McCormick: Literary nonfiction and deep journalism are best for early-stage underwriting
Packy McCormick · How Writing Led To Investing In Ramp, Scale AI, Replit, Varda | Packy McCormick, Not Boring · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Feb 14, 2025 · at 10:34
Packy McCormick of Not Boring Capital compares quantitative hedge fund approaches with literary biographical research for assessing early-stage venture investments.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“That, like, Jim Simons at Rentac versus, like, Robert Carroll, like, who would be a better earlier stage, early stage investor? And I think it's actually, like, Robert Carroll. Like, I think, like, literary nonfiction done really, really well, or journalism done really, really well, like, should actually be the best way to understand an early stage company.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Packy McCormick
McCormick: Most fast-growing AI software startups will flatten and fail to IPO
“By choosing to, like, not play in this space, I'm definitely missing a trillion dollar company or two, but I think for the most part, like, I think there's gonna be, like, a lot of these types of things happening, or even, like, these types of curves, where th…”
McCormick: AI will become 'super SaaS' rather than godlike AGI
“I called it super sass in, in that like 20, 25 prediction. And I think it is like, I think it's really amazing and like in no way godlike. And it's just like, I feel like I'm being psyopped whenever people are like, oh my God, this is like, this is, this chang…”
McCormick: Fuse recruited the former number two Iranian nuclear scientist
“The number of two, kind of, nuclear scientists in, in Iran who came over here to, kind of, work on, on our side here, and then just, like, everybody that I met who was, like, you know, working on the machines, like top to bottom, just like an unbelievably cool…”
McCormick: YC 'Request for Startups' Prompts Rarely Lead to Great Companies
“Like when YC puts out the request for startups, I'm like, I can't imagine that anything good is going to be built against these categories starting now because you've read the YC request for startups.”
McCormick: Anduril's early round was crowded at a $100M valuation
“But that, like, early story that, like, nobody wanted to touch it was actually, like, a pretty crowded round at a hundred million dollar valuation.”
McCormick: DeepSeek represents doing the same thing cheaper, not a qualitative leap
“My DeepSeek point is that, like, This, like, crack team that figured out all these algorithms, breakthroughs, and whatever, essentially just figured out how to do the same thing cheaper. Like, there hasn't been any leap that I've seen that I've been like, yeah…”