I Asked a $450M VC Where to Invest in 2026

Could only lose $3,000,000. I could gain $300,000,000. Alright. Kiel, what's up, dude? Not much, man. Doing well. Dude, always good having you on. You are, as always, I give you this title, the most interesting man in tech. You're you're in a great investor. You're a tech investor. How big is the fund, or how much total have you you invested now at this point? About 450,000,000 total. Okay. $450,000,000 So, like, you know, I've learned a lot from poker. Right? And in poker, you learn all these lessons that actually, like, cross apply totally outside the domain of poker. What would you say are the lessons from investing that apply to life? I think, you know, one is just, like, upside can be greater than downside. Like so if I invest in a company, let's say I put $3,000,000 into a company, there's a possibility of it being $300,000,000 But the downside is capped at 3,000,000. I could only lose $3,000,000. I could gain $303,100,000,000 bucks. Yeah. Because if you don't work in, investing or anywhere where you have that sort of asymmetric risk versus return, Let's just say you have a hourly wage job. Right? Like, you're sort of your mind gets trained into this linear. I put one in, I get one out. Right? Like, I can't put one in and get fifty hours of pay out of this next hour. That doesn't really ever happen in a normal job. But if your job is investing, you're like, oh, of course. That happens all the time. I lose one times my money, but sometimes I gain a 100 or a thousand times my money back. And that kinda breaks the brain, and you sort of, like, start to see, you know, other opportunities. Similarly, they have that, as the kids would say, the asymmetry of risk return. Alright. So that's one. There was something around this portfolio theory. Like, you know, out of the 450,000,000 you deploy, right, like, what does what does winning look like? You probably need to return some multiple of that 450,000,000. So what does winning look like for you? You put in $4.50. What do you need to get out for this to be a success? A couple billion dollars. Couple billion dollars. Let's say 2,000,000,000. Let's just use it as a rough math. And let's say it's 500,000,000 to make math easy. Right. So 500,000,000, four x it. That would be great over some ten year period. Yep. Now of that 2,000,000,000, how many companies would you go into? And of those, like, how many companies would be responsible for returning all of that money? It's only gonna be a few. Right? Give me the math there. Yeah. So almost all of the returns are gonna come from, like, 10 companies out of Right. Hundreds that we will have invested in. Correct. And so there's something like that in life too. Right? Whether it's, like, people you meet or dating …