Last week, I joined the investment team at Construct to double down on a mission that’s driven me over the last several years: the potential of disruptive technology to transform the foundational industries that can improve economic competitiveness, ensure national security, and unlock upward mobility in the workforce.
Getting close to the problem
I started my career as a consultant at McKinsey, where I spent most of my time focused on the future of work wrapping my head around the potential for AI and automation to disrupt labor markets. I got to appreciate the issue from several angles, serving clients from F100 enterprises managing large workforces to education institutions training the next generation of technical talent. As the pandemic accelerated shifts in the way we work, I felt the need to go from 30,000 feet to 3 feet away from this problem. I joined FutureFit AI, a pre-seed startup developing AI-powered tools to help workers navigate career changes and bridge talent supply and demand in the future of work.
While my thematic focus stayed the same, the day-to-day couldn’t have been any different. As a management consultant, the job mainly consisted of coming up with the best possible academic answers to problems in a vacuum without having to spend any time actually implementing them. As employee #11 at a startup and the only member of the team solely responsible for driving revenue, I learned to invert that balance and spend almost all my time iterating on rapidly cobbled together ideas to eventually get to the right answer. Over the next couple years, I got to lead a public sector go-to-market strategy that took us to mid-7-figure ARR while helping modernize workforce development at the state and local level across North America.
Getting much closer to a specific problem opened my eyes to the extent to which incumbents are incentivized to protect the status quo and embrace “this is how it’s always been done” thinking. I also got to experience first hand the potential for an ambitious, mission-driven team 1/1000th the size of a competitor to deliver drastically better outcomes. We soon raised our Seed at FutureFit AI, and as I started learning more about venture capital, I wondered if I could become great at repeatedly spotting those kinds of teams and supporting them along the way.
Economic competitiveness and national security
At the same time, the problems that kept me up at night began to expand. The National Security Commission on AI released its report outlining the US’s lagging pace of progress on critical and emerging technology areas including AI, defense, space, robotics, energy, and quantum that would define a geopolitical race for dominance. Then, the nature of warfare changed as Russia invaded Ukraine and the kill chain veered toward autonomy. And then Chris Miller’s Chip War brought semiconductors and the Taiwan strait to the mainstream.
With a new mandate around harnessing entrepreneurial talent to secure the lead over a set of technologies that would define the first half of the 21st century, I joined the early team at America’s Frontier Fund. For the past 2.5 years, I had the privilege to work alongside world leaders across business, science, and policy to build AFF into a unique platform dedicated to accelerating progress in frontier technologies. Along the way, I helped raise and deploy our inaugural $300M venture fund in partnership with the U.S. DOD and SBA, supported the launch of Roadrunner Venture Studios to build companies out of scientific breakthroughs, and created a national nonprofit partnership to reduce the talent shortage of semiconductor technicians.
Transforming foundational industries
While I was glad to retain some of the operator in me that comes along with scaling a new organization, as I stepped into the role of an investor, I got hooked by the energy and vision of the founders I met with. I also fell in love with the range of problems I could focus on through them: the next decade is expected to hold multiple technical breakthroughs in AI, robotics, energy, and quantum computing, and it’s founders, not incumbents, that are at the forefront. But I think it would be a mistake to view these as independent verticals. I believe the best founders will see these as platform technologies that have the potential to compound on each other to create incredible progress for foundational industries in manufacturing, logistics, and defense.
Dayna and Rachel founded Construct Capital 5 years ago and, now on Fund III, remain as dedicated as they were on day one to rebuilding the foundational industries that have been neglected for the last several decades. We also see eye to eye on the harm that offshoring our industrial base inflicted on the American workforce and the opportunity that rebuilding legacy industries holds for delivering economic gain at all levels. Just as impressive as being early to this thesis and to investing in generational founders within it, they have built an exceptional firm around principles that are harder and harder to come by in venture these days: we are a values-driven, collaborative, small team that works together in person and makes concentrated investments in a small number of companies whose founders we can truly support.
I couldn’t be more excited to continue on this mission as an Investor alongside the stellar team at Construct. If you’re a founder building disruptive technology to transform foundational industries, I’d love to hear from you at joachim@constructcap.com.