Hampus Jakobsson is a climate-focused venture investor at Pale Blue Dot who uses fiction and science fiction as core tools for investment judgment, treating literary novels as mental simulations for understanding founders and future systems rather than relying solely on business analysis. He deliberately seeks extraordinary people with unconventional career paths over polished profiles, testing whether he'd trust founders with his kids and building unusually intimate relationships where he shares internal investment memos during diligence and maintains WhatsApp-level communication.

• A strong preference for high agency and extreme ambition. He frequently discusses the importance of having drive and the willingness to be an outsider. He shares advice on aiming for the stars and encourages founders to embrace the sting of rejection rather than sticking to safe career tracks or smaller goals.
• Focus on execution over optics. He warns against joining the announcement economy, where founders seek external validation through press releases rather than building a muscle of execution. He believes in internalizing rewards and doing the work instead of turning startup progress into a dopamine game.
• Active experimentation with generative AI and coding. He is not just an observer but a user, sharing his own personal struggles while trying to use tools like Claude to recreate specific music tracks like Oxygène Part 4. He also discusses the shift toward an allocation economy where founders have infinite AI interns and must focus on management and taste.
• Philosophical approach to time and productivity. Drawing heavily from books like Four Thousand Weeks, he critiques the obsession with efficiency tools that only lead to more stress. He promotes the idea that prioritization is about deciding what you care about most, rather than just clearing a to-do list, and views time as the fabric of life rather than a resource to be exploited.
• Embracing the beginner mindset and resilience. He advocates for traversing the moat of low status, which means being willing to look inexperienced or foolish when learning new skills. He notes that he has restarted his own career path multiple times, moving from expert to novice, and views this ability to pivot and learn as essential for long-term success.
• Emphasis on sales as a survival mechanism. He explicitly critiques the European startup ecosystem for sometimes forgetting that for everyone to eat, someone has to sell. He believes that a lack of commercial aggression or understanding of sales dynamics is a major factor holding back otherwise talented founders.