For decades, the startup was the atomic unit of venture capital. Maybe in the next era, that assumption starts to break. Maybe the founder, not the startup, becomes the new unit of company formation. And if that happens, a new breed of VC firms may emerge: firms that do not just fund companies after they are formed, but help exceptional founders discover which company deserves to be formed in the first place.

I want to take you on a short journey. Not a journey about the AI hype, or the latest model release. This is a journey about a pattern. A pattern that has repeated itself across the history of computing and technology.

Every time technology became more abstract, more connected, and easier to use, it did not simply improve old software. It created entirely new kinds of companies, new markets, and even new human behaviors. And I think we may be standing at one of those moments again.

I’ve heard this pitch from founders many times. And honestly, on the surface, it sounds very reasonable. “We’ll start as a service business, work closely with a few paying clients, really understand the problem, refine the solution, and then turn that into a scalable software product.” In theory, it sounds smart. In practice, sometimes it works. But many times, founders get stuck somewhere in the middle, because the path from services to product is much harder than it sounds when you say it in one sentence.

I like the idea of venture studios. In theory, they make a lot of sense.

It sounds smarter than traditional VC. More structured. More repeatable. Less random. And that is exactly why the model is attractive.

But I am still skeptical, especially when it comes to standalone venture studios. Not because the model can never work. It can. Some studios have produced strong companies. But I think many people underestimate how hard it is to build venture-scale startups this way.

One thing I hear often from founders is this:

“VCs always say focus, focus, focus.”

And honestly, I get why that becomes frustrating. Because sometimes “focus” gets repeated so much that it starts to sound like: stay small, stay narrow, do less, dream less, don’t stretch too far, do’t think global!

But that’s not really what investors mean. At least it’s not what I mean.

To me, focus is mostly about execution. But vision? I actually think vision should be much bigger than that

Telecom is not a mature industry. It is just in between disruptions.

The first wave moved communication from wires to mobile. The second moved it from carriers to software. The next may move it from towers to satellites, and in parallel, from passive interfaces to AI-native communication systems.

The old telecom giants connected people. The next generation may connect people, software, satellites, and AI agents all at once.

A space mission launched later can arrive earlier if technology improves fast enough. That is now happening in startups too: founders who start later can overtake early movers because better tools, better agents, and better ways of building let them move faster and arrive first.

SaaS is evolving fast. From the investor seat, one pattern keeps showing up: classic SaaS pricing breaks in AI. Founders are adapting with new business models, and we’re learning from those experiments in real time.

Everyone has access to the same headlines. The real difference is who upgrades their mental models fast enough to recognize what matters, before it gets packaged into a narrative, turned into a buzzword, and priced in.

Venture capital trained us to see the startup world in two buckets: “lifestyle” versus “high growth.” That two-bucket model used to be helpful. Now it’s limiting. Not because VC is wrong, but because technology is changing the shape of what a “good company” looks like. The future isn’t only unicorns. It’s also upgraded “lifestyle” businesses that distribute cash, as AI makes software cheaper.

In venture capital, one phrase shows up in almost every partner meeting: “What’s our ownership?” For years, VCs have been trained to think that if you don’t own 10–20%, you’re not really in the deal. But is that always true? And in a world of larger rounds, competitive syndicates, secondaries, and multi-asset strategies… how much should a VC really care about ownership %?

There’s a lot written about the lifecycle of a startup, the lifecycle of a fund, even the lifecycle of a market. Almost nobody talks about the lifecycle of a VC’s ego.

This is my attempt to map that journey, not as a therapist, not as a guru, but as someone who has lived through most of these stages personally.