S3E2: Getting There Before Everyone Else – Finn Murphy on Talent Density as Competitive Advantage

Sep 18, 2025

Finn Murphy, founder and solo general partner of Nebular Ventures, dives into his unique approach to investing in talent-dense opportunities across emerging sectors like quantum computing and healthcare tools. He reveals how he tracks where innovative minds gather, opting to invest where others overlook potential. Finn shares his conviction-driven strategy of following talent rather than trends, emphasizing a genuine partnership with founders and exploring unconventional assets. His insights challenge traditional VC models by prioritizing people-first investing.

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ANECDOTE

From Founder To VC Via Curiosity

Finn discovered VC by applying to an analyst role in Dublin after his startup exit and stayed for years because he loved learning about people and technologies.
He became partner at Frontline and later moved to New York, which pushed him toward starting his own fund.

INSIGHT

Compete With Conviction, Not Size

Finn started Nebular because he saw increasing risk aversion and consensus investing in venture as an opportunity to compete with conviction and focus on founders.
He believes small firms can win by being singularly committed and flexible across domains where others can't go deep.

ADVICE

Follow Talent, Not Hype

Go where smart people are quietly spending time rather than chasing high-status, overcrowded areas.
Meet researchers, vendors, and founders to map talent migration and use that to generate early ideas.

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The mystery of venture investing is that you never know where your highest returns will come from. There's no repeatable business model, no guaranteed formula for finding the next breakout company. Most VCs try to solve this with pattern matching or specialized theses, but these approaches focus on what's working now. Finn bets on what's coming next.

Finn Murphy, Solo GP of Nebular, takes a different approach as a generalist investor. Instead of trying to predict outcomes, he goes deep on talent density.

Finn looks for areas "not flooded with high-status attention but brimming with potential." While others pile into consensus opportunities, he's mapping where smart, innovative minds are quietly building. Whether it's healthcare administration tools, quantum computing applications, or even dinosaur fossils as an alternative asset class, his investment decisions follow talent migration patterns rather than hot sectors.

"I don't just invest in what's hot," Finn explains. "I dive into spaces where others may hesitate." This conviction-driven approach lets him move fluidly across verticals because he's following people, not trends.

What makes this strategy work is how deep Finn goes. Rather than skimming surfaces across sectors, he systematically identifies where concentrated talent is spending time and then embeds himself there. I.e. engaging with academia, top founders, friends of founders. His intellectual curiosity, stemming from his mother's encouragement to "be the best in whatever you do" and supported by his engineering background and startup experience, drives him to explore ideas that might seem trivial to others but resonate deeply with the builders.

Going deep on talent density means accepting that your winners might come from completely unexpected places. Finn's fund deployment spanning US and Europe, reflects this approach. He's not trying to diversify away risk through broad exposure, but concentrating risk by going deep on people and places others haven't noticed yet.

This approach aligns with what his LPs actually want: diversity and non-consensus investment strategies. Finn has built a repeatable system for finding concentrated, correlated seed risk in spaces where the best minds are working but capital hasn't flooded in yet.

As he puts it, he likes "learning about things and usually starts from a place of ignorance, mostly barely scraping much past there, just trying to stay slightly ahead of where the crowd is going."

This humility combined with systematic talent hunting allows him to consistently stay ahead across different verticals. He's not trying to be an expert in everything. He's trying to be early to wherever the experts are going next.

Special thanks to Talal for introducing us to Finn! 🙏

To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com