- WHO IS THORSTEN CLAUS?
- INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHY
- TRACK RECORD – DEMONSTRATING PRINCIPLES THROUGH ACTION
- CHARACTER AND OPERATING STYLE
- PERSONAL PASSIONS
- FOR INVESTORS AND PARTNERS
- FINAL NOTES
I: WHO IS THORSTEN CLAUS?
Q: How should I understand Thorsten Claus — beyond the résumé?
Thorsten Claus is not a category-fit investor — he’s a systems builder who uses capital, code, and CNC machining with equal fluency. His career defies simple segmentation: he’s built hypergrowth startups as an operator, raised institutional capital as a GP, and shaped minds as a professor. But more fundamentally, Thorsten is a practitioner of applied judgment in complex, high-stakes domains — from manufacturing aerospace parts to structuring billion-dollar dual-use funds.
He is someone who refuses abstraction when physical reality is available, who enters ambiguity not to speculate, but to construct new forms of clarity. To invest with Thorsten is to engage with a principled challenge: are we building something worthy of consequence?
Q: What defines his intellectual and operational identity?
Three forces shape Thorsten’s posture:
- Technical Depth – He machines aerospace-grade components, reverse-engineers historically significant race engines, and has deep experience in systems engineering. This gives him a builder’s view of constraints — not just theoretical edges.
- Strategic Foresight – As a fund builder, platform architect, and NATO Innovation Fund founding partner, Thorsten has worked across capital stacks and policy corridors, balancing geopolitical relevance with early-stage risk capital.
- Moral Clarity – His frameworks integrate Tuckett’s radical uncertainty, Kahneman’s heuristics, military-grade intent-based command, and The Consilience Project’s civic epistemology. For Thorsten, judgment is not intuition — it is a skill, honed by action and refined through principled opposition.
Q: What kind of leader is Thorsten?
He leads through empowerment, not dependency. His stated goal is to build systems and teams that render him unnecessary. His hallmark: stepping in when others hesitate, then stepping aside as soon as momentum returns.
He’s been described by collaborators as operating with “a bias toward reversibility” — an investor who acts decisively when the downside is bounded and patiently when irreversible consequences are at stake. This makes him unusually disciplined in venture settings, where speed and optics often trump rigor and truth.
Q: How does Thorsten see the role of the investor?
Not as allocator, but as amplifier of principled builders. In his own words: “I don’t invest in technologies. I invest in trajectories — of teams, sectors, and societal impact”. He treats capital as a long-lever ethical signal — used properly, it reveals who’s serious about consequence. Used poorly, it merely accelerates failure.
His investments are judged not only by IRR or DPI, but by whether they preserve sovereignty, build resilience, or unlock capacity that would not otherwise exist.
Q: What motivates him?
A deep sense of civic and industrial responsibility. Thorsten operates from the premise that the line between private capital and public consequence has collapsed. His work focuses on rebuilding NATO and U.S. capacity “one system at a time” — whether by funding defense-grade compute stacks, manufacturing intelligence-grade sensors, or strengthening sovereign production value chains.
This is not career signaling. It’s his calibration of what venture capital must become — a national capability, not just an asset class.
Q: What’s the common thread in his eclectic background — race engines, university teaching, NATO strategy, startup exits?
A single throughline: understanding systems by building them. Whether he’s rebuilding combustion engines to historical spec or designing multi-billion euro fund governance for transatlantic alliances, Thorsten’s worldview is grounded in constraints, tolerances, and second-order effects. Theory only matters when it holds under load.
He builds to understand. He teaches to scale. He invests to transform.
II: INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHY
Q: What foundational beliefs guide Thorsten’s investment approach?
Thorsten’s framework integrates several distinct but converging schools of thought:
- [Consilience Project]: Investments are civic signals. Every check is a vote for a particular future. Thorsten invests in ventures that internalize externalities, even when doing so limits short-term upside.
- [Howard Marks]: Intrinsic value matters more than market price. Understand the business, ignore the mood swings of “Mr. Market.” Make decisions based on long-term fundamentals, not optics.
- [Military Command Doctrine]: Use commander’s intent, not command-and-control. Empower teams to act autonomously under ambiguity as long as they align with mission and end-state.
