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HEYNS VENTURES

Thesis

00 · WHY

I am building the future I want to live in, and the one I want my children to grow up in. I cannot build it alone, so I look for people already building theirs, and we argue it into shape together.

— Hannes Heyns. Building since 1999, full time since 2016. We publish what we learn so others are spared some of the expensive lessons we have paid for.

01 · WHAT BUILDING IT TAKES
Choose it.
A future nobody has described cannot be built. So we describe ours, out loud, and expect it to be contested.
Align it.
People build toward their own futures. The work is finding where they overlap, and being honest where they do not.
Make it safe to try.
People build where the blast radius is bounded and the rules are known. Most of what we do is making that true.
Tend it.
Nothing built stays built. Someone has to keep it.
Start companies.
One of the tools, not the point. Where the future needs something that does not exist yet, we build the venture that makes it. → Jobs
02 · 2050: THE FUTURE WE ARE BUILDING TOWARD

If the founders we work with succeed, this is what the world looks like.

Abundance is the default.
Experienced as generosity: space, time, greenery, water and ease for everyone, not gadgets for a few.
Technology is recessed.
The most advanced places look the least technological.
Individuals are private; institutions are transparent.
Your data sits in your vault; every public body lives in glass.
Coordination is nearly free.
A town can restore a river and a nation can rebuild its grid.
Everyone can build.
Trying is cheap enough to be normal.
Everything is tended.
Nothing stands derelict, fenced, or abandoned.
Experiments are welcome, bounded, and published.
A new idea gets a yes where the blast radius is your own, with two strings: declare it, and share what you learn.
Trust stays human.
What cannot be automated is trust between named people, face to face.
Safety is a dividend, not a watchtower.
Everyone housed, needed, and known.
Cities are the unit of change.
Small enough to see whole, real enough to matter.

This is our version. It is meant to be argued with. Where we are, the argument happens in the open, on a shared ruler.

03 · BELIEFS
1
Building is becoming cheap.
Design, code, media, distribution: what took teams now takes one person and the right tools. Today is the most expensive it will ever be. Building becomes a common lever.
2
The bottleneck has moved.
From building to knowing, honestly, whether what you are building should exist. The valuable work now sits before and between the building.
3
The founder is the constraint.
In every new venture on the road to product-market fit, the founder is the limiting factor: what they can learn, decide, and carry. → Jobs
4
Success is a function of honest iterations.
Every honest cycle raises the probability of success; nothing guarantees it. The number of cycles before the runway ends is the part you can influence.
5
The future must be chosen.
If we do not know what we are building toward, we will not bring it to life. The future arrives regardless; unchosen, it is chosen for us. → 2050

Belief 3 produces the jobs. Belief 4 produces the board. Belief 5 produces 2050. Beliefs 1 and 2 produce all of it.

04 · HOW WE WORK: MARKET BEATS TEAM BEATS PRODUCT

We learned it the slow way: a decade of building companies and watching which ones the market pulled and which ones no team could save. It is the order the Venture Validation Standard runs on, the open standard we co-authored at Validation.Works: it starts at the ecosystem and lets validation expire downward, so getting the market wrong writes off everything beneath it. Marc Andreessen and Andy Rachleff reached the same order from the investor's side. In a great market the product is pulled out of the company before it is good; a great team cannot save a bad market; product ranks last because it is the one thing you can iterate.

CHANGE A LAYER, AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT IS REDONE
1
MARKET
Find a market worth serving · jobs 1.1 to 1.7
2
TEAM
Build and sustain the venture capable of finding the product · jobs 2.1 to 2.7
3
PRODUCT
Find the product the market comes back for · jobs 3.1 to 3.8

The jobs, in full, are on the Jobs page. → Jobs