Atypical Ventures

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Finding Engineers with Empathy

Finding Engineers with Empathy

When we first met Skopos Labs in 2019, their pitch deck read like a research project. Most investors passed. The “Proprietary Artificial Intelligence” and “deep learning methodology” in their deck sounded more like a science experiment than an investable business. AI was still fringe then—and unless you had worked

Why we choose hard problems over easy markets

Why we choose hard problems over easy markets

Most investors passed on Atomic Alchemy because it was a nuclear reactor. Full stop. While they chased software margins, we saw a founder living inside the biggest bottleneck in nuclear. The Constraint Nobody Wanted The nuclear medicine market in 2019 was broken: only 7 aging reactors worldwide produced medical isotopes—

Go direct

The world rewards boldness, yet too many people cling to warm introductions.

Redefining impact through first principles

Atypical invests with impact in mind, though “impact investing” has never been a hard mandate.

The presumptive no

You are the single greatest storyteller in the world. Every minute of every hour of every day, you are spinning stories in your own head. The presumptive no is one such story. It’s the story we tell ourselves when we fear rejection.

Beneficial to infinity, or optimal to zero.

Optimal is the mortal enemy of beneficial.

In search of engineers that give a damn.

Atypical invests in engineers with empathy.

The atypical angle

“It's ok to be weird. It's ok to be different. It's ok to care about things other people don't seem to find relevant or interesting or important. Being innovative and creative often means you aren't interested in what everyone else