The Disruptors' Blind Spot

We see the true picture of every company but our own.

In Oscar Wilde’s only novel, a young man named Dorian Gray gets the bargain many secretly desire. His face will stay young and unblemished no matter how he lives, while a portrait of him, hidden upstairs in an attic, ages and rots in his place. Everything he should have had to answer for shows up on the canvas instead of on his face. For a long time the arrangement is wonderful. He keeps the painting covered, in a locked room, and simply never goes up to look.

The horror of the story is how long he manages not to look.

Early-stage venture capital has its own portrait in the attic. Right now, artificial intelligence is aging the way we work.

Our whole job as VCs is seeing the true picture behind someone else’s surface. We sit across from a founder and attempt to discern their true ability to execute, their capacity to attract exceptional talent, and their will to persevere against the odds. We’ve gotten it right enough times to build an entire asset class around it. And nothing keeps you from seeing your own portrait like a long career spent studying everyone else’s.

My partner Rob Go has written, bracingly, that seed venture in particular is currently “staring extinction in the eye.” In a companion piece he frames the choice in the standard Christensen sustaining-vs-disruptive terms. He is right that the pressures on early stage VC are structural and unlikely to reverse, and right that nearly every firm will claim to be adopting AI while very few actually change how they operate.

We pride ourselves on knowing the difference between sustaining and disruptive innovations. We are misreading it about ourselves.

Almost everyone in venture is treating AI as sustaining: same craft, better tools, faster sourcing, sharper analysis, the partner freed up to do the parts that supposedly matter. That is real, and worth doing. It is also precisely the move the comfortable incumbent always makes.

The more challenging possibility to accept is that AI is disruptive to the work itself, coming at it from the bottom up, reaching every function of a venture firm: sourcing, diligence, decision, support, even the relationship itself. Followed far enough, it doesn’t just improve each function; it reimagines what a firm even is once those functions no longer need us.

When I tell my peers in private that I believe AI is going to take our jobs, I’m usually laughed off, or met with a hardened objection.

The reflex dismissal that early-stage venture won’t be upended by artificial intelligence is that venture is a business of relationships and conviction, not information. That a founder wants a human in the room, that taste and trust and the lonely non-consensus bet can’t be automated. Maybe. That deserves a real answer rather than a reflexive one, and earning that answer is most of what a new blog series would do. But “you cannot innovate away what makes me special” is, almost word for word, what an incumbent says on the way down.

This is the portrait the industry keeps upstairs.

We run a hard, clear-eyed assessment on every company that walks through the door, the same durability test we are known for, and we have not run it on ourselves. We could. We have chosen not to, because we suspect we won’t like the portrait.

I am starting this new blog, Carried Away, to be a diligence memo most of us are unwilling to run on ourselves. I’m writing it in public, still working most of it out, because I would rather be too early than turn out to be too late. In the end this is about the truth, easier to face now than it will be later. I’ll work through it the way we’d work through any company staring down disruption: how decision-making businesses have been automated before and what the doubters said each time, which parts of our craft are genuinely safe and which only feel that way, and what a firm rebuilt from a blank sheet might look like.

The portrait is in the attic either way. We might as well climb up and look.

The portrait the industry keeps upstairs. GPT Image, in the manner of Degas.