I’m consistently hitting an “every two weeks” cadence on my investing journal thus far, which is better than my personal journal but not as good as my blog. The obstacle, I’ve found, is not that I lack interesting nuggets across my portfolio, request for startups, or idea library. Instead, it’s that they come too quickly and each require development. That’s one of the difficulties with writing; to do it at all takes time, but to do it well takeslotsof time.

The core concept for today comes from a board meeting I had last week, but as I let it sit in my mind it ended up encompassing a handful of touch points over the course of the last few days. It came up in an updated mark for another one of the companies I’m invested in and percolated through several of the conversations I had throughout the week.

From the lumbering giants of financial services to the sneaky beauty of grungy software and into the world of mineral rights, let me try and unpack my thinking around sneaky giants hiding in plain sight. Plus, some bonus hints at a request for startups in regulatory data and revenue cycle management!

First, financial services.

I’m an investor in a company called Moment; a fintech company providing an investment management platform for large financial services firms. The company started in fixed income but has started to broaden its coverage across other asset classes. It’s an incredibly impressive team across the board, but what left me stunned after the board meeting last week is just how big financial services really is.

Fixed income, alone, is ~$150 TRILLION globally. Equities represents another $126 trillion. The companies managing these financial services don’t blink at multi-million dollar vendor contracts. There is SO much value that can be created in milliseconds of efficiency or insight. Meanwhile, most people don’t have a clue nor do they care even if they do.

Don’t get me wrong, Moment has had no trouble raising capital. They’ve had several exceptional firms line up to invest and support their growth, oftentimes preempting rounds. They’re scaling incredibly fast and are poised to be a truly exceptional company. And they’re plenty advantaged by AI. But they’re not what most “dumb-as-bricks” VCs would describe as “AI-native.” So the majority of investors don’t pay attention.

They don’t pay attention to the trillions of dollars of assets in desperate need of higher quality technology, nor do they pay attention to the multi-billion dollar company being built in Moment.

Sneaky giants hiding in plain sight.

Second, grungy software.

One of my first investing jobs was at TCV. Now, TCV has changed a LOT since I started there almost 10 years ago. But at the time, there was a term we threw around to describe a special breed of businesses: Artemis. An Artemis business was named in honor of the Goddess of the Hunt. These were bootstrapped, profitable businesses that were growing. They may not be growing 100%+ per year, but they had demonstrated a truly exceptional trifecta of profit and growth without exorbitant capital. Something worth hunting.

I’m going to desperately try NOT to talk about the current software over-sell since I already talked about it in 001 and 002. But this idea of a “diamond in the rough” type of software business is far from in vogue these days. The death of software is everywhere. Soon we’ll be vibe coding ERPs for every occasion. What good can grungy software be?

Turns out? Pretty darn good. A few years ago I invested in a new-age holding company. The concept was Constellation Software-esque; acquire solid businesses in niche verticals with demonstrable merit and build a basket of these assets for a long-term hold. Simple enough. Recently, I got an update on how they’re doing. In just the few years since I invested I’ve locked in a conservative 8x already. What’s more, the basket of companies is accelerating growth. In part, because of things like Claude Code. AI, far from the harbinger of death for software across the board, is a universal accelerant.

One of the first companies they acquired was an equestrian software company; literally software for horse trainers. Who in their right mind is going to vibe code that, let alone be able to sell it? There is something powerful about these steady software businesses with some hair and grunge that are far from the sex appeal of the limelight.

Sneaky giants hiding in plain sight.

Finally, mineral rights.

I’ll hold back the details, in case he doesn’t want me sharing too broadly. But I met a former tech founder this week who was taking a first principles approach to resource bottlenecks. Everyone has talked about the implications of rare earth minerals across semiconductors, batteries, solar panels, and on and on. But the reality is that “rare earth minerals” aren’t rare in a geological sense; its a logistical limitation.

There are at least 130 million metric tons of rare earth deposits across 34 countries. Meanwhile, annual production is ~300K metric tons. The rarity comes, instead, in the underlying complexity of the value chain:

• (1) Economic concentration: You need ore grads that are typically above 1-5% total rare earth oxides (TREO) in order to compete with the kind of concentration you see in China
• (2) Processing complexity: You’re typically dealing with 15+ different elements that require dozens of chemical steps for separation
• (3) Environmental challenges: NEPA is a pain in the butt, adding a massive amount of regulatory complexity to the entire process. China typically pulls ahead because they’re willing to absorb the environmental costs in a way countries in the West won’t
• (4) Capital intensity: Building a rare earth processing facility can cost $500M-$1B+ and can take years to permit and build

This former founder is building a new fund around mineral rights by taking the approach to minerals that already exists in pharma. Massive failure rate, for one reason or another, while the ones that hit and achieve economic operations hit it big. Today, exploration is a ramshackle operation of publicly traded penny stocks. Typically, only 20 companies spend over $5M annually on exploration, which leaves the majority of the industry as a hyper-fragmented cottage industry.

The solution? Build a data-driven exploration model that has a higher hit rate relative to other uneconomic attempts. If you can even improve the success rate of exploration efforts from 1% to 5%, that’s the difference of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in successful mining outcomes. The high failure rate can be derisked by higher quality data and more incentive-aligned model.

Sneaky giants hiding in plain sights.

He’s actually talking to LPs right now, so if you’re interested in deploying capital into mineral rights, he’s your guy. Let me know!

Therefore, What?

I’d say this is a pretty widespread collection of ideas. I’ve got a separate, but somewhat related “Request For Startups” brewing around regulatory data (the cross-section of permitting / compliance navigation and lobbying efforts) that I also feel like is a giant hiding in plain sight, but will let that one bake a little bit more.

My TLDR takeaway is this: look for sneaky giants hiding in plain sight.

Another pet category of mine that didn’t necessarily come up for me this past week, but has been on my mind frequently over the last few years is revenue cycle management (RCM) in healthcare. Its a ~$200B industry and its horrible. There are hundreds of RCM companies, several of them doing billions in revenue. New-age startups, like Cedar, are only processing ~$3B of that volume. There’s a sneaky giant hiding in plain sight.

Granted, one of the dangers of chasing these giants is a lack of appreciation for the Lindy effect. In simple terms, “the future life expectancy of some non-perishable thing, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to its current age.” In other words? The longer something has been a crappy, broken, sneaky giant hiding in plain sight, the longer it is likely to remain that way. Big, lumbering companies don’t typically stay big or lumbering because they want to; there’s something keeping them that way. Both keeping them big, but also keeping them lumbering. You have to understand those adjacent details if you hope to take advantage of them.

Now, off you go, giant hunting. And let me know if you’re interested in mineral rights LP vehicles. And I’ll try and unpack my thoughts on the opportunity set in regulatory data and revenue cycle management more sometime in a future RFS.