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.

I grew up playing StarCraft, a game with a fractal strategy space. Each expansion added units and buildings, opening new branches of the tech tree. But whether any particular build was viable came down to the underlying numbers - cost, build time, range, damage - and how everything interacted. The metagame emerged as players tested that possibility space. I loved theorycrafting, but only playing revealed what worked.

The technological frontier is fractal in much the same way. A breakthrough like AI opens a new tree of possibilities, but technical and economic variables determine which branches become viable. As builders and researchers explore that possibility space, progress along a working branch can compound much faster than linear extrapolation would suggest.

I started my career at Vista and TPG, large private equity firms where investing meant working inside-out - management access, data rooms, and models built from years of operating data. Later, at Altimeter, public markets demanded the opposite - work outside-in with far less information. 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 from researchers and builders whose jagged insights changed my priors about which technical paths might become viable. Investing at the frontier meant synthesizing those insights with the disciplines I had learned before: understand a business deeply and find what others were missing. I began asking what a firm built around that combination could look like.

When I met Matt and Alana, I was struck by how much thought they had given to the same question. They had built a world-class firm where investors, researchers, and builders work together and learn from one another. Paradigm refined this model in crypto, where technical depth was essential. I believe it translates naturally to the broader frontier. Several technological frontiers are now advancing at once, each opening new branches in the others. As those advances interact, progress can compound far faster than it would within any 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.