Original Thinkers
The obsessions of reading, writing, acting, and persisting can be learned by reading the works of originals
TLDR: To win, you need to be obsessed. To be obsessed, you need to read. Original research, unique angles, and a willingness to be wrong are where you get the most mental tennis. This is a list of original thinkers I get tremendous value from.
There’s an unspoken expectation in this job that you’ll keep up. New funds, new founders, new theses, new market, new structures. Most of us try. But it’s harder than it looks.
The problem is that the feed doesn’t reward original thinking. It rewards taking a popular thing and repackaging it slightly faster than the person next to you.
So when someone is genuinely doing the research, naming things, building frameworks, and surfacing real data, it’s important to prioritize them. The list below is not a “best of” anything. It’s just the people whose work I find myself reading every time it lands, because I always learn something I didn’t know before.
These are the people that densify my inbox in the best way, and if you’re trying to obsess over this job, they’re absolutely worth a follow.
1. Dan Gray — Research Lead at Odin. Writes The Odin Times, Credistick, and 25+ essays at Crunchbase News. He’s the person I forward most often to my team and to other investors. Five recent pieces will show you why. What Happened to the Future? on consensus-aversion and the financialization of venture. 30,000 Feet Above the Venture Market, his 2026 LP survey showing 57% of LPs won’t back an emerging manager this year — up from 33% the year before. The Reserves Paradox on why follow-on capital usually drags fund returns down. Mythical Beasts on the Arthur Rock founder myth. National Capitalism on government as megafund LP. With no fund to defend, no portfolio to flatter, no co-investor to keep happy, he brings a uniquely unbiased voice, a rigor to his research, and a consistency that’s hard to match. Follow him at @credistick.
2. Konstantine Buhler — Partner at Sequoia. Writes Konstants and Variables on LinkedIn. The deep cut most people don’t know about. His “agent economy” thesis from Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2025 keynote is the structured framework proliferating the architecture of most of the AI companies that matter right now; agents that don’t just communicate but transfer resources, transact, and develop trust. His earlier Sequoia piece The Always-On Economy articulates how AI removes temporal friction across sectors over the next 5-7 years. On X, at @Konstantine.
3. Mike Maples Jr. — Co-founding partner of Floodgate. Wrote Pattern Breakers with Peter Ziebelman, a USA Today bestseller, and his newsletter can be followed at patternbreakers.substack.com. Start with his canonical “Pattern Breaking Startup Ideas” post that lays out Inflection Theory. The argument that 85%+ of his exit profits came from pivots, and that “business is never a fair fight” so startups must “wage asymmetric warfare on the present,” rattles in my head on the unpredictable nature of pre-seed and the absolute requirement for founders to be both “earnest and formidable,” as Paul & Jessica would say. On X at @m2jr.
4. Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson — Recently joined LGT Capital Partners after 14 years at Sapphire Partners. Co-founder of OpenLP, co-host of Origins. The most candid LP voice publishing right now. Her “I See Dead VCs” piece on the brutal jump from first-time fund manager to established firm is the kind of writing we rarely get to read. Combine that with the Origins catalog of 100+ episodes interviewing GPs and LPs about how funds actually get built, and you have the closest thing to a free MBA in fund construction that exists. On Medium and X at @Beezer232.
5. Peter Walker — Head of Insights at Carta. The man who went from well-kept secret to the most obvious “duh” for a list like this one. Peter has become the data spine of the entire industry. The cap-table charts, dilution stats, valuation benchmarks, time-to-stage numbers, fund performance breakdowns; it’s remarkable what he has built. He publishes weekly on LinkedIn, sends the Carta Data Minute every Thursday morning to nearly 20,000 subscribers, while dropping quarterly fund performance reports covering 2,800+ funds. When Dan Gray or Beezer cite a chart, when I cite a chart, when most VCs you follow cite a chart, there’s a good chance Peter played a role.
6. Elad Gil — Solo GP, author of High Growth Handbook, writes Elad Blog on Substack with 32K+ subscribers. Co-hosts No Priors with Sarah Guo, which is the audio companion to a lot of the same thinking. His “Market > Team > Idea” framework and his ongoing AI infrastructure essays are required reading if you’re investing in or around AI right now. Forty-plus unicorns to his name and still publishing original work weekly.
7. Jared Heyman — Founder of Rebel Fund. Writes the Rebel Theorem series on Medium. Built the largest dataset on YC startups and founders outside YC itself — millions of data points, nearly 300 portfolio companies. Rebel Theorem 4.0 shows how machine learning actually applies to seed investing, with back-tested numbers (he claims a 65%+ gross IRR on the top 10% of YC startups his algorithm scores). His March 2026 piece on YC W26 batch quality is the kind of data work nobody else is doing publicly.
The list goes on and on in this industry:
— The Generalist (generalist.com). Mario Gabriele writes deep-dive profiles of companies, investors, and trends that are weeks of research per post. The annual Future 50 and What to Watch are calendar items.
— Hunter Walk (hunterwalk.com). Operator-investor (ex-YouTube), 20+ years of public blogging. Recent piece “Secondary is quickly becoming primary for early stage VCs“ is ta must-read on why the seed-stage holding period is breaking and what it means for portfolio strategy.
— Fred Wilson (avc.com). Daily since 2003. Generations of VCs were trained by it.
— Packy McCormick (notboring.co). Hours of research per essay. Not strictly venture, but an optimistic view on the crazy things humans are capable of and will accomplish in our lifetimes.
— Sarah Tavel — Venture Partner at Benchmark. We co-invested in Agentio. Writes on Medium with 34K followers. Her “Hierarchy of Engagement“ and “Hierarchy of Marketplaces” pieces have aged as beautifully as any consumer/marketplace writing in venture. She continues to call her shots on shows like 20VC, and as early as 2024 talking about AI startups moving to sell outcomes rather than seat-based productivity. On X at @sarahtavel.
The standard in this job is rising. The bar is no longer “I have a thesis and a network.”
The bar is obsession.
Obsession over your model, your portfolio construction, your sourcing, your reserves strategy, your pricing, your decision quality.
You need to constantly evolve in how you do this work, because the asset class is evolving faster than it ever has. The investors who treat this like a craft while appreciating the value of decades-long compounded work will outperform the ones who treat it like a personality.
Read the people doing original work. Steal their frameworks. Argue with them in your head. Write your own original thoughts. Then act on them and prove yourself right.
To win, you need to be obsessed.
See you Monday.
After reading the enticing intro, I came here to see if there was anything on LSH investing, but unfortunately not