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Vashon describes itself as expeditionary capital modeled after historic merchant banks like the Dutch East India Company, investing in both technology and assets tied to national sovereignty, and it works directly in the field—traveling to scout countries, islands, and supply routes rather than investing from behind a screen. The fund also tries to get ahead of supply-chain bottlenecks like materials and logistics before they affect portfolio companies, and it evaluates founders by imagining whether they'd be the kind of person capable of leading others into battle a thousand years ago.
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What Makes them Unique
Video Interview
On the paradigm shift underlying Vashon's thesis
"We're going to exit what we would consider the 100-year anomaly of the last 70 to a hundred years, which was characterized by sort of Pax Americana in the sense of like post-war global order, overfinancialization of everything from capital to ultimately software, over-indexing into abstraction and artificiality... we're going to leave that 100-year anomaly and return."
Santiago Pliego | Vashon
On what capital native to the new paradigm should look like:
"In the past, it was the Dutch East India Company. It was the merchant banks of the 16th to 18th centuries that deployed capital in these really interesting, complex ways... fundamentally in the field, fundamentally across ways that might look like venture capital or early stage. You're designing the best ships... but you're also underwriting an expedition to go out somewhere in the world to secure a critical supply chain or critical material that's necessary for national sovereignty."
Santiago Pliego | Vashon
On the single most important thing a pitch needs to show:
"Show me, if anything, I want you to show that the problem in itself is sort of hiding in plain sight on the one hand, but it's also a problem that no one's identified."
Santiago Pliego | Vashon
On what Vashon is actually evaluating in a first meeting:
"If you beam this founder back a thousand years before startups exist, are they conquering a city? Are they the type of person that are leading a group of men into battle, scaling a wall, taking over a town or a country? Because that's what it takes. That's what startups are fundamentally all about."
Santiago Pliego | Vashon
On the mistake technical founders make in their pitch:
"Just having pure technical prowess and the most interesting way to produce or build or manufacture something doesn't translate to a business. You have to actually, you're building a company, not doing a science experiment. So you have to show that."
Santiago Pliego | Vashon
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