Non-Consensus is Dead. Long Live Non-Consensus.

Every weekend, there’s a new “hero” tweet that takes over venture capital group chats.

This past weekend was clearly slow on the news front, because what I initially read as a fairly standard take ended up dominating my timeline.

The tweet came from Martin Casado, GP at Andreessen Horowitz, who runs their $1.25B infra practice:

The idea that non consensus investing is where the alpha is, is actually quite dangerous in the early stage. Follow on capital tends to be more and more consensus aligned.

For whatever reason, this concept triggered a bunch of investors.

We should feel lucky. We’re living in an era full of consensus categories that can still produce massive outcomes: AI, robotics, crypto, bio, defense, autonomous systems, manufacturing.

It wasn’t always like this.

When I started angel investing in 2014, venture capital felt predictable.

Mobile was exploding, on-demand apps were raising money (usually with terrible unit economics), and cloud was just starting to compound. It was the perfect way to learn the ropes and see how quickly categories could get crowded.

Martin’s larger point, as I read the tweet and the replies, is that very few categories are truly non-consensus anymore. The industry has matured.

Sure, you can find “non-consensus” companies within “consensus” categories but at some point, it all feels like we're glamorizing our jobs.

Some investors are superior at sourcing, picking and winning, but that usually doesn’t make them non-consensus as we talk about the concept online. It just makes them great.

Take American Dynamism as an example, a venture category branded just a few years ago by A16Z that now feels like an industry in itself.

Palantir (2003).
Truly contrarian. Nobody else was building forward-deployed CIA software. Palantir was a one-of-one company that probably only Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and Peter Thiel could have created. Two decades later, it’s more relevant than ever with a $370B market cap.

Anduril (2017).
Equally contrarian, but for different reasons. At the height of Trump-hate in Silicon Valley, backing autonomous defense systems was a career risk. Elad Gil has said he actually got furious emails from friends after his Anduril investment became public. Today Anduril is a decacorn. Only eight years ago, it was radioactive.

2025.
Fast forward and American Dynamism is a full-blown investment category. Hundreds of startups and dozens of funds are chasing defense, aerospace, and manufacturing. I live 15 minutes from El Segundo which has famously become a dense hub of these companies.

Today’s defense investors aren’t contrarian. It’s one of the most consensus categories you’ll find.

Does it matter? Not really. Some companies will hit. Most won’t. That’s venture capital.

The non-consensus part today isn’t spotting the category.

It’s cutting through the noise, ignoring investor WhatsApp gossip about which startups are “good,” and having the conviction to back the ones that still feel too strange or risky, even if the broader category is already consensus.

In other words: being a non-consensus investor inside consensus.

Crypto illustrates the point well. The industry is already $2.5T in market cap, with Bitcoin alive for fifteen years and BTC + Ethereum settling trillions annually. By any reasonable measure, it’s consensus, but it’s still misunderstood.

Plenty of VCs (especially in the Bay Area) still can’t see past the FTX blow-up in 2022 even three years later.

Meanwhile, the smartest operators are moving the other direction. Stripe is betting its roadmap on stablecoins, even building its own payments-focused L1. And Robinhood, now a $95B company, is basically a crypto company in disguise.

The paradox is that crypto is consensus as a category today, but the opportunity is to be non-consensus about its timing and trajectory taking the bets investment committees are too slow or scared to underwrite.

That’s why Peter Thiel is piling money into Ethereum right now while most of Sand Hill is still trauma-bonding over FTX.

I’ve never lost sleep over being “consensus” or “non-consensus.” What keeps me up at night is whether we’re backing the right founders and deploying capital where it actually compounds.

Martin’s observation hit a nerve because it points to something structural, not a lack of creativity:

“Follow on capital tends to be more and more consensus aligned.”

Growth investors aren’t less imaginative, they’re more efficient, with massive funds they need to deploy. Sure, that makes venture feel less romantic. But in mature industries romance always loses to efficiency in the long run.

The best companies are known earlier than ever. Scouts spray $25K checks, report back to their multi-stage overlords, and any information edge evaporates within minutes of a founder update.

Sub-verticals become consensus at lightning speed: AI legal, AI healthcare, AI customer service. There are few secrets in Silicon Valley anymore.

VC right now is noisy AF. If you’re running a contrarian playbook and it works, you deserve the win. But most venture capitalists aren’t Peter Thiel.

I came across a thread last week reviewing 61 (!) AI coding agents and sent it around to my teammates at Chapter One.

We already knew the category was crowded, but seeing dozens of venture-funded startups lined up with screenshots made it feel ridiculous.

“I’ve tried all 61 AI coding agents & IDEs: Emergent, CodeRabbit, Cursor, Copilot, Replit, Devin, Github Spark, Figma Make & more.”

The author included this emoji in the headline:

Accurate. That’s exactly how it feels to be a seed investor right now.

After about two minutes of that thread, I wanted to clear my head and jump in the Pacific Ocean for a cold plunge (though at this point, does taking cold plunges make me consensus?).

I can count the number of truly non-consensus investors on one or two hands. Not because the rest aren’t smart (in fact many are really f’ing smart), but because venture is now hyper-networked, hyper-efficient, and hyper-competitive.

Alpha is still out there. But it doesn’t come from LARPing contrarian. It comes from knowing what you believe in and moving faster than others.

It comes from sitting through thousands of meetings that mostly feel like wasted time. From enduring dry spells where you wonder if you’re even good at this.

Then one day, you meet a truly special founder. That’s when it matters to move faster than the funds waiting for their Monday partner meetings. To decide, commit, and win the right to invest before the market catches on.

And it will catch on fast if you don’t.

In the rarest cases, you’ll back founders who invent categories so big they look obvious to Sand Hill Road only in hindsight. But that isn’t usually about being “consensus” or “non-consensus.” It’s a messy mix of hard work, skill, and luck.

Of course, when those companies break out, investors rewrite history and call it a “thesis” on their victory laps.

The truth is, most category-defining companies don’t feel like new categories at the beginning. They just feel like another startup… until suddenly, they don’t.

In 2025, venture capital is hyper-networked and hyper-efficient. Scouts live-tweet deal flow. Firms pitch LPs on “unique access.” Everyone swears they’re contrarian.

Behind the noise, the truth is it’s harder than ever to be non-consensus. But it’s also the most exciting time to invest.

There were years when we all sat around waiting for the next platform shift. Now we’ve got ten of them colliding at once. The number of incredible companies being built right now is staggering.

Anyway, I should stop writing and get back to work. Another legal AI deck just hit my inbox.