We live in an era where we are faced with some of the greatest challenges ever. Consider the list of things facing us. An ageing population nobody has worked out how to service, let alone how to pay for. A cost-of-living squeeze. Pollution. Tariff wars, territorial wars, and the sort of wars most of us assumed had been left in the twentieth century. And threaded through all of it, entire sectors: healthcare, construction, insurance, logistics; still running on processes a Victorian clerk would recognise, only slower, because now there is a portal.

The institutions have had their turn

Governments operate on four-year electoral cycles while facing problems with thirty-year horizons. They consult, they convene, they publish. Nobody in the history of public administration has ever been sacked for commissioning a report.

Large corporates are arguably worse, because they have the resources to look like they are trying. There is a Chief Innovation Officer, a beanbag budget, an accelerator with a logo, and a mandate to change nothing that might affect this quarter’s numbers. Management by committee is where good ideas go to be consulted upon.

None of this is a moral failing; it is structural. Incumbents are optimised to protect what exists, and solving a hard problem means destroying something or cannibalising your own revenue line.

The people who actually fix things are, almost without exception, individuals with an unreasonable degree of conviction, moving at a speed no institution can match. They are not always easy company. They are rarely balanced. They are, however, the mechanism by which the world moves forward. Enter the Entrepreneur.

Venture capital exists to find those people, fund them and keep them alive long enough to be proved right. Long before impact became an asset class with its own reporting template, Venture Capital was the original impact investing.

The numbers aren’t subtle either. Research by Will Gornall and Ilya Strebulaev at Stanford University found that venture-backed companies account for 41% of US market capitalisation and 62% of US public company R&D spending. Among public companies founded in the past fifty years, VC-backed companies account for roughly three-quarters of value and more than 92% of R&D spending and patent value. They also conclude that three-quarters of the largest US VC-backed companies would not exist at anything like their current scale without an active venture industry. For an asset class routinely dismissed as a casino, that is a remarkably productive casino.

The money is the least interesting part

Banks say no to early-stage companies, and they are right to: their model is not designed to finance a business with no revenue, no assets and little more than a colourful deck. Venture trades cash for equity rather than debt, so there are no interest payments quietly strangling the company in year two while it is still working out what it is.

But if capital were the whole job, venture would be a spreadsheet exercise and everyone would be good at it. Everyone is conspicuously not good at it. The real work happens after the wire lands: the operational scar tissue, the introduction that turns an eighteen-month sales cycle into six, the honest conversation about the co-founder who is not working out.

And none of it comes in standard sizes. One founder needs a sparring partner at 7am. One needs to be left alone for a quarter. Another needs somebody willing to say the thing that nobody else in their life will say to them. A firm offering every founder the same package of “value-add” is not running a partnership, it is running a newsletter. Some investors confuse being helpful with being present: they add nothing, but they add it weekly.

Vision, resilience and the ability to sell are largely innate; you back them, you do not build them. Humility, self-reflection and stakeholder management can be developed. The investor’s real job is to work out which kind of gap they are looking at, and then tailor the support accordingly. That is harder than wiring the money. It’s the most valuable thing a venture investor does.

What that looks like in practice

We backed BVNK from the beginning, when “stablecoin payments infrastructure” sounded to most institutions like something shouted at a conference by a man you were trying to avoid. No bank would have gone near it. The company built compliant plumbing between fiat and digital currencies, went on to process payments across 130 countries for the likes of Worldpay and Deel, and in August completed its acquisition by Mastercard for up to $1.8 billion. From uninvestable to core infrastructure for the world’s second-largest card network in five years. No committee produced that, and none ever will.

Pockit makes the social case as clearly as the financial one. Millions of people across the UK and Europe are, in the polite language of retail banking, uneconomic to serve: thin credit files, irregular income, no property. The incumbent response was to charge them more for it. Pockit built the alternative, acquiring Monese in 2024 to reach that population at scale; a real problem, solved commercially, by people who refused to accept that it was somebody else’s job.

None of which stops venture being everyone’s favourite asset class to mock. It is illiquid, opaque and staffed, allegedly, by men in gilets. Most investments disappoint. That is not a defect to apologise for, it is the design: venture funds ideas whose expected value is enormous and whose median outcome is zero, because nothing else is structured to do it. We are judged on our ducklings and remembered for our swans; often by critics typing the criticism on devices built by four companies that were themselves, not long ago, ridiculous propositions with no revenue.

The quest for the best entrepreneurs

The problems at the top of this article have not gone anywhere while you have been reading, and no summit will resolve them. Somewhere, in a rented office with too few staff and a worrying amount of ambition, someone is already working on one of them and wondering how to make payroll in March. Our job as venture capitalists is custodial: find those people, fund them, help them properly, and then, hardest of all, get out of their way.

Venture capital will never be the most loved asset class. That is fine. Swans were never especially popular with the other ducks either.