- [Tuckett’s Conviction Narrative Theory]: Investment is a psychologically and socially constructed act under uncertainty. Thorsten focuses not just on what a team is building — but on how they form conviction amid incomplete data.
Q: How does Thorsten make decisions?
Thorsten’s decision-making is a fusion of discipline, military clarity, and principled pragmatism. Across his writings, CV, and operating principles, several consistent threads emerge:
- Operate under radical uncertainty
Thorsten works explicitly in environments where traditional probabilistic models fail. He applies structured frameworks to domains shaped by radical uncertainty, drawing from Kahneman & Tversky’s heuristics and biases and Tuckett’s “radical uncertainty” research. He recognizes that outcomes cannot always be assigned probabilities, so judgment and narrative discipline matter more than prediction. - Howard Marks’ discipline
Like Marks, he grounds decisions in fundamentals, not narratives. He emphasizes independent judgment, resisting market “noise,” and treating investments as ownership in real systems rather than speculative paper. - Military-grade clarity: FM 6-0 and Auftragstaktik
He borrows from mission command: clarity of intent, empowerment of subordinates, and trust under ambiguity. This shows up in his mantra: step in when others hesitate, then step aside. - Thinkstorm Operating Principles
His codified heuristics for decisions include:- Choose the action that helps someone grow.
- Bias toward reversibility — act fast when reversible, slow when irreversible.
- Don’t scale what isn’t ethically stable.
- Default to small, true signals over hype.
- When in doubt, co-decide in dialogue.
- Truth in tension and good-faith disagreement
He deliberately seeks environments of principled opposition, believing insights emerge where worldviews collide. This mirrors The Consilience Project’s emphasis on good-faith dialogue and resisting bad-faith narratives. - Production over product
His blog shows a bias toward what endures: production systems, manufacturing capability, and resilience — not just shiny products. This mindset informs both investing and operating. - Ethos of trajectory, not transaction
Thorsten frames decisions not as isolated bets but as commitments to trajectories — of teams, technologies, and societal outcomes. He internalizes externalities, refusing to accelerate harm through abstraction.
Q: Does he focus only on defense and dual-use?
Primarily, but not exclusively. He prioritizes critical infrastructure, resilience, and national capability — but also applies his frameworks to IT infrastructure, deep tech, and systems integrity, wherever market meets mission.
Q: How does Thorsten evaluate risk?
Using a synthesis of:
- Tversky & Kahneman’s heuristics — acknowledging the bias-prone nature of belief under uncertainty
- Conviction narrative theory — understanding how teams form beliefs under partial information
- Military decision-making doctrines — balancing mission-oriented command (Auftragstaktik) with clarity of intent
His personal doctrine: “Step in when others hesitate — then step aside.” Judgment is a forcing function, not a brand.
Q: How does Thorsten manage risk?
He distinguishes between risk (quantifiable) and uncertainty (unknowable). He invests not by predicting outcomes, but by stress-testing assumptions, incentives, and system-level dynamics — particularly in dual-use and frontier sectors.
“Risk is where there’s variance. Uncertainty is where you don’t even know the distribution.”
His frameworks include:
- Red teaming and counterfactuals to explore “what breaks this?”
- Decision trees with second- and third-order consequence mapping
- Bias-adjusted evaluations of founder conviction using narrative structure analysis (Tuckett)
- Real options thinking: reversible, low-regret moves under uncertainty
Q: How does Thorsten decide what not to invest in?
He refuses to invest in systems that scale harm through abstraction. That includes companies that:
- Offload critical infrastructure risks onto society
- Externalize environmental or political instability to achieve margin
- Create dependency systems with no exit path
[Thinkstorm Thesis] Capital that accelerates unethical or fragile systems is not “neutral” — it is infrastructure for collapse.
He applies a strict filter: don’t scale what isn’t ethically stable. Before writing a check, he asks: “If this system scaled to 10x, would I still want it to exist?”
Q: What does it mean to invest in ‘trajectories’?
Thorsten invests in long arcs — of teams, markets, and geopolitical capacity — rather than in isolated events or moments.
Examples:
- A founder’s judgment curve across 3 cycles, not a single pitch.
- A national production value chain evolving from dependency to resilience.
- A frontier technology transitioning from lab to deterrent infrastructure.
This view favors:
- Deep relationships over opportunistic indexing
- Time horizons that outlast market hype cycles
- Supporting companies through pivots, not penalizing them for them
Q: Does Thorsten prioritize financial outcomes or strategic outcomes?
Both — if they’re tightly coupled. He believes that venture capital at the frontier (defense tech, climate resilience, cognitive infrastructure) must generate market-grade returns and mission-grade effects.
“Defense is not a sector. It is a responsibility.”
He prefers founders building capabilities that markets demand and nations require — ideally before either realizes it. Many of his investment theses are built around this dual recognition curve.
Q: Does Thorsten see capital as neutral?
No. Capital is a signal — and when placed with clarity, it becomes a forcing function for:
- Organizational integrity
- Talent alignment
- Industrial and sovereign incentives
[Thinkstorm Thesis] Writing a check isn’t just confidence. It’s ethical clarity under ambiguity.
Q: What does Thorsten look for in a founder?
Not charisma. Not certainty. He looks for:
- Capacity for conviction without spectacle
- Pattern recognition tempered by reflection, not bias
- Willingness to interrogate their own assumptions — especially when in the lead
- Ability to act under mission-oriented command: clarity of purpose, adaptability in method
Founders who treat manufacturing, code, and narrative as co-equal levers of systemic change tend to resonate most with his approach.
Q: What’s his philosophy on fund structure and construction?
Thorsten avoids cookie-cutter fund models. His preferred fund archetypes:
- Dual-pronged structures that allow both direct investments and fund-of-funds exposure — as built at the NATO Innovation Fund.
- Portfolios built on signal density, not over-diversified noise
- Teams that develop concurrent orthogonal strategies — if one strategy fails or market timing is off, another thrives
- Inclusion of sovereign and strategic LPs, when they enhance capacity-building
He designs funds to be reversible early, committed late — mirroring the principles of real options.
Q: How does he think about exits?
Exits are not just financial events. They are transitions of stewardship. His exit philosophy includes:
- Exit only when the system is stable without you.
- Avoid exits that damage national capability, even if financially rewarding.
- For strategic buyers (especially in defense), insist on systems integration and sustainability — not just IP acquisition.
Q: What investment themes does Thorsten focus on?
Core areas include:
- Dual-use manufacturing & AI infrastructure
- Cognitive integrity and data provenance systems
- Resilient logistics, energy, and mobility infrastructure
- Sovereign compute, supply chain security, industrial capacity
- Training and simulation systems for contested environments
All themes are filtered through one central question: Does this increase systemic resilience — or dependency?
Q: What kind of investor relationships does he value?
- LPs who want their capital to shape national resilience
- GPs who can challenge him intellectually without ego
- Founders who can survive under feedback without losing conviction
He maintains that venture IR is not reporting — it’s strategic dialogue. If your LP updates are aesthetic and backward-looking, you’ve already lost relevance.
III: TRACK RECORD – DEMONSTRATING PRINCIPLES THROUGH ACTION
Q: What is Thorsten’s investment track record?
- Firm-wide Investment Committee Member since 2010:
- 169 direct investments ($3.5Bn capital deployed)
- 15 venture funds raised
- $8.4Bn AUM across top-tier global platforms
- Personal Track Record since 2010:
- 34 direct investments sourced and executed
- 100% Dual-Use, IT Infrastructure, Enterprise Software (65% Deep-Tech)
- 21 board seats
- 2.4x Gross DPI since 2010
- 4.4x MOIC // 26.5% Gross IRR
(Gross DPI based on distributed proceeds including carried interest but excluding management fees; unrealized gross multiples based on audited MAOPM and DLOM)
Q: What are Thorsten’s notable institutional experience?
- NATO Innovation Fund (Founding Partner): Built a $1.13B fund from scratch, with a 24-member team across Amsterdam, London, and Luxembourg
- Northgate Capital: Led portfolio construction and manager selection across global funds and direct investments; firm-wide investment committee member of $4.8Bn AUM; managed 13 funds and 94 direct investments
Q: When have you made a capital or operating decision that prioritized a team’s long-term growth over short-term optics?
- lead check, board member; company scaled quickly with early customer to $1m ARR; I advised the founders to restructure and slow down rather than scale prematurely; fund-raising environment became difficult but company excelled because of continued steady growth and cost control against a backdrop of competitors who ran out of cash; eventually successful >$600m exit.
