Austin Guyette looks at Seattle's startup scene through the idea of sous-chefs—standout early employees at fast-growing companies who go on to become the next wave of founders—and he thinks about investing the way a product manager thinks about building something, pulling together resources and information and influencing people without needing formal authority. He tends to dig into where value really sits in a market, like questioning whether AI-driven value lands with law firms or software companies, and whether a promising tool can grow from solving one narrow problem into a full platform, and he's drawn to companies that cut through complexity, such as security tools that map out attacker paths instead of just piling on more alerts.