A Bet on Becoming
I chose Owe Zerge’s Victoria Mortis for this essay because of the relationship it depicts: a young man playing chess with Death. Death has all the time in the world. If you are an agent of life, you don’t. [1]
I feel that urgency in how I relate to people. I tend to be intense and open, sometimes to the point of making them uncomfortable. Life is too short for social BS. I want to understand what someone cares about, what they could become, and whether there is something worth doing together.
A meaningful part of my investment thesis is underwriting people who have the potential to become exceptional humans. By that I mean their character, their work, and what they make possible for other people. A company can become an extraordinary expression of a person. I’m interested in the human becoming capable of creating it.
My friend Koko’s essay On Talent Investing describes a craft built around finding, selecting, and serving talented individuals. I recognize that commitment to the person: taking their potential seriously enough to become useful before it is obvious to everyone else. [2]
I also believe human greatness has a purpose. Understanding a person means understanding where they want to apply themselves. Why this problem? What is there for them to discover, create, or change? The domain matters because it gives their abilities somewhere to go and makes demands on the person they will need to become.
The argument about great individuals has been around for a while. Carlyle put them at the centre of history. Spencer pointed out how much they owe to the society that produced them. The Durants describe people as both shaped by their times and capable of changing them. They also make an observation I find especially useful: a demanding situation can bring out abilities that otherwise remain unrealized. [3]
I believe entrepreneurship is the hardest thing one can do. As a rule, I discourage most people from doing it. The people I think should pursue it are those obsessed with self-actualization, with finding out what they are capable of becoming. For them, I think it is the most effective path precisely because it demands so much.
Building a company keeps putting your understanding of yourself in contact with reality. Your judgment, your relationships, your ability to take responsibility all have consequences. Becoming more fully yourself can be painful, and entrepreneurship offers plenty of opportunities to find that out. The popularity of putting “founder” in a bio suggests the price of admission has been misunderstood.
I meet people while much of this is still forming. Jung’s idea of individuation gives me useful language for it: becoming more fully oneself, including the parts that sit uneasily with the identity one presents to the world. [4]
What fascinates me is how someone becomes more integrated while remaining extremely intense. I believe that intensity is critical to becoming an exceptional human. The challenge is to understand what drives that intensity and take responsibility for how it affects others, while keeping its force.
I think about agency, curiosity, intensity, and taste as pillars of identity. Each is a way a person expresses themselves.
Agency is how someone acts under uncertainty. Do they turn inward, read, build, find someone to learn from, or form a partnership? I want to understand how they find a way forward and whether they take responsibility for it.
Curiosity is what keeps drawing them back. What do they pursue for its own sake? What depends on an audience, recognition, or reward? I’m interested in what remains constant when the social reward disappears, and how they respond when learning means giving up something they believed.
Intensity is the energy they bring and what drives it. Elegant or anxious? Does it open up their thinking or narrow it? How does it affect the people around them? Can they change course without feeling that their identity is under attack?
Taste appears in the pattern of their choices: their work, language, relationships, and friendships. What is distinctly theirs? Where have they developed their own judgment about what deserves attention?
I form a view by spending time with people and doing things together. In one conversation with founders, we wandered into mathematical intuition: what it feels like when an abstract idea becomes something you can think with. One of them apologized for wandering away from the topic. I felt we were very much inside it.
I enjoy following a shared fascination. There is room for play: trying an idea, entertaining an unlikely possibility, disagreeing, seeing where a thought takes us. I get to see how someone learns and what they notice. There is vulnerability in letting another person watch you work something out. You are showing them your uncertainty and allowing them to affect your thinking.
Over time, we have decisions to make and work to do. I can see what happens to the curiosity, openness, and judgment I thought I saw in conversation. They get to do the same with me. Choosing an investor is a judgment about a person you may be in a relationship with for years.
That mutual assessment is easily distorted by power. Power can be part of play when it is explicit, understood, and open to discussion. When a relationship keeps returning to control, I wonder what someone is defending and whether an old fear is running the present. The question applies to the person with the money too. How much room do I actually give someone to disagree with me?
For me, sharing how I think is a greater expression of kindness and love than anything else I can offer. It gives the other person something they can engage with, challenge, and use. My openness also affects what happens between us. If I make someone uncomfortable, their response tells me something about our interaction, including what I brought to it.
In a recent conversation, I interpreted a founder’s question as uncertainty about how to think through a problem. He corrected me. He had a specific decision in mind and wanted my judgment on it. I had to understand the question he was asking. His correction was part of getting to know him, and accepting it was part of letting him get to know me.
I can also fall in love with the person I imagine someone could become and start filling in the evidence myself. The question I need to keep asking is simple: what have I actually seen them do? Then I need to let their actions change my mind. Spending more time together only helps if I remain open to discovering that my first reading was wrong.
There is a further question in all of this: what will they use their abilities for? The Durants ask a version of it when they consider whether greater human power amounts to progress. Agency, intensity, and originality can serve very different purposes. [5]
I want to understand how someone gives credit, keeps a promise when it becomes inconvenient, and makes room for other people to grow. I learn more about their generosity when sharing credit or money costs them something. The people I most want to back make it possible for others to do work they could not have done alone.
In The Lessons of History, the Durants pause their account of human misconduct to notice people who helped one another. One example is Joseph Black repeatedly advancing money to James Watt. That small passage stays with me. Alongside the person whose work survives is someone who helped make it possible. [6]
That is a form of contribution I want to make. I can offer time, a useful challenge, an introduction, or help finding the first problem we can make progress on. Working together gives me a better understanding of someone and a chance to participate in their development. They can change me in the process.
I am betting on what a person might become, and committing some of my own life to helping it happen.
Sources
- Owe Zerge, Victoria Mortis (1921), artwork identified by Bukowskis. The reading of the painting is mine.
- Nova, On Talent Investing, September 2026. “On Craft” and the definition on printed page 1.
- Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, lecture I; Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology, chapter II; Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, chapter V, “Character and History”.
- C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” part II, paragraphs 266–269. The application to founder assessment is mine.
- Durant, chapter XIII, “Is Progress Real?”.
- Durant, chapter VI, “Morals and History”.