The Efficiency Frontier

I’m lazy. Genuinely, deeply lazy. I’ve also spent a meaningful amount of energy figuring out how to be lazy more effectively, which is either a contradiction or the whole point.

Here’s what I mean. I’ve been playing competitive games my entire life. In high school, I was a semi-professional Counter-Strike player. I competed in the CPL, which at the time was the biggest competitive gaming league in the world. My first time in Texas was flying to Grapevine for a million dollar tournament. Now I live here. Life is weird.

These days it’s Valorant and Mechabellum… the kind of games where there’s a ranked ladder and everyone’s trying to climb it. In Valorant, I’ve hit the top 1% of players. In Mechabellum, I’ve been top 200 in North America. Not bad for someone who considers himself lazy.

The trick isn’t talent. It’s prioritization. I focus on fundamentals first because that’s where the return on effort is absurd. Crosshair placement, positioning, game sense… the boring stuff. Getting the basics right puts you above 90% of players who skip straight to highlight-reel plays. But at some point, the effort curve goes exponential. The hours required per marginal gain stop making sense. So I stop.

That’s not laziness. It’s an efficiency calculation. And I run it on basically everything.

The Inversion

Most investors describe their process as looking for reasons to say yes. They’re scanning for signal, pattern-matching on potential, getting excited about markets and founders and big ideas. The energy flows toward conviction.

I do the opposite. I look for every reason to say no.

When a deal comes in, I’m not building a case for it. I’m trying to kill it. Interrogating the assumptions, stress-testing the claims, pressure-testing whether the technical foundation holds up. It’s the Socratic method applied to deal flow. I ask questions not because I want reassurance, but because I want to find the crack.

Most of the time, I find one. And that’s fine. The whole point of the process is efficient filtration. If a thesis dies under questioning, it should. Better to discover that in diligence than in a board deck two years later.

But occasionally, something survives. I push on the market dynamics and they hold. I challenge the technical claims and they check out. I look for the incentive misalignment and can’t find it. That’s when things get interesting… not because the company is “exciting” in some abstract way, but because I ran out of ways to break it.

The feeling isn’t “this is cool.” It’s “I tried to kill this and I couldn’t.”

A recent example. A molecular design platform came across my desk that looked incredible on paper. Strong narrative, credible partnerships, deals in the pipeline. I spoke with their business development team and everything tracked. But when I pushed on the actual technology… how it worked, what the mechanisms were, where the evidence was… I got back a stack of papers that read like consultant-speak. Polished language, very little proof. I’m a trust but verify kind of person, so I kept going. Spoke with the founder directly. Asked for the science. And they still couldn’t provide real evidence that they could do what they said they could do. I killed it.

That’s the process working as designed. Not every deal dies on obvious red flags. Some die because what should be there simply isn’t. The absence of evidence, after you’ve asked clearly and given every opportunity to provide it, is its own kind of answer.

Why Structure Matters

This only works if your incentives support it. The real danger in investing isn’t a lack of discipline… it’s a structure where activity gets rewarded over accuracy. When deployment timelines are rigid and there’s pressure to show deal flow, the bar quietly drops. Not because the investors are bad at their jobs, but because the system rewards putting money to work over waiting for the right opportunity. “I didn’t find anything worth investing in this quarter” is a hard thing to say when the clock is ticking.

At Mimosa Ventures, we’ve been intentional about building a structure where saying no carries no penalty. Right now, that means investing off our own balance sheet with no outside LPs. But the principle is broader than any one vehicle. The goal is making sure the incentive to deploy never overrides the discipline to wait. However you set up the plumbing, that alignment has to be designed in from the start. Patient capital, in whatever form it takes, makes better decisions. Bad ones compound.

The Process Doesn’t Stop at No

One thing people get wrong about a kill-first approach is assuming it means disengagement. It doesn’t.

Even when I pass on a company, if I’ve gone deep enough to form a real opinion, I’ll share it. Not a vague “it’s not a fit” but specific feedback… what I think is weak in the materials, where the product positioning misses, what questions the next investor is going to ask that they aren’t ready for. I won’t do a deep dive on everyone. But if I like you enough to spend real time in the weeds, you’re getting specific examples and concrete suggestions, not platitudes.

And if I pass, I’ll tell you exactly why.

The companies that do survive the interrogation get more than capital. They get my time, my network, and my attention. The filtration process isn’t about being stingy. It’s about making sure that when I do commit, the commitment actually means something. Being selective is how you protect the capacity to go all-in on the things that matter.

Same efficiency curve, different ladder. The fundamentals still come first. The effort is still capped where the returns stop making sense. And the things that survive the filter still get everything I’ve got.

The lazy part is just the filter. The rest is anything but.