Notes on talent investing

I've spent the last year meeting people whose trajectories and stories had an interesting shape to them - spotting the "diamonds in the rough" before most, and helping them start companies. This is what I think I've learned. None of it is settled, and I'm not writing as someone who has cracked the craft; mostly I wanted to get the thoughts out of my head and onto a page.

Disclaimer: this is very much focused on talent in the early innings of their career - not a take on proven, credible talent.

Inputs mixed with intention

A personal preference, but I obsess over inputs and care a lot about working with intensity. I believe very strongly in moving heaven and earth to help the founders I work with win.

A lot of the early days go into kickstarting the "compounding flywheel": building relationships with (i) nodes in clusters I find interesting, and (ii) having enough conversations to build my own model of what exceptional looks like.

Blending inputs with your own opinions on where the interesting shapes of people might be is what lets you actually go deep into a cluster. For example: a shallow version of "spending time with developers in cybersecurity" just means going to talk to people from Crowdstrike, Palo Alto Networks, Aikido, and so on. A more interesting nuanced version looks more like this:

I want to spend time with early-career people in cybersecurity, because I think the ones who were great at CTFs growing up were great purely through a mix of talent, agency and effort - pursuing something they were unlikely to have been encouraged toward, rather than just focusing on academics. There's an interesting parallel there with founders who can go against consensus and take a second-order bet on the future.

This approach takes more effort, but I think it leads to better relationships than just showing up as "another investor". It also has a built-in safeguard: if the thesis is directionally wrong, that becomes obvious fast, so you pivot.

The market is more efficient than it looks

It's worth being honest about what "underestimated" talent really means today. As more and more capital pushes earlier and earlier, a lot of what used to look underestimated is now just a very efficient market.

You can see it in where people's instincts go. When investors who don't usually do early stage start dabbling, the first move is almost always the same: CS at Oxford, Palantir, Jane Street, etc. Those are real signals, but they're signals everyone else can read too. By the time talent is that legible, it isn't underestimated. It's just expensive in a way that's easy to justify.

So legibility becomes a shortcut for lazy decision-making. A useful tell for how someone actually thinks is to listen to how they explain why someone is great. One version understands the person's trajectory and can articulate why they're great in a way that demonstrates their curiosity about the human being. The other just lists logos - "they worked at X, Y and Z, of course they're great." Whenever I meet talent that are legible, I try to ask myself a deflating question: why am I so lucky? Usually the answer is that I'm not, and plenty of other people are looking at the same person.

The actual edge is in the weird shapes - the trajectories that don't read cleanly off a CV. Someone's love for playing unstructured games their entire lives (starting companies, open source projects, etc) tells me a lot more than a polished CV. That's where the genuine underestimated outliers tend to be. The tradeoff with that though, is it takes a lot more time to find those people because not all of them are visible on traditional channels.

Purposeful Apprenticeship

Investing is an apprenticeship-driven craft. Early on, most of the value comes from learning off people with more reps than you. But I've realised there's a flaw in pure apprenticeship: you risk becoming a mirror of whoever you're learning from, and never surfacing your own "edges". I define edge as a mix of two things - being able to get into rooms more easily than most, and being good at building relationships once you're in them.

When I started, I took a bet: most talent and early-stage investors in Europe haven't cracked identifying technical talent, so they lean on legibility (Palantir, Jane Street, and the like) as a shortcut for lazy decision-making. I believed there was a lot more genuinely great technical talent out there without that legibility. That bet helped me find and work with the following (anonymised) people:

• Became Bending Spoons' first-ever intern at 16 through a cold email, then went on to set up operational infra at a host of early marketplaces, before building out an AI-native marketing company's product as its first engineer. Currently building in stealth in defence manufacturing.
• Grew up in a remote part of Germany, where in high school he built a software agency and scaled it to a team of 15. Now spends his days building an open-source alternative to Vercel.
• Hacked into Discord at 17, captained a European Cybersecurity Challenge team, and did CTFs as part of Team Europe before founding an AI-native cybersecurity company that was acquired.
• Built open-source sandbox environments for a serverless compute platform that was acquired by Cloudflare, before being headhunted as the youngest hire at an AI-native cybersecurity company.

Earned Conversations

Most new investors assume the institution earns them the right to be interesting - to probe and to position. In reality, the best talent doesn't grant you that right because of your title or where you work. It's granted through curiosity and being interesting.

That holds for every part of the job: earning the right to have the conversation, to build the relationship, and to question someone's priors. Reach out with earnest curiosity, not with the sole intent of building a transactional relationship. Approach conversations wanting the other person to leave feeling challenged, not sold to.

The goal isn't to be remembered as "the investor from X" who sounds like everyone else, but as someone genuinely interesting - someone who actually raises people's opinion of the institution they represent. After all, investors are the stewards on the ground for their institution.

A heuristic I've come to trust: I'd rather have a great relationship with 70% of the people I meet and not click with the other 30%, than a merely fine relationship with all of them.

Be aware of your biases and incentives

The incentives and biases that come with this job are obvious to the person across the table - even in moments when they're nowhere near front of mind for me. Pretending otherwise doesn't hide them; it just makes you look unaware.

So I say them out loud. When an opinion of mine is shaped by my incentives, I flag it. When it isn't, I say that too. It feels slightly awkward in the moment, and it has made my relationships noticeably more honest.

Conclusion

Talent investing is a genuinely hard craft, and I'm nowhere near a level I'd call exceptional, but writing this down gives me clarity.

Always happy to spar on any of this - feel free to email me at ayman.ali@joinef.com.