Follow the talent

Talent is the primary input to the venture equation, and the supply of talent is shifting in ways that will materially impact returns for all investors.

Universities have been scaling production of bachelor's degrees for decades, but the credential has decoupled from outcomes. In 2025, unemployment for college grads aged 22-27 hit 5.8%, the same rate as people without high school diplomas (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Compare that to 2010, when recent high school dropouts faced 42.7% unemployment while college grads sat around 10%. The gap has closed, but not in the direction most people expected.

The McKinsey factory line is broken, and we don't think it's worth fixing it. The world has just moved on. There used to be a time, not too long ago, when investment banking and consulting were the envy of the ivy leagues. Over the last decade however, the best brains have slowly been draining to big tech, and now to startups. You don't look very smart if you need to finish your HBS degree to slave away at GS. That's cheugy.

If you can do the work, the credential doesn't matter. Palantir launched its Meritocracy Fellowship in 2025, hiring 22 high school graduates straight out of school, no college required. Tesla and SpaceX stopped caring about degrees years ago. Anduril's building its workforce the same way.

Peter Thiel understood this well when he started his fellowship. Not a scholarship, but a bet that the best founders don't need institutional permission to build. He was right, and universities aren't restructuring fast enough to follow suit, if they ever will.

The venture divide is stark. Of the tens of thousands of campuses, only two consistently produce startup-ready talent at scale: Stanford and Berkeley. Stanford alone graduated over 1,100 company founders between 2006 and 2017, and the cumulative output of all Stanford-founded companies? $2.7 trillion in annual revenue (Stanford GSB).

But even that's context-dependent. Stanford doesn't produce great founders because of curriculum. It produces them because of proximity to the Valley. The culture, the networks, the density of ambition.

Meanwhile, the broader economy is already repricing the relationship between capital and labor, and has been for decades. In 1980, labor received 58% of total economic output. By late 2024, that had fallen to 51.4%, while profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the same period (Commerce Department via WSJ). The simplest illustration of where we're headed: in 1985, IBM was America's most valuable company with nearly 400,000 employees. Today, Nvidia is 20 times as valuable, five times as profitable, and employs roughly a tenth as many people (WSJ).

AI is only accelerating this, not reversing it. Work is being automated faster than institutions can adapt. White-collar busywork is getting replaced by agents. Blue-collar repetition is facing robotics. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei wrote last month that "large enterprises are disrupted in general and replaced with much less labor-intensive startups." We think it's going to be bigger, faster, and more disruptive than currently reported.

What stays scarce isn't execution, it's founding. Human ingenuity at the zero-to-one stage: identifying problems worth solving, building conviction around a vision, attracting resources, earning trust to execute at scale. AI optimizes within existing patterns. It doesn't create new categories. That's a human skill unlikely to transition to machines anytime soon.

Think steel mills in the 1800s. Entire industries restructured around new technology. Labor markets adjusted, migrating from farms to cities. We're early in a similar transition. As the broader labor market shifts, the divergence will accelerate, and asset prices will follow suit.

The few who can navigate the new wave are already scarce today. Demand for a new kind of training is massive, just as it was for university degrees throughout the postwar era, but supply remains scarce. The only way to acquire these skills is to learn directly from others who are great at doing it: join a great startup. Unfortunately there just aren't enough of those, and access isn't evenly distributed. Today's working class is already on the wrong side of this shift. Capital, however, has a chance to adapt.

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If you owned farmland at the start of the industrial revolution, the smart move was to sell it and acquire industrial assets near cities before prices re-aligned. On the eve of this Cambrian explosion of economic opportunity, the challenge for investors won't be access, it will be surface area. What and where you buy matters as much as when. Get there too late, and the returns aren't worth the risk.

The traditional playbook of writing checks into brand-name venture funds doesn't work in a world where platforms are raising double-digit billion funds catering to institutions. Underwriting growth rounds into companies that are already working is perfect for a pension or sovereign wealth fund, but less than ideal for private investors looking to grow portfolios while generating cashflow to fund new investments.

We believe the opportunity lives early. By the time the trajectory is obvious, the upside is already gone. First checks are written before the market crowns a winner. You're betting on the person's ability to navigate zero-to-one, not business metrics. The reward for that early risk goes beyond venture-scale returns, it gives investors the ability to generate cashflow via secondary markets, a privilege reserved for a handful of winners and very early shareholders.

The seed-stage market was relatively small a decade ago, easy to cover in its entirety by a handful of firms. Now it's booming, and thanks to productivity gains from AI, we don't think it will slow down. If anything, it will accelerate.

A matching problem is presenting itself. Game recognizes game. The best founders choose their investors, not just their capital. They want someone who's lived zero-to-one, who has the pattern recognition and relevant experience to be genuinely value-add. At the earliest stages, human judgment and talent networks are the only things that matter.

That's why Slice bundles managers who connect with founders on the journey because they've taken it themselves. They're making judgments on people, not just metrics. Can this person build a category-defining company? Will they attract the talent, capital, and customer conviction to scale? There's no spreadsheet for that. It's taste, and taste comes from real life experience, not a badge. Just follow the talent, and let it guide you to the future.