On being early

Every few years the world discovers the sky again. A rocket lands upright, a photograph comes back from very far away, and for a season everyone has an opinion about the future. Then the season passes, and the people who were only watching go back to whatever they were doing before.

We were not watching. We were early, and we intend to stay early.

Being early takes a discipline that has never been fashionable. It means holding assets the market does not yet understand, through years in which nobody congratulates you for holding them. Most capital cannot manage it. It answers to too many people, and too many of those people want their money back before the work is finished.

We answer to very few, and that is by design.

There is a popular belief that the future should belong to everyone, and that every breakthrough ought to be handed out as quickly as it can be made. It is a generous belief. We do not share it. The things we invest in are powerful, and powerful things handed out quickly tend to be handled badly. A launch vehicle is not a consumer product. Neither is a reactor, a deepwater port or the cable that carries the conversations of a continent. These things deserve owners who will be careful with them, and careful owners are rare.

So we stay small. We stay patient, and we choose our partners slowly, usually over years and always by introduction.

This year we added two holdings and declined some four hundred proposals we did not ask for. We expect next year to look much the same. The horizon has not moved. We simply see it sooner than most.