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We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us - by Euclid Ventures

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Venture capital has long celebrated itself as the business of contrarianism. The best investors prided themselves on spotting what others missed: the non-consensus founder, market, or product. The venture model was designed to harness outlier outcomes — but it relied on individual conviction, not herd behavior, to find them. Venture contrarianism was borne out of strategic rationality. As in most investment businesses, there is alpha in epistemic arbitrage. Deep knowledge of a business—its target market, operators most likely to succeed in building it, its underlying technologies, the business models that may or may not work to drive adoption—is a powerful advantage. Only, of course, if that knowledge is asymmetric. The most successful founders (and the VCs that back them) are those who see and believe things that others do not and are ultimately proven right. There isn’t much profit to be had in the conviction that the sun will rise tomorrow. As Peter Thiel observes in Zero to One: Th

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us The Mind-Virus of Big Venture has become a Pandemic Sep 04, 2025 26 3 Share Venture capital has long celebrated itself as the business of contrarianism. The best investors prided themselves on spotting what others missed: the non-consensus founder, market, or product. The venture model was designed to harness outlier outcomes — but it relied on individual conviction, not herd behavior, to find them. Venture contrarianism was borne out of strategic rationality. As in most investment businesses, there is alpha in epistemic arbitrage. Deep knowledge of a busines

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