Talk notes
The warm-intro economy is venture capital's oldest sourcing protocol and its most biased one. It rewards founders who happen to live within a one-hour radius of a partner with deep rolodex access. It punishes everyone else. Forty years of empirical evidence shows this concentration is real, persistent, and worsening. Eight percent of partners write fifty percent of warm intros. The bottom half of partners write almost none.
Our argument is not to replace this system. The warm-intro economy works extremely well for the founders inside it. Our argument is that it leaves the other 92 percent of qualified founders effectively invisible to the typical fund's pipeline. Public engineering data is the first credible parallel sourcing channel that doesn't depend on geography, school network, or social proximity. A founder shipping commits in Mumbai is as visible as one shipping commits in Palo Alto.
The hedge-fund analogy is instructive. Quantitative funds don't replace fundamental analysts, they run alongside them. The fundamental desk reads filings; the quant desk parses filings, satellite imagery, credit-card panels, and shipping data. Both desks contribute to the portfolio. Venture is forty years behind that bifurcation. We're not pitching a quant takeover. We're pitching the parallel desk.
The structural advantage is time-zone neutrality. A merge graph is updated daily, by people who don't know they're being read, in whatever time zone they happen to live in. The deck arrives months later through a partner-to-partner introduction. The code is observable now. The intro is observable later. That asymmetry is the entire game.