*Outlaw aims to be the chief capitalist to future world-defining individuals.*
Outlaw is a thesis-driven fund, and we narrow down opportunities based on theses, themes, and investment philosophy.
The fund invests in individuals, not companies, we generally avoid live rounds, and we tune out everything except the founders in our underwriting.
The fundamental belief that we have around this asset class is this:
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Out-of-distribution companies are created by out-of-distribution people.
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The primary criticism of pre-seed investing is that there are "too many unknowns" and the probability of success is too low. We don’t subscribe to this belief.
Not all founders start with equal odds. A founder with a successful exit has vastly different odds than a 24-year-old first-time founder. The founding engineer at Cursor has different odds than someone who's only held junior engineering roles. The founding GTM person at Ramp has different odds than someone who's only held generic sales jobs.
The key is positioning yourself to scout talent before companies, curating people before pitches, and offering something unique in exchange for allocation. This requires doing the real work of pattern recognition on people, not just patterns on markets.
Thesis: Founding employees at outlier companies are often among the most talented 1-5% of employees at those companies.
They've been operating in high-variance environments during critical inflection periods, where every decision mattered and speed was a competitive advantage.
These individuals have developed:
Where these people worked:
Target roles:
What we look for: