Will Stark - e/acc

After 15 years of investing, we realised that truly exceptional founders have something impossible to fake: deeply unconventional lives. We analysed 15,000 founders using five binary signals to measure this: odd hobbies, early signs of exceptionalism, extreme life choices, unusual geographies, non-linear careers. These sum to give a 0-5 score per founder. Whether someone started coding at 10, speaks five languages, climbed Everest or quit a safe job to live in Chile, the signal was deviation from the mean. Rather than focusing on IQ or EQ, we call this metric the Outlier Quotient, or “OQ”. When forecasting founder success, it turns out that OQ was the single most predictive variable in our entire classification model, trained on ~70 different factors. Our OQ score had zero correlation with having worked at a top-tier company or attending an elite university. The signals most VCs rely on aren’t just noisy, they’re blinding. The best founders don’t signal like everyone else, they don’t think like everyone else, and they certainly don’t build like everyone else. If you want to spot breakout talent before the rest of the market, stop screening for conformity. Back the founders the system was built to filter out.

Can a 29-year-old start all over again?

Elon Musk and Franz von Holzhausen during the first Model S customer deliveries in 2012, and the final Model S deliveries in 2026. 14 years later. What a journey!

We raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.2B valuation, led by a16z. Exa is a search lab organizing the web's data for agents.

We raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.2B valuation, led by a16z. Exa is a search lab organizing the web's data for agents.

It's time for interfaces to break out of flat land. Lately, I have been experimenting with spatial experiences supported by foundational gestures. Truly feels magical.