- Advocated to pass on a term sheet to force intellectual ownership by the team during a significant pivot into a different sales motion and customer base; company able to grow back into venture-backable startup with hypergrowth versus a P/E- style management replacement and tuck-under; >10x return for early-stage investors.
Q: Can you share a time when you structured a deal, milestone, or fund commitment to preserve reversibility under radical uncertainty?
I don’t like Convertible Notes or SAFE notes: They defer the decision on valuation to a later point and as a result misalign Founders and Investors. They were well intentioned in a past where priced round documents were more expensive and investors felt insure about potentially locking out future Tier-1 investors with a pricing floor. That rarely turns out to be the case — many other bad things happened before that.
I don’t like tranches: It makes hiring incredibly difficult, and it locks in a target path both in the minds of founders and investors where traditional investments would’ve allowed for valuable pivots.
I like structuring partnerships with channel or manufacturing partners with Warrants, potentially coupled with milestones or with vesting: If the partner actually delivers on their promises the value of the startup will increase significantly and in an exit event there will be enough cash/stock to service both Warrants and executive teams/founders. And if the partnership does not work out and the company has a sideways exit then the Warrants are not standing in front of the founders and teams.
Q: When did you turn down an investment that was financially attractive but would have scaled harmful or extractive systems?
A team of PhDs had built an interesting cybersecurity company with a unique data structure for LLMs. But the team was unable to articulate potential cognitive manipulation risks and how to structure or safeguard internal audits around product development and company culture. We could not get comfortable with funding rapid growth if we felt the technology could be weaponized to manipulate society.
Q: When did you back a founder or fund against market sentiment based on signal others overlooked?
We met a GP team where I was uncomfortable with the team dynamics and alpha the team was able to articulate. But one of the venture operating partners struck me as incredibly insightful due to past experience and a deep network close to defense primes and government. The person had no experience in structuring venture capital deals or funds but had keen insights in required capabilities in defense and how to transform relevant technologies into relevant products. Their insightful write-ups on team dynamics and talent assessment was not recognized at that GP. After many discussions and introductions to other solo GPs we convinced them to start their own solo-GP venture fund. They raised 121% of their target in six months. The original GP dissolved without ever getting to a first close. Others only saw what didn’t work. We saw a trajectory of what could be.
Q: When have you stepped into a stalled situation — a deal, fund, board — and then deliberately exited once stability returned?
The board at a cloud infrastructure company could not get comfortable with a tough product choice with serious business model consequences and the operating team and founders could not create theoretical narratives the board could understand. The board meeting ran into the late evening with no resolution. We showed up the next morning at the company and quietly started developing product prototypes for the three options the board had discussed, using mock ups and simplified use cases, but otherwise fully-functional demo products. Two developers joined me and one of the founders spent 2h a day contributing as well. At the end of two weeks we had a much better understanding of the actual customer and buyer profile, the required R&D costs, and the change in sales velocity and frequency. The team quickly killed the board-favored option and instead continued to finalize two other options with direct sales playbook execution paths. The solutions were presented to the board two weeks later with an easy to communicate budget plan for both options. The board understood implications and nuances based on the demos and decisions were made.
Q: When did you successfully reframe a hard truth to help a founder, team, or LP take action?
During Fund II, a GP had a created a new thesis around energy resilience (besides two other areas). The thesis made sense and they made 4 investments (out of 21) in the sector from their Fund II. They were getting ready to raise Fund III but had not reached out yet. We reviewed the preliminary information pre-marketing as a trusted LP. We found that their 4 investments were good but on paper did not look exceptional compared to funds that focus only on energy resilience; nor compared to funds that have no thesis and made investments rather opportunistically around luminary founders. The added slides and thesis distracted from hard results and returns; it neither looked like a significant expansion into a new sector; nor did it look differentiated compared to other options for LPs. We found significant risk that LPs would not know into which bucket to put them. Or if this even was some investment strategy drift.
