How to Build Conviction at the Pre-Seed Stage: Takeaways from my Sierra DPI podcast interview
Conviction isn’t consensus: how the best deep tech bets look weird before they look obvious -- and other lessons from a recent interview
Vignesh and Brendon with Sierra Ventures just invited me to be on their new DPI (Deconstructing Preseed Investing) podcast. We went deep on preseed investing but a lot of the conversation focused on something that sounds simple but is actually incredibly hard:
How do you build real conviction… when there’s almost no data?
The full interview is linked at the bottom, but here are my top 5 takeaways :
1) Start with the product — not the market slide
“I’ve always liked to put my hands on tech, to immerse myself in technology… I realized that makes me a little bit of a quirk in the venture industry… I always start with product. I always start with the technology… not from the business potential, but from what’s actually being built.”
That instinct is what led me to Rocket Lab — with their unique rocket engine that looked like hardware, but was really software underneath. Today’s the startup is worth 1,000x more than when we initially invested while I was at Bessemer and is the foundation for our software beyond the screen thesis.
2) The best investments don’t take weeks — they click
“Without exception, every single one of my top investments has been a decision within about 24 hours… but when something resonates, it resonates pretty quickly… I stick to my knitting and when the signals line up, it just clicks.”
Speed here isn’t about rushing. It’s about having a prepared mind and recognizing patterns instantly when they show up.
3) Turn messy real-world problems into clean software abstractions
With Halter, I didn’t see agriculture — I saw code:
“My mind was blown… I was thinking, oh, so each of these cows is like an C++ object… with methods like “setters” and “getters”… there’s an SDK for a cow… you can write scripts so all the cows come to the milk shed at 6 a.m.… like a cron job in linux… accelerometer data can be referenced with if-then logic applied to 500 cows.”
That translation layer — from atoms to APIs — is where a lot of non-consensus insight lives.
4) “Moonshot culture” often removes the very discipline you need
“Moonshot culture says ignore all the rules… I’m not going to raise a $2 million seed or $5 million seed… I’m going to raise a $500 million seed because I’m doing a moonshot… I’m not going to have board meetings… you don’t understand, it’s a moonshot… and it gets more and more abrasive from there.”
That mindset sounds bold. But in practice, it often skips:
technical diligence
staged risk reduction
real customer validation
The best deep tech companies still follow a disciplined, step-by-step path. I wrote about this more here:
5) Scarcity isn’t a constraint — it’s a forcing function
“There’s an argument that scarcity… drives a certain intensity, a certain creativity… it allows you to create focus… most entrepreneurs have 20 ideas they’d like to do, but because of the capital and runway, they focus on one or two… and if they did all 20, there’s a chance all 20 fail.”
When resources are abundant, it’s very hard to stay scrappy.
Focus drifts. Standards slip. Complexity creeps in.
Constraints, on the other hand, force clarity.
We also covered:
why the new AI benchmarks like “$100M in year one” are often misleading (“stop the panic”)
how to move at “founder speed” without cutting corners
and where new deep tech alpha is emerging (including… space)
If you’re building or investing at the earliest stages, this one is worth a listen.
Check it out now:
(0:00) Intro and welcome
(1:20) Origin story: the Rocket Lab Pelican case moment
(5:30) Why solo GP + deep tech was non-consensus in 2017
(13:08) How Halter got a yes in 45 minutes at Il Fornaio
(16:38) Moving at founder speed: the 24-hour clock
(27:35) Moonshot culture is strangling deep tech discipline
(40:06) Why Bessemer’s “Supernova” benchmarks can be misleading for founders
(46:50) Mistakes founders make when capital floods a category
(51:44) Ubiquity University and the DRY principle applied to VC
(56:30) The future: data centers in space and life beyond Earth
Ubiquity Ventures — led by Sunil Nagaraj — is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on startups building software that reaches into the real world. In a screen-obsessed world, we focus on "software beyond the screen" startups, which include technology companies that apply AI, software, and smart hardware to physical problems and systems that you can touch, hear, and feel.
If your startup fits this description, reach out to us.