Motion Blur 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
Connect with Grant
🔗 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
🌀 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:
Intro music credit: Will Harrison
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