reason I’m in venture to begin with.
The American Dynamism Cinematic Universe
Many people have asked me what I will specifically be investing in at Cantos. I like to say I’m staying in the American Dynamism Cinematic Universe.
The ADCU has quite a large surface area. It entails basically anything that touches huge parts of our lives (and GDP), that hasn’t really been touched by technology yet.
Usually there are many reasons why that is the case, and there are many reasons why it’s all changing. Whether you look at the world through COVID, Climate, or Geopolitical Conflict, the world is getting a lot weirder. And with that comes opportunities to finally change the status quo for the better. We’re on the cusp of profound, radical change thanks to a lot of technologies — both new and old.
In some cases we invest in technological breakthroughs, but we also invest in people taking fairly mature technologies that are finally bringing them to forgotten industries. We invest in robotics foundation models & micro nuclear reactors, and we also invest in computer vision for fish processing.
So to summarize: I’ve joined Cantos, and am looking at everything that upgrades the physical world.
Believing Before Others Understand
When I joined a16z, I published my set of personal mantras I wanted to live my venture career by:
GG's Pillars: -Be the bar -Become a plus one -Ensure you’re the dumb one -Remember who the Heroes are -Believe before others understand
I specifically want to call out the last one, because it’s often the most important. If you want to accomplish anything consequential in life, you need help. Sometimes it can be difficult to find it.
In my case, it was a long and arduous path to break into venture. Which is why I’ll always be grateful to Susa and a16z.
Susa accepted me into their Venture Fellowship Program, welcoming me into the venture ecosystem and advocating for me. Katherine and David at a16z took this further; they brought me onto the American Dynamism team, mentored me, and helped me become a better partner to amazing founders. All because they were willing to take a chance on me.
The reason I bring all this up is because this is what I strive to do for founders. Many people just need a chance. Once they get it, they’ll almost undoubtedly be successful. All it takes is someone saying yes.
I’m now in a position to do that, and I don’t take it lightly. The pillars above hopefully illustrate that I try to be thoughtful, deliberate, and considerate of that.
I’m hopeful that in a few decades, if you ask the founders I’ve worked with, they’ll say I was someone that made a difference. Not because I need the personal gratification, but because I know how hard it is to try to break in when no one is helping you. I’ll give you that helping hand.
Our goal at Cantos is to be your first partner, and help you gather an ever growing contingent of supporters as you aim to transform the world.
We believe, before others understand. And belief, more than anything, is often all someone needs to get that momentum started. When that momentum snowballs, we’ll be able to look back together and reflect on how far you’ve come.
Creators make things that did not previously exist. They make companies and paintings and songs. They even make other people. If there is one unique characteristic that sets the human animal apart from other species, it’s that a human can envision a different world and then work to create it.
— Donald Miller, Hero on a Mission
Serving Others
I’ll end this piece the same way I ended Words To Live By, because even after a few years, it still rings true:
People like to say venture capital is filled with long feedback loops. That’s obviously true for your track record, but in many ways that’s a trailing indicator of something far more important that’s immediately within your control: your reputation. And that’s not earned in decades, it’s earned in seconds.
How we comport ourselves is our own prerogative. Everyone has their own approach.
Mine starts with founders. And those are the words I choose to live by.
If you’re a founder, you know where to find me, along with the rest of the Cantos team.
In the meantime, I’ll be chicken sexing.
See you out there,
GG
“But you, brave and adept from this day on, there’s hope that you will reach your goal, the journey that stirs you now is not far off.”
– The Odyssey