Round announcement: Excited to see DefendEye take this next big step! James Buchheim and his team have raised a round led by NovaCapital, alongside IQT, ff Venture Capital, Hard2beat, and us. DefendEye is building autonomous drone systems for first responders. It has manufacturing facilities in Poland and the US, giving it direct control over production on both sides of the Atlantic. Looking forward to what’s ahead.

People are more important than hardware. In special operations, this is part of the DNA. In business and investing, this often gets lost, pushed to the back burner by the sheer inertia of the deal or situation. Our Venture Partner, Davin Michaelis, former U.S. military, is back with another thought piece: With the exception of the fringe 1% of human performance, the right person with subpar resources beats the subpar person surrounded by the best gear money can buy. Every time. Several years ago in northern Iraq, my team and our Kurdish partners ran a large stress shoot. In a stress shoot, you climb ropes, scale buildings, sprint up towers and hills, and clear obstacles or complete any physically demanding that maxes out your heart rate and puts you in difficult and unstable positions. You engage targets dispersed across the course, which are scored for time and accuracy. When the stress shoot ended, every American operator had placed ahead of every partner. To be clear, these partners were warriors. Men who live in combat while we rotate in and out, and the beneficiaries of years of training and millions of dollars of U.S. support. They were upset, and I understood why. They blamed the gap on our superior rifles and our optics — Gucci kit, admittedly. And they were far from the only people I have met over the years who believe the equipment makes the shooter. There was a lesson to teach our brothers in arms that day. So, we swapped weapons. We handed them our rifles and pistols, we took theirs, and we ran the entire grueling course a second time. Just running the course a second time I’m sure broke many of their wills and motivation, but the result was exactly the same. Every American placed ahead of every partner, now shooting the partners’ equipment. The difference was never the hardware. It was the fundamentals. We had invested, relentlessly, in the fundamentals that let us overcome any obstacle or unknown we walked into. We knew success came from effort and from within — never from something someone else handed us. This is where founders, investors, and entire organizations self-limit. We misread and misallocate value and risk onto everything except the core of the decision: Is this the right person, the right team, to build and deliver this vision? Although it’s easy to blame failure on the things we did not have, the reality is that the decisions and chain of events that led to the failure started many moves prior. Markets will shift. Tech will pivot. Competition will increase. However, the right team will not flinch, and the right team, properly resourced, is the lowest risk bet you will ever make. So to the early-stage founder and investor reading this: stop weighing the things that do not matter yet. There will be plenty of data to judge how well the business is run at the growth and scale stages. At the early stage, your edge is judgement about people. Bet on the operators, not the optics. People over hardware. Every time.