Investing In Wackadoos

Investing in founders and their ideas means navigating a spectrum of oddballs, hustlers, and copycats. I bucket them like this:

Wackadoos: Fringe ideas—unproven, underdefined, outright weird. Markets barely exist, and success feels like a fever dream. These founders blaze their own trails with high agency, but spotting the rare gem means sifting through delusion. The trick? Find the difference that makes the difference.

Thot Leaders: Polished pitches iterating on what’s already out there, chasing efficiency over reinvention. They lean on big raises, bold distribution, and buzz, less about groundbreaking ideas, more about winning the game. High agency, sure, but resource-heavy and competition-obsessed.

Pastas: The “x of y” crowd—lazy imitations like “Uniswap but in ecosystem X.” They’re “someone of somewhere” until they’re “no one of nowhere,” coasting on external hype, not internal drive. Low agency, low (intellectual) effort.

Remixers: A step up from pastas, these founders mash up (mostly proven) ideas from different corners—think “AI meets L1”. Surface-level sophistication plays off differences, not similarities, but they’re still riffing, not creating. Overlap with pastas is common; intent separates them.

Ideas don’t stay put—they can travel clockwise through these categories. Ethereum’s a case study: a wackadoo Layer 1 blockchain snubbed by the big VCs morphing into a thot leader’s darling, spawned a pasta frenzy of “Ethereum killers” (Solana, etc.), and remixed into “not L1 but L2” plays. Evolution’s rarely counterclockwise—serendipity or rare genius drives it, barely a design.

Investing in wackadoos demands grit: identifying them (tough), writing most off (they’re usually nuts), and enduring side-eye from peers (being wrong hurts). But none of these types are inherently “good” or “bad”—each can win.

Remixers, blending what’s worked, might spark emergent user behavior despite recycling. Pastas can dominate small ponds. Thot leaders wield pre-baked clout. Wackadoos, if they hit, rewrite rules.

This isn’t static. A pasta founder can pivot into a thot leader; a remixer can go wackadoo. Agency matters—high-agency efforts (wackadoos, thot leaders) feel riskier but promise outsized impact. Still, a low-agency pasta might luck into big returns (although very rarely sustainable).

The model clarifies what you’re betting on and why. Pastas comfort with familiarity, remixers tease novelty, thot leaders sell ambition. Portfolios often skew competitive—Kissinger’s quip about small stakes and fierce battles rings true.

Layer in Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers for depth. Wackadoos dig slow and deep—harder to pull off, longer to mature, but monopoly potential looms. Pastas and remixers chase fast layers—urgency, trends, shallow wins. Thot leaders straddle both, riding fashion with a nod to a deeper substance.

“Fast gets attention, slow has all the power.” Map an idea’s layer wrong, and you’re either out of touch (too deep, too slow) or fleeting (too fast, no roots). Founders lost in self-image—dogmatic, not curious—dig too greedily, curse the world, and fade. Founders (and investors) must respect all layers—short-term utility, long-term power—and stay dynamic. Rigidity kills.

Curiosity, not contrarianism, drives the best. Peter Thiel’s Hamlet nails it: true heroes fight for eggshells, not just big TAMs. Micro resolve trumps macro virtue. Anyone can fight for things that truly matter.

This framework won’t predict winners, but it sharpens your lens. Ask: What layer does this operate on? Who’s really behind it? Independence fueled by curiosity, not blind competition, separates signal from imitation.