The State of Adventure (Capital)
Launching the SOA website
Last year, we published a 286 slide deck on the State of Adventure Capital.
We never really took the opportunity to write out our thoughts behind why we built it.
Every technological era has new knowledge frontiers. What worked for the Dotcom era was distinct from mainframes and PCs. What worked for SaaS and Internet 2.0 differed from Internet 1.0. And what works for AI is different than what came before.
This is a law of physics for technology and investing. What worked then probably won’t work now. It’s evolution. Adapt or die. Only the paranoid survive.
The same is true for hardware. It’s really hard, and materially different than prior paradigms.
We need new taxonomies, frameworks, and playbooks for building in the physical world. You can’t do the Lean Startup SaaS playbook. You can’t pivot your way to greatness here. You might be able to move fast and break things (though if you’re a robotic surgery startup you definitely shouldn’t). Hence, why this project was born.
(Ad)Venture
Names are important. Yes they confer meaning, but more importantly they provide a sense of precision. There’s a reason why surfers have 20+ different terms for types of waves. Each word carries invaluable information; mastery is often best reflected by how rich your vocabulary is. The better you are, the more descriptive and precise you can be.
This leads us to the name: The State of Adventure Capital.
Right now there are countless names for these physical world categories: hard tech, deep tech, frontier tech, american dynamism — again, all of these are directionally helpful, but lack precision. Which is why we’re choosing to refer to these categories as Adventure Capital.
There are two reasons: first, this is a callback. Adventure Capital was the original name for this industry. From Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law:
These are our roots. You need to know where you’ve come from in order to have a sense of where we’re going. Adventure is all about backing technologists looking to reimagine how the (physical) world works.
The other, more pertinent reason for this name lies in the actual word itself. Adventure.
The reality is that most of venture investing the last decade+ was fairly systematic. Everyone knew the SaaS playbook, and the multiples and milestones you needed to see. We got the Rule of 40, the T2D3 trajectory, the quick ratio, and the burn multiple. Investing became an act of benchmarking against these known frameworks, instead of betting against the unknown.
Our industry got used to investing based on checklists and rulesets, and then people tried to use those rules on completely different categories and domains.
(Ad)Venture, by definition, should be the opposite of this. It’s leaning into the unknown. It should be a riskier asset class (that has the highest payoff); instead the irony is that some of the most risk averse people I’ve met in my life are VCs.
No one used to invest in this stuff. Or more accurately, few firms did. Now that’s changed.
Welcome to the ADCU
As we detail in the opening of the SOA report, these used to be very niche categories. Few investors took them seriously. But if you fast forward to today, that’s completely changed: Everyone, is, investing, here, now.
That is great for the ecosystem, and represents a deeper commitment across these domains.
The big bang happened — the American Dynamism Cinematic Universe exists now. There’s a self-sustained bottoms-up movement of companies, talent, and capital.
We detail all the reasons for that, but the takeaway is that capital is no longer the constraint for these categories. People and ideas are.
Launching the SOA Site:
Today we’re officially launching the SOA site: StateofAdventure.Capital
This will be a proper home for all future State of Adventure Capital reports.
We’ve been building this site with the help of Bunsen for the past few months. Cantos has been fortunate to partner with them on a number of fronts previously, and when we first approached them about SOA they aligned immediately with the goal: to build a home for all the future reports, and help make an even more compelling visual design language for a category that deserves its own spotlight.
We wanted this site, and the design, to reflect the ethos of the project. We started with a massive moodboard file, basically all the inspiration images, links, and materials I’ve collected in the past few years to create the initial framings for SOA. I have hundreds of slides like this:
From there the Bunsen team went to work. The whole team was incredible supportive, starting with the initial logo mocks, font selection, design architecture, and ultimate website design and creation. We pushed to get every color palette rationalized, every artistic direction explored, and have every pixel be perfect.