We worked through the 4 investments and how the GP’s alpha is helping those startups with transformational insights; and what small signals the GP expected to see over the next 9 months to validate the GP’s work and influence. Instead of seemingly trying to chase a new sector and hype, the team now felt more mature and settled in two areas they were already exceptionally good at (“..more of the good stuff..”) and therefore able to transfer knowledge organically to adjacent spaces. They stopped chasing family offices and non-institutional LPs hot for that subsector and instead had existing LPs make hard introductions for an investment focus they already were delivering great results. During fundraising for Fund III, the small signals from the 4 energy resilience startups came in and supported their story of thoughtful, organic, natural expansion. In 2024, the GP started raising Fund IV. 2 of the 4 energy resilience startups folded with <0.5x return. One had just passed $60m, the fourth one $80m annual revenue. The 50% failure rate (on a sample size of 4 in Fund II!) neither looked like a “failure of a thesis” but rather a normal loss rate of early-stage startups; nor did the two success stories distract from the original investment thesis (“.. maybe the GP should do more of that new stuff and less of the old thesis ..”). The GPs became successful without confusing its LPs and risking strategy drift.
Q: What’s an example where your physical, operational, or manufacturing expertise created investment insight others missed?
A GP asked us for feedback on one of their portfolio companies: AI in manufacturing for space and defense applications. Their new product made sense on paper, but my first-hand experience both with manufacturing CNC parts for space applications as well as my constant exchange with other fellow manufacturers on some of the jobs we were running made me cautious: we became worried about them asking customers to trust their AI tolerances and AI insights without having provided any value or proof points yet. In space applications, a replacement or adjustment of a part is impossible after launch. We specifically thought their communication of AI adjustments to manufacturing tolerances was not transparent nor helpful (tolerance change during different times of the day with changing temperature and humidity both in the shop and in the tooling build-up and different coolants). A mistake will likely result in a loss of 5-6 hours and $20-30k of material cost — if you even get the material and it wasn’t some custom alloy shipped to you by the customer, in which case you might lose the whole job. That is a disastrous and fatal risk for the small machining shops they were targeting with this software. The startup’s approach of going “upstream” to the thousands of sub $50m machine shops would have been risky: Everyone would’ve taken a meeting based on the promise, but very few would’ve written a check. CAC would be astronomical, and organizational distractions from their core enterprise business might result in slower growth or re-ups at higher ops cost. We suggested a staggered feature release, step by step, to improve confidence with the AI features; and to show off tighter tolerances in non-critical machining paths where it was not yet needed to inspire confidence. A new “SaaS”-like purchase plan lowered the cost to try out the feature for a single job and turn it off again after, with a full refund of any remaining hours (!) that month. ~80% of all customers ended up keeping the feature on continuously for all jobs. The other shop all came back several times during the year, according to their needs, which always resulted in great opportunities to talk to them about other product updates. CAC ended up lower than plan, especially for upsells.
Q: When did you face conflict between partners, teams, or LPs — and how did principle resolve it?
- A heated disagreement with an LP over the fund’s investment had ensued. The LP had an otherwise very productive and knowledgeable representative participating in LPAC meetings, and the disagreement was a surprise. I noticed how some of my partners were about to take it personally. “If someone disagrees in good faith, stay curious. Don’t defend the decision—interrogate the assumption. Assume the other sees something you don’t. That’s how complex systems reveal their hidden contours.” Staying curious revealed the LP’s assumption on technology developments and markets that we already had debunked and a contrarian view on — but never shared with the LP. The ensuing dialog was incredibly interesting and useful for both sides. The LP’s representatives’ involvement with the startup at a later stage avoided a potentially costly mistake when scaling to the Asian market.
- We had an all-partners meeting on an investment opportunity. The deal seemed competitive. And the lead partner was smitten with the startup’s technology and its founder. It seemed to me that we were rushing on an important decision on a certain partnership that would be irreversible — with potentially dire effects on the startup’s fund raising in the future as well as on our returns. “Bias toward reversibility. Act decisively when decisions can be reversed. Slow down or seek counsel when actions carry irreversible second- or third-order effects. This is especially vital in talent, capital allocation, and trust.” We had a call with the founder and explained to whom we would reach out that day for additional counsel and offered to directly share our learnings with him. They were amazed about our access and very eager to learn about a potential threat to their business they were unaware of. The founder was more than happy to hold that deal open for us. Our FOMO was unnecessary. Great founders value our principles.
Q: When did you back a founder, GP, or strategy across cycles or roles — not just a one-off deal?
