Joining Paradigm

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Paradigm as a Partner, focusing on AI, robotics, energy, space, reindustrialization, fintech, and other frontiers. My favorite game growing up was StarCraft, a game with a “fractal” strategy space. There was an ever-expanding tree of possibilities for each build to take, and each expansion added new units / buildings, opening up new branches of the tech tree. But whether any particular build was viable came down to the underlying numbers (cost, build time, range, damage, etc.), and how everything interacted in the multivariate space. The metagame only emerged as players tested that possibility space. Theorycrafting was fun, but only playing the game revealed what worked. The technological frontier is fractal in a similar way. A breakthrough like AI (new tech tree unlocked) opens a new tree of possibilities, but technical and economic variables determine which branches are actually viable. As builders and researchers explore that possibility space, they start to reveal the shape of the “metagame” of frontier technology. I started out my career at Vista and TPG - large private equity firms where investing meant working from the inside out. We had deep access to information, including management, data rooms, and models built from years of operating data. Later, at Altimeter, public markets demanded the opposite - you have to work outside-in with far less information to form an imperfect, approximate picture. You still had to understand the business deeply, but that alone created no edge; you had to find what others were missing.

I then joined Patrick Fu on Dandelion’s founding team, just as AI opened the first major technical frontier of my investing career. There, I learned the value of working closely with the researchers and builders, where their jagged insights changed my priors about what technical paths were viable. Investing at the frontier meant synthesizing those insights with the skills I had built up in private equity and public markets investing - understanding a business deeply and finding what others were missing. I began asking what a firm built around that combination of deep technical insight and investment rigor might look like.

When I met Matt and Alana, I was struck by how much thought they had given the same question. They had built a world-class firm where researchers, investors, and builders all worked and learned from each other. Paradigm refined this model in crypto, where technical depth was essential to investing. I believe this translates naturally to the broader frontier. 

Several technological frontiers are now rapidly advancing at once, each opening new branches in the others. As those advances intersect, progress can compound far faster than it would in one field alone. The fractals of the future are vast and inspiring.

I’m particularly interested in technologies that do more than improve the world as it exists - technologies that make a different world possible. If you are building along one of these paths, or one that does not yet have a name, I’m reachable via DM on X and by email at calvin@paradigm.xyz.