I am immensely grateful for their Bunsen team’s focus, eagerness, dedication, and patience. Some of the final images:
The SOA logo calls out two instruments essential for any adventurer: a compass and an astrolabe. The color palette invokes the vibrancy of the physical world, and the art direction calls out many of the elements we emphasize: engineering, order, pattern matching, craft, care — and more.
On top of all this, there are all sorts of easter eggs in the actual SOA site, perhaps my favorite in the inspo board in the top right.
Lastly, we chose Lettera Mono as the primary font for the project. It’s subtle but strong, firm and rigid, but also playful and opinionated — all characteristics we hope the slides exhibit in various ways. LM became the perfect font to shepherd the messages within the slides.
That brings us back to SOA’s purpose.
A Universal Theory of Everything
One year ago today, I published The Purity of Obsession. That feels like ages ago, and as I look back (dare I say, introspect) upon that piece, one message rings true: I love hitting the ball.
If I’m lucky, I get to do this for the rest of my life. While SOA is secondary to my core job, it is highly complimentary and accretive. Learning more about these categories deepens our understanding and underwriting of them, and by recognizing patterns we can package takeaways for others as well.
And make no mistake, this is a lot of work.
Every SOA slide is hand-built. This is a craft just as much as it is a deep dive or industry report. Jiro dreams of sushi, I dream of SOA slides.
I have for years now:
This is my humble attempt to make sense of how technology works. And specifically technology in the physical world. These categories have a fundamentally different knowledge frontier, and we want to help advance it.
My belief is there’s an Aggregation Theory buried somewhere, waiting to be discovered. Maybe there are multiple.
None of this guarantees any sort of alpha, let alone some sort of enduring edge. Though to that I’d say: we are in the knowledge business. Everything here compounds. I know all 286 slides better than anyone else. I built them all by hand, and can tell you the 3-10 other permutations of every slide too.
The Theory of Everything is an attempt to connect all of known physics into one elegant formula, one consistent description of the universe. SOA is my attempt at doing the same for building companies in these categories: is it possible to reconcile all the venture frameworks, mental models, and business strategies together?
Almost certainly no. But as we try to connect all these disparate domains together, we’ll continue to find new insights that hopefully move the needle. The real, longterm goal is to inform people about the potential here, and help contribute frameworks for how to build in these categories. The ultimate grade will be how many founders and operators we helped navigate these categories with better tools and instrumentation.
Building in the physical world requires massive scale, sheer ambition, and unquestionable resolve. You need intense conviction, often because so many will doubt for you unreasonably long periods of time.
As is hopefully evident, all of this (Cantos and SOA) are my craft. I’m chiseling away at an edifice that hopefully informs how people build in these categories. Chiseling takes time. You must be deliberate, focused, and perseverant.
I will always be quick to say how this should not and certainly does not compare to building a company. Especially in these categories. It’s really freaking hard! But I think similar to many of the founders we partner with, we have a similar sense of purpose and drive. Cantos, and the SOA project, very much feel like a life-long quests.
Quests are the right word for it.
The Next Greatest Industrial Buildout
Our intention is to publish this every year. We are already halfway through 2026’s report, and frankly, probably 2/3 of our ideas for this one will have to wait for 2027 and 2028. Like I mentioned above, I dream of SOA slides.
But that’s okay. Because we’re in the very beginning of what will be the greatest industrial buildout of our generation.
This is what the last one looked like:
This is what it looks like today:
There’s a SpaceX opportunity in every vertical, and we are backing the founders building them.
It’s day one, and we remain as excited as ever about where things are going.
My hope is that however many years from now, SOA becomes a definitive resource for people in these categories. If we can help evangelize the founders and companies, while also advancing the knowledge frontier, then I know we’re headed in the right direction.
I’ll close with two quotes:
“The most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One
“We’re investing against the thesis that basically all incumbents are going to get nuked, and everything is going to get re-built.”
— Marc Andreessen, 2025
We’re just getting started.
the SaaS-rules-on-hardware problem is real and most LPs still don't see it. excited for the 2026 report.
The ADCU was inadequately nourished with Adventure Capital, but no more it seems.