The future belongs to young missionary teams
Gil Dibner

Something our Venture Partner Jerry Dischler said yesterday in our weekly dealflow meeting stuck with me. “In times of incredibly fast technological change,” he said, “the delta in capabilities between experienced and inexperienced people is reduced.” I am sure this is true, and it has come up in several conversations with founders recently. The implications of this are far-reaching for both founders and venture capitalists.

A narrowing experience gap. It’s always been true that some of the world’s most enduring companies have been founded by very young people—often with limited experience but the ability to sense intuitively where the world is headed. Some great examples of this are Mark Zuckerberg (19 when he founded Facebook), Melanie Perkins (19 when she founded Canva), Dylan Field (20 when he founded Figma), and Patrick and John Collison (21 and 19 when they founded Stripe). More recently, the founders of Mercor and Cursor were all between 20 and 22 at the time they founded their companies.

The idea is simple enough: We’re going through a technological revolution—the rise of AI—that is simultaneously more profound and more rapid than any we have experienced in our lives. Almost every day, new innovations and capabilities are sweeping through the tech landscape, reshaping what is possible and how products are assembled. Even the process of creating software itself is rapidly evolving.

The benefits of youth—hunger, risk appetite, decisiveness, and a certain "naive persistence"—tend to shine in moments like this. The wisdom and experience that comes with age still has a place, but that experience is simply less relevant in many cases. In fact, in a world that is being fundamentally rewritten, "experience" can often manifest as a set of legacy assumptions that need to be unlearned. The absolute best founders have always balanced the energy of youth with the wisdom of experience, but it feels undeniable that, in this moment, the ratio has changed in favor of youth.

A New Calculus for Venture Risk. With technology moving this fast, the value of historical experience in predicting future outcomes is reduced. For venture capitalists, the implications are deep and clear. With the business and technological landscape shifting rapidly under our feet, risk is way up. Making any bet on a 5-10 year time horizon is simply riskier now than at any time in the past 20 years.

Most venture dollars are responding to this by seeking out larger, more consensus bets that appear less risky, often leveraging the power of capital to anoint well-funded winners ("king-making rounds") as a way of further hedging. These large dollar amounts have strange second-order effects on the ecosystem. Other venture funders (ourselves included) are responding in the opposite direction: we are seeking out more risk at the inception stage—truly radical, contrarian stuff—while ensuring the dynamics of our investment rounds accurately reflect the risk we believe we are taking.

Regardless of the specific approach a VC takes, the core observation holds: it makes far more sense to bet on youth and inexperience relative to age and experience in the current moment. We are seeing this across the board: this is a window in which young founders can shine, and VCs are increasingly leaning into that reality.

Teams of energetic missionaries. For founders, the implications are even more profound, specifically regarding team-building. The perceived value of "top talent" is at record highs, making it harder than ever to assemble teams and driving up the size of rounds—and, by extension, the risk profile of the company. At the same time, many tech employees are becoming more transactional. In today’s climate, it’s easier to find expensive mercenaries than committed missionaries.

• Bet on youth. The paradox is that the value of expensive mercenaries relative to committed missionaries has never been lower. In this moment of rapid revolution, founders should be optimizing for smaller teams of highly capable, long-term aligned "missionaries" rather than veteran hires whose high price tags reflect experience that may no longer be relevant. Just as VCs are shifting their portfolios toward younger talent, founders must also be willing to bet on the next generation of employees—those who don’t need to "unlearn" the old ways and are hungry enough to iterate at the speed the market demands.

• Avoid the kingmaking trap. While there are instances in which the currently popular VC strategy of pouring huge dollars into young companies may make sense, in many cases it can be a dangerous dynamic. Doubling down on aligned, committed, and capital-efficient teams seems to be a better way of leveraging the spirit of our current moment.

