Will's Corner: Hardware Over Software?

One more convo about the State of Adventure! This one is with our close friend Will Quist at Slow Ventures. Will had Grant on their podcast to riff on Adventure Capital, Narrative Warfare, and much more.

Will is one of the sharpest minds in venture, and we’re excited for you to tune into this convo.

Grant Gregory and Cantos just dropped a 286-slide deep tech mega-deck. They swap inside baseball on narrative warfare, the voting vs weighing machine, and why “precision” in deep tech labeling matters (Waymo ≠ TLM ≠ Shinkai ≠ Anduril).

Grant shows his two most important slides: the Deep Tech Score (levels from SaaS to “OpenAI before Transformers existed”) and the “narrative violation” where hardware’s capital-to-outcome multiples beat software in the data he compiled.

Chapters:

• 00:48 Who is Grant? A16Z American Dynamism team → Cantos

• 01:36 Why capital finally “got the plot” on hard tech

• 03:13 The two most important slides: Deep Tech Score + Narrative Violation 04:20 Hardware vs software: the capital-intensity myth, with data

• 05:59 Narrative warfare: voting machine vs weighing machine

• 06:38 Anointment dynamics; operating between fundamentals and momentum 07:28 Can founders learn the voting machine? Authenticity over mimicry

• 09:44 Defense FOMO, IBM-ification of venture, and pre-signal markets

• 14:18 Defense exits: only a few true fund-returners; multi-product is required 17:21 Deck feedback: founders want a real definition of “venture scale”

• 18:45 Deep Tech Score criteria: risk types, hypothesis legibility, market maturity

• 22:22 Why concentrated, full-stack investing matters in non-consensus areas 24:32 Non-VC capital in SpaceX/Tesla/Anduril: the uncomfortable truth

• 29:31 Business physics: power, supply chains, leverage in physical industries

• 30:13 Will’s take: Automation is a terrible investment vs services on top

• 32:10 Advice to founders: narrative warfare + slow conviction

Keep in touch with Slow Ventures: X: https://x.com/slow

Connect with Will

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🔗 Show Resource Links

• The full YouTube video of the conversation, and the tweet

• Grant’s tweet announcing the deck

• Grant’s LinkedIn post announcing the deck, and the full deck

🎙️ Podcast Links

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• ⁠X (FKA Twitter)⁠

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🌀 About Motion Blur

Exploring what makes great companies and technologies work. Brought to you by Grant Gregory & Hammad Aslam. Grant is a Partner at Cantos where he focuses on physical world technologies. Hammad is a Partner at Kivu Ventures, Susa’s growth fund.

Learn more about the hosts:

• Grant Gregory, ⁠Embers⁠

• Hammad Aslam, ⁠Susa Ventures

Intro music credit: ⁠Will Harrison⁠

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