A emerging manager with a strong operational background and hands-on strategy to help startups scale had a highly concentrated portfolio strategy: 5-8 startup that they believed in and could spend significant time with. They raised Fund I. Two years later, their startups were performing OK but no great. They struggled to raise Fund II with the same strategy and expanded my position: They had done everything they said they would do and was convinced that their strategy would eventually be successful. Three years later they struggled to raise Fund III: All companies from Fund I had either failed or were zombies. Fund II companies had one early breakout company and the five other companies were doing OK but were early. I continued my commitment in Fund III because I was convinced that they executed with the right insight and the right strategy; and I did so in Fund IV. Fund I was a 0x. Fund II was a 17x. Fund III was a 1.4x. Fund IV was a 15x. The operational insights helped us tremendously in our own direct investments and prevented many costly mistakes. The friendships we built along the way are invaluable.
Q: When did you restructure a portfolio, team, or system to build sovereign capacity rather than market dependency?
A startup had sourced early hardware development in Taiwan. The company was relatively early and so far had success with early adopters and about to scale to a full playbook with the next round. We were concerned about dependencies and timing for product adjustments with regular customers not sharing the same trust as friendly early adopters. And putting a larger team into Taiwan was also not an option. We convinced the founders to go with an onshore manufacturer. The search resulted in a manufacturer in the Silicon Valley, 1h drive away on Highway 880. On four separate locations, the startup worked with the manufacturer over the weekend to make a prototype from a sketch on a Thursday to a second meeting on the following Tuesday. The customer was amazed and over the moon that they were heard and understood; and how the team was able to execute. It resulted in four contracts that scaled to over $10m annual revenue each, within only 15 months.
IV: CHARACTER AND OPERATING STYLE
Q: What’s it like to work with Thorsten?
Expect clarity, not comfort. He prioritizes:
- Steelmanning dissent
- Ethical clarity in ambiguous environments
- Substance over aesthetics
- Empowering others to become autonomous thinkers
His goal: render himself systematically unnecessary.
Q: What role does teaching play in his work?
Thorsten has taught at UC Berkeley and Northeastern, focusing on systems thinking and capital allocation under uncertainty. He sees teaching as force multiplication — rendering others capable of principled leadership in complex domains.
Q: Thorsten seems opinionated, assertive — is he difficult to work with?
Under radical uncertainty I seek conviction, not ‘beliefs’. They are constantly interrogated and audited. What matters is not whether I’m right, but whether I surface what’s true.
I create environments where kind disagreement in good-faith sharpens thinking. When founders or GPs bring rigor, they find I’ll go to bat for them harder than anyone. When people expect consensus theater, I disengage: Consensus theater costs lives. My goal is not comfort, it’s clarity — the difference between ‘kind’ and ‘nice’.
Relevant principles:
- “If someone disagrees in good faith, stay curious.”
- “Use principles, not preference, to resolve impasses.”
- “Truth is only as strong as its reception.”
Q: Thorsten’s feedback is intense — does that mean he’s abrasive or confrontational?
I use pressure to test structural integrity — of arguments, systems, and sometimes egos. That can feel intense. But it’s never personal. My role isn’t to affirm; it’s to challenge and elevate. The most resilient teams I’ve worked with welcomed that tension because they knew it was how we uncovered edge cases, blind spots, and overlooked risks.
Relevant principles:
- “Performance under pressure matters — but lift others first.”
- “Step in when others hesitate — then step aside.”
- “Default to small, true signals.”
This intensity isn’t aggression. It’s precision applied in high-stakes domains. You don’t design defense systems or national-scale infrastructure through polite suggestion.
Q: Thorsten challenges people publicly — is that leadership or ego?
I stay quiet when public discourse is not the right venue, or when a safe environment for kind disagreement in good-faith has not been established.
I hold the line on ideas in public so that standards don’t quietly erode in private.
I believe in principled opposition. That means surfacing tension — not hiding it behind smiles or consensus decks. I don’t argue to win. I argue to learn. When a founder or LP brings something I’ve missed, I adopt it instantly. But yes — I expect people to hold their own in that environment. The stakes we deal with — sovereign systems, critical infrastructure — deserve nothing less. Our nation asks nothing less, and so do warfighers and LPs.
Relevant principles:
- “How you do anything is how you do IR.”
