In Support of the Current Thing

I need to say something that might be uncomfortable.

I need to say something that might be uncomfortable.

We are living through the most important transition in human history. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve spent the last eighteen months thinking deeply about the Current Thing, talking to the smartest people working on the Current Thing, and I’ve come to a conclusion that I think more people need to hear:

The Current Thing changes everything.

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve heard this before. You heard it about the Previous Thing, and the Thing Before That. You heard it about social, about mobile, about cloud, about crypto, about the metaverse, about whatever it was we were all excited about in 2021. I was there too. I remember.

But here’s what people get wrong. Those were necessary precursors to the Current Thing.

Every Previous Thing was the universe slowly teaching capital markets how to recognize the moment when it actually arrives. And it has arrived. I feel it in my body. I think you feel it too.

Let me be more precise.

The Current Thing is not a technology. It is not a sector. It is not a market. The Current Thing is a civilizational inflection point. It is the hinge upon which the next century will turn. Historians will look back at this exact eighteen-month window and they will say: that is when the future was allocated.

Not built. Allocated. There is a difference, and it matters.

I’ve been talking to founders. Hundreds of them. Maybe a thousand. I’ve lost count, which I think is the point. What I’m hearing is that the Current Thing unlocks capabilities that were, until recently, the domain of science fiction. Founders describe it with a kind of reverence, a quiet awe. Several have cried. I have cried. We looked at each other, crying, and we understood that something very important was happening, not just to technology but to the species.

Some of these founders will fail. Most of them will fail. Almost all of them will fail. That is the cost of building the future and it is a cost that someone, ideally with a 2-and-20 structure, must be willing to bear.

I want to talk about the skeptics for a moment.

There are people, smart people that I respect. People who went to good schools and have good families and presumably feel love. Some of these people look at the Current Thing and say: “I’m not sure this is as transformative as you’re suggesting.” Or: “The unit economics don’t seem to work.” Or: “This is structurally identical to the last three bubbles.”

I used to engage with these criticisms. I used to take them seriously and respond to them point by point. I don’t anymore.

Here’s why.

When you are standing at the edge of the most important transformation in human history, and someone tugs your sleeve and says “excuse me, I have a spreadsheet”. That person is afraid. And I have compassion for that. Fear is natural. Fear is human. But fear is not an investment thesis.

What I have is an investment thesis.

Let me tell you what I believe.

I believe that the Current Thing will generate more value in the next decade than the last five Previous Things combined. I believe that the companies being built right now, today, in this specific vintage, will become the foundational infrastructure of the twenty-first century. I believe that the founders I am backing are not just entrepreneurs but protagonists of history, and that my role, our role, as their capital partners, is not merely financial but moral.

We are not investors. We are stewards of inevitability.

And inevitability, as you know, commands a premium.

Some people have asked me whether there’s a valuation concern. Whether paying 200x revenue for a company with eighteen months of runway and a product that is, in the most technical sense, a wrapper around someone else’s API, constitutes “prudent capital allocation.”

I want to reframe this question.

What is the value of the electric light? What is the value of the printing press? What is the value of fire? What if you had the opportunity to invest in fire? Not the application of fire, not a fire startup, but fire itself, the underlying platform. Would you ask about the revenue multiple?

You would not. You would simply wire the money.

That is what we are doing. We are wiring the money. Into fire.

I want to be transparent about something. Our new fund is larger than our previous fund. Significantly larger. Some have suggested that this is because management fees scale with fund size, and that raising a $2 billion fund generates $40 million per year in fees regardless of performance, and that this creates a structural incentive to raise ever-larger funds irrespective of deployment opportunities.

To those people I would say: you are describing the mechanics correctly but missing the music.

Yes. The fund is larger. Because the moment is larger. Because the Current Thing demands capital at a scale that previous things did not. We are not raising more money because we want more fees. We are raising more money because the future is expensive and someone has to pay for it and it should probably be pension funds.

There is a phrase I keep coming back to. I think about it in the morning when I wake up and at night before I sleep and during the day when I am pricing term sheets. The phrase is this:

We are building the infrastructure of human progress.

When I say this to LPs, some of them nod. Others write very large checks. The ones who write the largest checks nod while writing them, and I think that is the purest form of conviction I have ever witnessed.

Let me address the elephant in the room.

Some of the companies in our previous fund, the ones built around the Previous Thing, have not performed well. A few have shut down. Several have pivoted to the Current Thing, which I actually think demonstrates extraordinary founder resilience and also conveniently means we don’t have to mark them down yet.

But here is what I want you to understand: the Previous Thing was always a stepping stone to the Current Thing. We said this at the time. I am almost certain we said this at the time. And if we didn’t say it explicitly, it was implied by the font choices in our deck, which were very forward-looking.

The point is: everything we have ever done has been leading to this moment. Every fund, every check, every fee, every carry calculation. All of it was preparation. We were not wrong about the Previous Thing. We were simply early. And being early, in venture capital, is the same as being visionary, which is the same as being right, eventually, in a way that is difficult to measure but easy to feel.

I want to close with something personal.

Last week I was at a dinner. A small dinner. Twelve people, all of whom are building the Current Thing or funding the Current Thing or advising the people who are funding the Current Thing. The wine was very good. The conversation was better. At one point, someone said something that I will never forget. They said:

“If we don’t do this, who will?”

I looked around the table, at the partners and the founders and the operators and the one person whose role no one could quite explain but who seemed important, and I realized: we are it. We are the ones who have to deploy this capital. Not because we want to. Not because it enriches us personally, although it does, considerably. But because the Current Thing requires it. Because history is watching. Because our LPs are watching. Because the management fee won’t generate itself.

This is our moment.

This is the Current Thing, and I support it.

And I think you should too.

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Use Odin to invest in the Current Thing

Or maybe use Odin to invest in whatever you actually think is a good idea, not what everyone else thinks is a good idea. The choice is yours.