The Outsider
The outsider is not a pose. It is keeping for yourself the right to say "stop".
Friends tell us to start an account and talk about how many term sheets came in this week. We would rather answer a dumb question first: who are we?
Our position first. Glacier was set up in 2018, and this is the eighth year; the whole time we have wanted to stand outside. What is an outsider? The one who stands outside the market and looks at it. Why stand there? We take it in three layers.
Standing outside is how you keep the right to say "stop"
Once a deal starts, every incentive at the table points the same way: close it fast. Who then admits the structure has a problem?
The seat we keep for ourselves is the one that can press pause. Press it once and there is one deal fewer this period. What comes back is the standing, next time, to spell the risk out in full.
Standing outside is not sniping from the sidelines
Comment only from the sidelines and you are not yet an outsider.
There is no traffic on the North Slope
The two axioms set out at the head of the Institute we have never changed. First, the moat of a hard-tech company grows in its labs and on its production lines, not in its pitch deck. Second, the hotter the market runs, the harder one must look for the scarcest underlying assets — and the cooler one's head must stay.
Follow the axioms down and the only road left is the North Slope. AI foundation models and new paradigms; Physical AI, embodied intelligence and robotics; commercial space, quantum computing, controlled nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces; AI infrastructure; intelligent manufacturing and globally competitive hard-tech products — five directions, and not one of them pays off in two years. In eight years we have walked with more than eighty companies, about ten a year. The number is small on purpose.
The North Slope is cold, the climb is slow, and you carry your own supplies. But there is no traffic on the North Slope.
So does an outsider miss the excitement? Of course. But that is the cost of this way of playing. What it buys is answering only for our own judgment, not for this period's deal volume.
Understanding, matching, closing — we have done those three for eight years. Writing this down is not to strike a pose. Today's work is the same as ever: turn over the facts of the next company, one at a time, until they are clean.