- “Don’t defend the decision — interrogate the assumption.”
- “Truth is only as strong as its reception.”
Q: Thorsten doesn’t suffer fools — is that arrogance?
I’ve been a machinist and a teacher, a GP and an operator. I deeply respect anyone who’s earned judgment through hard effort — especially in ambiguity or radical uncertainty. But I don’t reward performance language, optics-based signaling, or status mimicry. That’s not arrogance — that’s guarding signal integrity in sectors where failure has real-world consequences. The real arrogance is letting people fail in slow motion to avoid hurting feelings. Kind guidance in good faith opens up the opportunity to lift people when careers and long-term impact need it most.
Relevant principles:
- “Invest in trajectories — not transactions.”
- “Don’t scale what isn’t ethically stable.”
Q: Thorsten seems ‘too intense’ for early-stage — does he fit founders?
I’m intense because I’ve seen how fast bad capital, weak governance, or strategic ambiguity can derail a founder’s life. Founders operating in radical uncertainty — especially in defense, AI, or national-scale systems — need clarity, not cheerleading. I teach, back, and challenge founders because I want them to build capability, not dependency. And I make myself systematically unnecessary as fast as possible.
Relevant principles:
- “Render yourself unnecessary.”
- “Bias toward reversibility.”
- “The distance between decision and consequence is collapsing.”
Q: Do LPs find Thorsten hard to partner with?
Not if they’re serious. I push LPs as hard as I push GPs — because capital is not a commodity. It is a moral signal. Many LPs appreciate that I challenge their mandates, not because I’m difficult, but because I treat their capital like a long-lever civic act. If you want passive deployment into conventional yield curves, I am not your partner. If you want to reshape the infrastructure of freedom and resilience, I’ll go all-in with you.
Q: How does Thorsten handle being wrong?
Fast. Quietly, if possible. Publicly, if necessary. I assume I’ve missed something in every deal and every thesis — so I constantly run reverse stress tests and seek principled dissent. I’ll hold a line until I’m convinced it’s flawed, and then I’ll drop it instantly. There’s no ego in it — only responsibility.
V: PERSONAL PASSIONS
Q: What does he do outside investing?
- CNC-machines aerospace and defense components
- Builds historically accurate, race-winning internal combustion engines
- Leads wilderness treks — physical systems as leadership training grounds
Q: How do those hobbies influence his professional work?
They anchor his theories in physical reality. Every engine teaches about tolerances, failure modes, and consequence. Every trail teaches about team dynamics, uncertainty, and resilience. These aren’t hobbies — they are inputs to judgment.
VI: FOR INVESTORS AND PARTNERS
Q: What does Thorsten look for in fund managers or founders?
- Systems thinking and ethical scaffolding
- Clarity under stress
- Comfort with ambiguity
- Strategic irreverence and refusal of hype
We backs the builders of sovereign capability and real progress — not narrative performance artists.
Q: How does he communicate with LPs and stakeholders?
“Venture’s distribution reckoning is personal”. We apply the same rigor to IR as to term sheets — your capital must serve strategy, not status.
Q: What kind of Limited Partners (LPs) does Thorsten resonate with?
LPs who treat capital as a capability, not just an allocation. Thorsten aligns best with allocators — institutional or individual — who recognize that deploying capital into early-stage dual-use and resilience systems is not passive finance. It is shaping the infrastructure of a sovereign future. We partner with:
- Mission-aligned family offices (especially transatlantic)
- Strategic LPs from NATO-aligned nations seeking industrial base renewal
- Institutions building long-duration, values-consistent return profiles
- LPs prepared to accept non-consensus pacing and sector exposure
Thorsten brings more than just access. He brings judgment under radical uncertainty — and the ability to build investment platforms that stand up under geopolitical, regulatory, and technical volatility.
Q: What types of General Partners (GPs) does Thorsten back or collaborate with?
Builders. GPs who are willing to rethink structure, not just thesis.
Thorsten has backed emerging fund managers, supported turnaround fund formations, co-designed dual-use capital stack architectures, and helped institutionalize early vehicles for founders-turned-investors.