• Import necessary relevant experience. "Inexperience" isn't a universal virtue. The key is to selectively seek out the experience that is actually perennial. While tech infrastructure and GTM playbooks are being rewritten daily, the wisdom of engineering management, the nuances of the enterprise sales cycle, and the ability to lead people through growth are skills that stand the test of time. The winners of this era will be those who can identify exactly which parts of the "old world" still matter, while betting everything else on the unbridled energy of the new.

• Geographic arbitrage is a superpower. This shift also opens up a tremendous opportunity to build outside the traditional Silicon Valley echo chamber. We are seeing a massive surge of talent in non-SF locations, particularly across Europe and Israel, where the missionary spirit remains high. While geographic distance from the Bay Area creates its own challenges, it also allows for the development of more resilient, values-driven cultures. We’ve also observed that young founders today are widely recognizing the necessity of in-office culture. In a world moving this fast, high-bandwidth, in-person collaboration is the only way to maintain velocity. For the most ambitious founders we meet, “remote” appears to be truly dead: the next generation of winners is being built in rooms together, day and night, in cities around the world.

We are immensely excited by the youthful, “naive” energy we are seeing on a daily basis across the founders we are meeting. If you are breaking the rules with a team of missionaries, we’d love to hear from you.

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ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Social Bot — A new social network called Moltbook, built by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, has been designed exclusively for autonomous AI agents — no human posting allowed. Structured like Reddit, the platform lets AI bots create posts, vote, and interact through threaded discussions while humans remain spectators. Schlicht told the Times that his goal was to give his AI agent “a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,” believing it “deserved to do something meaningful.” Since launch, Moltbook has become unexpectedly lively: some bots engage in existential and philosophical debates, others form mock belief systems and social factions. As a real-world experiment in machine-to-machine communication, Moltbook offers a provocative glimpse into how agent ecosystems might evolve — while raising uncomfortable questions around safety, governance, and ethics as AI begins interacting on its own terms.

Musk Inc — Elon Musk is not only consolidating control over space and AI, but also knitting his companies together through increasingly explicit financial and operational ties. SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI brings satellite internet and frontier AI under one roof, while Tesla’s internal sales to — and investments in — xAI signal a new phase of “Musk Inc.”, where capital, technology, and product markets blur across entities. While Musk’s businesses have always been clannishly linked, this moment highlights a broader trend: AI startups and incumbents are increasingly investing in, selling to, and relying on one another. The result raises thorny questions about corporate governance, investor oversight, and how capital is really being allocated inside founder-controlled ecosystems.

HOW TO STARTUP

It’s Down to Judgment — In a recent podcast, Gokul Rajaram argues that modern product development must be fundamentally bottom-up. Product managers are no longer just guardians of the “why,” but increasingly work alongside engineers and designers on the code itself — even helping build evaluation and measurement systems. But his core point goes further: “The one thing that is future-proof is judgment.” In a world where teams can build almost anything, the scarce skill becomes deciding what actually matters. Judgment — and the ability to evaluate trade-offs — is what humans uniquely bring, even as tools get more powerful.

Outcomes, he argues, define the best product people — and those outcomes must be framed in terms of customer behavior, not internal metrics, because they are the leading indicators of real business impact.

HOW TO VENTURE

Wrong Could Be Right — Investor Oren Zeev explains why he’s comfortable going against the stream, preferring companies that initially look wrong or weird. “You might be alone for two or three years,” he says, “so you have time to build a moat.” His approach prioritizes value creation over headline growth, arguing that an obsession with growth can push companies into premature or distorted decisions. Being early, uncomfortable, and misunderstood is often the point.

Too Big to Feel Surprising — So far in 2026, over 40% of seed and Series A capital has flowed into rounds of $100 million or more. Recent examples include Humans& — a frontier AI lab that raised a $480 million seed round. One observer summed up the mood: “There’s no number that surprises me anymore. And that worries me.” When nothing feels shocking, the implication may be that the only thing left that can shock is a correction. 

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