E9: Working w/ VP JD Vance, Peter Thiel & Thesis Driven Investing w/ Colin Greenspon

Colin Greenspon is the co-founder of Narya Capital, a venture capital fund he cofounded with Vice President JD Vance and Falon Donohue (also cofounder of Reindustrialize). Before Narya, Colin was on the investment team at Mithril Capital, working alongside Peter Thiel.As a technologist if you go over the Twitter/X timeline, it will be hard to miss hype videos of hardtech companies announcing their new funding rounds or showcasing early prototypes of their product. You see photos of founders in a giant warehouse with the American flag hanging at the back, this represents a crop of builders and entrepreneurs who are re-shoring manufacturing, building defense-tech (war-tech? think Navier Boat, Epirus etc) or going for moonshots like humanoid robots (think Figure AI), manufacturing in space (think Varda Space or Outpost Space) and so on.

As a technologist if you go over the Twitter/X timeline, it will be hard to miss hype videos of frontier tech companies announcing their new funding rounds or showcasing early prototypes of their product. You see photos of founders in a giant warehouse with the American flag hanging at the back, this represents a crop of builders and entrepreneurs who are advancing manufacturing (Atomic), building defense-tech (war-tech? think Navier Boat, Epirus etc) or going for moonshots like humanoid robots (think Figure AI), manufacturing in space ( Varda Space or Outpost Space) and so on.

In 2022, I clearly remember hardware was still an outlier category very few VCs invested in. Fast forward to 2024, 38% of total funding raised by venture funds had a hardware thesis. There has definitely been a shift. 2023, the “American Dynamism” micro-cultural movement is born as a16z launched their new fund with a focus on critical technologies. This also coincided with the e/acc micro-cultural movement many might remember which represented technology acclerationists, technologists on Twitter/X including Marc Andreessen had e/acc as postfix in their names.

Narya had this thesis in 2019. Four years before it went mainstream on at least the X timeline, before more funds flocked into the space and raised millions of dollars against the thesis, back then it was truly contrarian to go actively look for founders outside Silicon Valley or founders working on critical problems outside of the Silicon Valley flavor of the year. Majority of the capital was still being deployed into SaaS, then crypto and now its AI. Majority of the capital was still being deployed into SaaS, then crypto and now its AI (to be fair it still is, according to Carta’s pre-seed funding report only 19% of funding went into frontier tech in 2024).

Narya invested in Rumble with a thesis around free-speech before Twitter was acquired by Elon, they invested in Atomic, an advanced manufacturing startup out of Detroit and started the movement on Reindustrializing America and continue to develop theses 3-5 years before they go mainstream.

Colin explains in our conversation how Narya continues to come up with a contrarian thesis and stay away from technology hype cycles (including AI), what he learned working at Mithril Capital which has produced an incredible talent mafia of its own with former associates now in leadership roles at 8VC, Linux Foundation, DARPA and so on including the Vice President of the United States of America.

Colin has never really sat down for a long form conversation like this. This was one of my favorite episodes, hope you enjoy the show as much as I did recording it!

One takeaway for me was that Twitter/X, tech podcasts and blogs are a lagging indicator of where the most value will get accrued on a 5 year timeline and our job as founders of ideas, companies and early stage investors is to identify the biggest markets, the unique ideas, find or assemble the right team and have a differentiated business model with some sort of a masterplan for going after the market. The question one should always ask themselves is how would you create a monopoly on a 10 year timeline? But in the short term you should be able to zoom in and work on pushing out your version of the Tesla roadster not the Optimus humanoid robot.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro

01:44 – What Narya VC does

03:57 – Working with Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Falon Donahue

09:35 – Why are harder problems solved away from SF

13:24 – The Mithril “Mafia” and getting into Venture

20:26 – The origin story and the Ohio thesis

27:01 – Why Reindustrialization Matters

31:45 – Narya’s core investment theses

39:10 – Narya’s investments

43:48 – Co-creating Reindustrialize

51:25 – Evaluating founders

57:41 – Why Betting on America’s Industrial Future Was the Contrarian Move

1:03:41 – Contrarian frameworks at Mithril

1:09:08 – How Colin Spends His Time

1:25:41 – Partnering With Scientific Investors

1:36:32 – Advice to Young Builders

1:52:57 – Lessons from Mithril alumni

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— Suffiyan Malik

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