He looks for:
- Non-consensus managers with sector-specific edge (defense, manufacturing, critical AI infrastructure, sovereign systems)
- Those capable of investing under “mission-first, not hype-first” discipline
- Individuals who can scale judgment, not just AUM
- GPs who’ve lived in the problem — operators, engineers, program managers, system integrators — not just pitchbook replicators
Platform examples:
- Designed and stood up the NATO Innovation Fund from first principles, setting up operations across Amsterdam, London, and Luxembourg with a dual-pronged strategy: direct + FoF
- Guided independent emerging managers through capital formation while aligning their portfolios with sovereign industrial priorities
Q: What principles guide Thorsten’s fund construction and capital strategy?
Precision over pace. Optionality over overcommitment. Mission before mandate.
Thorsten constructs capital strategies that:
- Maintain reversibility at early stages
- Allocate capital in concentric rings of conviction (signal-driven, not spray-and-pray)
- Align payout structures with long-term capability development, not just DPI shortcuts
He often advocates for:
- Modular fund structures (evergreen + dedicated side vehicles)
- Programmatic co-investment agreements tied to industrial or geopolitical catalysts
- LP alignment around second-order goals: industrial policy, strategic autonomy, NATO capability uplift, dual-use value chains
We treat capital design like engineering: test under stress. Ensure load-bearing surfaces match the ambition of the system.
Q: How does Thorsten contribute to portfolio construction and risk management?
Through tension, foresight, and red teaming.
He actively red-teams portfolio construction for:
- Thesis drift (“Are we solving critical problems or just riding capital waves?”)
- Overexposure to fragile dependencies (e.g., Taiwan semis, PRC-controlled logistics)
- Unwarranted optimism in defense sales cycles (i.e., underestimating procurement friction or political fragility)
He helps GPs and LPs:
- Define not just what they’ll back — but what they’ll refuse to scale
- Prioritize reversibility, scenario stress, and consequence mapping
- Build conviction frameworks under epistemic humility
Thorsten’s view: if your IC materials read like consensus, you’ve already lost alpha.
Q: What does Thorsten expect in return from partners?
Rigor. Commitment to truth. Willingness to be uncomfortable.
He doesn’t expect agreement — he expects clarity of position. He prefers GPs and LPs who:
- Welcome challenge without defensiveness
- Surface the tradeoffs in their own strategies
- Treat capital as an act of consequence, not just exposure
If you’re performing for optics, optimizing narrative over substance, or papering over risks — he will disengage. He prefers friction that sharpens over harmony that dulls.
Q: What’s it like to co-invest with Thorsten?
Highly structured. Focused on what matters. Never a passenger.
Co-investors describe Thorsten as:
- Relentlessly focused on second-order effects and national consequence
- Willing to do the work others outsource: supplier tracing, technical diligence, battlefield doctrine alignment
- Unafraid to take “ugly” early positions in sectors others avoid until de-risked
- Willing to walk away from deals — or even whole sectors — when externalities outweigh upside
He’s particularly skilled at identifying underpriced complexity in manufacturing and sovereign systems where conventional VCs lack conviction.
Q: What is Thorsten’s communication style with LPs, founders, and GPs?
Direct but kind, ethical, and focused on what is most likely to shift future decision-making. No consensus theater.
We don’t do performance updates, we offer strategic visibility:
- Portfolio-level pattern break detection
- Founder judgment assessments (beyond KPI grooming)
- Early warning signals on talent misalignment, dual-use divergence, or sovereign exposure risk
Every update answers one question: What do we now know that we didn’t before — and how should it change our posture?
Q: How does Thorsten structure partnership terms?
Always designed for alignment, never designed for opacity.
He insists on:
- Simple, legible economics that make upside and downside symmetrical
- Structures that prioritize capability, not dependence
- Anti-fragile terms that allow capital to pause, pivot, or escalate based on signal, not ego
If you’re raising capital or seeking partnership and don’t know why your structure looks the way it does — he’ll ask until you do.
Q: What’s the ultimate shared goal for Thorsten’s partners?
Build the infrastructure of freedom — and get paid to do it with rigor and integrity.
Everything else — fund size, ownership %, deal mechanics — is downstream of that.
VII: FINAL NOTES
Q: What should I read to understand Thorsten’s thinking?
Start here:
- Thinkstorm Blog
- The Consilience Project
- Howard Marks Memos
- “Judgment Under Uncertainty” by Kahneman & Tversky
- Research by David Tuckett on conviction narratives