amir

State of Hard Tech VC Few things im seeing: > F*ck ton of capital out there. However, doesn't feel like it unless you're one of the companies everyone wants lol. Headlines make venture look like 2021 again. It isn't. Capital is concentrating into a relatively small group of companies while everyone else is grinding through 50 investor meetings trying to piece together a round. Middle of the market feels brutal. > Bar for a Series A in hard tech has moved materially higher. Two years ago - a killer technical team, working prototype and huge market gets you there. Increasingly investors want real traction, meaningful contracts, manufacturing figured out and a viable path toward scale. Series A diligence is starting to look a hell of a lot like old Series B diligence. Not a bad thing IMO. > At the same time, best companies are raising faster than I’ve ever seen. They aren't running six-month fundraising processes - talk to 10–20 investors, create scarcity, get a lead and suddenly everyone who was “still doing work” has 48 hours to decide lol. Fundraising has become incredibly binary. > Defense tech is no longer contrarian. Full stop. Ten years ago, could barely get a mainstream VC to touch weapons. Now everyone has a defense thesis. Probably great for America, but investors should recognize what happened: the trade went from deeply contrarian to increasingly consensus. Next Anduril probably isn't going to look like Anduril. > Increasingly convinced capital intensity is not the problem people think it is. Lack of differentiation is. Give me the company that needs $100M to build something extremely difficult over the company that needs $5M to build something 30 other teams can copy. Capital can be raised. Technical moats, manufacturing knowledge, supply chains and customer relationships much harder to manufacture. > Hard tech founders are getting significantly smarter about the capital stack. Venture equity used to be the hammer for every nail. Now I'm seeing founders think about government grants, customer-funded development, equipment financing, venture debt, project finance and strategic capital alongside equity. This is good. > Government is quietly becoming one of the biggest growth investors in hard tech. Grants, loans, contracts, guarantees and direct strategic investment are increasingly underwriting infrastructure that traditional VC never could. The best founders are figuring out how to stack governemnt/VC without destroying the cap table. > Hard tech valuations are starting to get stupid in pockets. SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir and a handful of monster outcomes proved the category can create enormous companies. Great. That doesn't mean every pre-seed defense startup with three engineers, a render and an SBIR should be raising at a $40M cap. Entry price still matters. > Think we're massively underestimating the opportunity in boring industrial companies. Everyone wants robots, rockets and drones.Increasingly interested in the shit underneath them: motors, bearings, pumps, power electronics, machine tooling, specialty materials, controls, chemicals, components and replacement parts. (said this the other day) > Biggest opportunity in hard tech may increasingly be outside the venture ecosystem entirely. Fifty funds are chasing the Stanford/SpaceX/Anduril engineer starting an autonomy company. Far fewer are looking at the 38-year-old manufacturing engineer in Ohio who has spent 15 years staring at a $2B industry's biggest bottleneck. Everyone wants proprietary deal flow. Maybe stop looking in the same places.