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Put Your Hand in the Box:
The Spirit of BlueYard
“Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
If you have a pulse you know we are alive in a moment of extremity, with breakthroughs and breakdowns appearing in equal measure across our civilizational bingo card. The world feels full of potential yet completely off its axis.
Our social fabric is fraying under the strain of inequality and institutional decay. The geopolitical chessboard has become an open field of pawns and pyromaniacs, where the erosion of old alliances has produced both chaos and white space for realignment. New technologies are evolving faster than our governance and market mechanisms can comprehend, let alone contain.
Civilization feels like it’s running a dangerous experiment with no control group. The band of possible outcomes has widened, and the margin for error is deadly sharp.
Yet in this reality, there are those shaping the contours of an unbelievable future in places others can’t fathom. Founders with their eyes wide open to a rapidly changing reality, quietly working on technologies urgently needed to keep us from unravelling, and to nudge us toward a better world.
These founders are rethinking the underlying assumptions of how systems function: how energy is produced, how increasingly powerful compute is applied, how biology is programmed, how defense is modernized, how capital moves. They operate with a clarifying sense of urgency, navigating around obstacles through a fog no one else can see through, towards a destination only they can see.
None of these companies resemble what came before, and they aren’t meant to. They are products of their time. They are n-of-1 visions for an era of black swans.
What these founders need and deserve are partners who won’t lazily try to squish them into boxes and categories that do not fit. They need co-conspirators fluent in weirdness and volatility.
At BlueYard, we are technology pragmatists investing in the building blocks of a resilient, stable, and prosperous world to come.
Our superpower is being able to stare straight at the scary stuff, to navigate risk and volatility with a vision clouded by neither fear nor hype. We approach a bizarre emerging reality with a steady hand and minds that cannot be boggled.
When we think about how to metabolize risk in this environment, the infamous quote from Dune rings in our ears: Fear is the mind-killer.
Masochism is an act we don’t have time for, but outfitting oneself with blinders is to limit your ability to see the truth. Most people get vertigo at the edge. Honestly, so do we. But that doesn’t mean we back away.
We fly into the eye of the storm with smiles on our faces, because that’s where the highest-resolution data lives. Because once you’ve pushed through the noise (and the nausea), it’s the only place you get a clean read on what’s really happening.
That’s how we work with our companies. We stay present, lucid, and useful through complexity. We stand tall when others are in a defensive crouch. And we’ve built up a tolerance for volatility that lets us see opportunities others can’t.
We often invest when others hesitate, like when a space seems risky, radioactive, or just deeply misunderstood:
2016: In the wake of Mt. Gox, when crypto was synonymous with crime and anything non-Bitcoin was deemed a scam, we backed both Protocol Labs (IPFS) and Filecoin with their strange idea for a decentralized web with distributed storage, which now underpins exabytes of censorship-resistant infrastructure and supports over one hundred million users.
2018: Before the transformer paper reshaped the field, we saw that the appetite for compute was outpacing what traditional architectures could deliver, members of the BlueYard team invested in Groq and IonQ, betting on new computational frontiers. As much of Silicon Valley turned away from silicon, we invested in AI chips, photonic interconnects, and liquid cooling to meet hyperscalers’ accelerating demands.
2023: While most VCs tiptoed around defense post-Ukraine, hoping for polite “dual-use” applications, we backed a founding team building weapons powerful enough never to fire. Castelion was just a pitch deck when we funded their vision for hypersonic missile systems, because deterrence only works if it arrives before the war.
We are obsessed with getting there early and putting our capital to work in places the herd might not agree with for years. So while some of these investments might seem fashionable now, they weren’t when we wrote the checks.
The unifying thread between these checks is deceivingly simple: they’re n-of-1 companies allergic to convention and drawn to hard problems. And they’re led by founders who know that while the road ahead might not even exist yet, there’s probably a pot of gold where nobody else is willing to go.
Somewhere along the way, venture capital became addicted to a buffet of already-obvious startups, templatizing the entire process and expecting the returns to follow as a matter of course.
But what happens when the templates no longer fit, and there’s no longer such thing as a safe play? The venture world is reckoning with that question in real time.
Nobody wants to put their hand in the box anymore.
If the real multiples live where deep risk and opportunity overlap, playing it safe is malpractice. You end up overexposed in crowded markets, underexposed to breakthrough value, and most importantly, disconnected from the founders who are actually trying to do something different.
So this is a call. If your company keeps getting misread by the market, or dismissed by investors asking the wrong questions, come talk to us.
If you’ve been told again and again you’re too early, not big enough, or not in their category, come talk to us.
If you’re working on something that matters, something you can’t stop thinking about, something that looks strange today but could shape the structure of tomorrow, definitely come talk to us.
We may not have a playbook. Sorry, those days are gone.
But we do have the tools, temperament, and the taste to fly into the storm with you.