Transforming Growth Through Capital, Information, and Energy

Everything in technology revolves around flows of information, energy and capital.

Aperture is based on a thesis for what is changing in each. It is the intellectual foundation for how we help companies grow with our ‘in-market’ accelerator and rolling investments.

1 Capital: Embedded Finance

2 Information

3 Energy

Capital: embedded finance

The idea that financial services are best distributed through new, internet based channels that have lower Customer Acquisition Costs, turning financial services into a horizontal capability serving all businesses, rather than a vertical market. Capital will eventually flow on internet like ‘rails’ and the existing infrastructure of proprietary networks and protocols will be replaced. The fintech crash which has largely been ignored, will not mean that fintech goes away but the role of incumbents will be stronger.

Information

The AI revolution is a paradigm shift for computing, away from code and deterministic logic, to probabilities within a black box. Network advantages now play out within software rather than between users and so advantages switch from distribution to manufacture. What this means in investment terms is that the difference between product and services companies will blur as many human like operations will scale, bringing some services based companies within scope for venture capital. Because of the obviousness of AI capabilities, too much money has poured in too quickly and there will be a temporary hangover, but the secular opportunity will continue, much like it will for fintech.

Energy

Climate change is a real and human created, existential threat which can only be tackled with techno-optimism: increased energy use (zero emissions energy doesn’t create climate change); economic growth (knowledge and wellbeing as the goal); computation (protecting the environment requires understanding nature and complex systems which are computationally irreducible. This requires massive increases in clean energy and economic progress driven computation). Just as with capital and information, something akin to the internet of energy will emerge where existing electricity grids are replaced by interconnected services at different scales from utilities to micro-grids, with real-time pricing to match supply and demand.