Not Everything Interesting is a Good Idea
The importance of knowing what you don’t do
On the last day of an investor conference in Los Angeles, after most people had left and the hotel lobby was getting quiet, I ran into a limited partner I’d met earlier in the week. He stopped me in the hallway and asked if I had a few minutes to talk, so we grabbed a table and ended up sitting for a lengthy chat. There wasn’t really an agenda and there was no pitching (unlike most of the other meetings that week). It was just a conversation between two people who think about investing from different angles, sitting down to talk through how we each make sense of a world that’s full of ideas, opportunities, noise, and sometimes contradiction. What we were both trying to figure out is this: “How do you actually find the right opportunities in a world full of interesting ones?”
What came out of that conversation, and what stuck with me after the fact, was how helpful it is to have a lens. Not necessarily a monolithic thesis or a position or a brand, but a way of seeing things that gives your decisions some consistency. It doesn’t mean you’re rigid or overly narrow. It just means that when something comes your way, you have some sort of frame to evaluate it and understand if you could add value to it. You know how to think about it. You’ve already done a little bit of the work in advance to know what you’re looking for and what probably doesn’t fit.
We ended up talking about how strategies hold together. Not in a high-conviction, plant-your-flag kind of way, but more in the sense of how you actually build something coherent. What happens when you invest in both industrials and financial services? Is that a strength, or is it just two unrelated bets? In some cases, those areas might feel too far apart to reinforce each other. There’s no shared operating knowledge, no ability to transfer insight from one deal to the next, and not much of a reason why doing one makes you better at the other. It’s not that you can’t do it. It just doesn’t feel like it adds up to something. We talked about things like route-based services: businesses such as residential HVAC or commercial janitorial that, on the surface, might not seem that similar but actually share a lot when you look at how they operate. You start to realize it’s less about what category something falls into and more about how it behaves.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” - sj
One of the better ideas we landed on that afternoon was the power of subtraction. Instead of only defining what you are, define what you’re not. That’s where real focus comes from. Maybe your fund doesn’t do software or healthcare. Not because those sectors are bad, but because they require domain expertise you don’t have or don’t want to build. Saying no to those verticals sends a signal: that you know your lane, and you’ve got the conviction to stay in it.
Most of us are trained to think in terms of industries. Software, healthcare, business services, etc. It’s a familiar way to organize the world, but it’s mostly surface-level. What often matters more, especially when you’re trying to build conviction, is the second layer down. Who are the end customers? How do they buy? Are those relationships sticky? Is demand predictable? What kind of switching costs exist, and are they structural or just a function of momentum? These are the things that shape the behavior of a business over time, and they’re often more revealing than the label you assign to it. Two companies in different industries might look completely unrelated until you see they serve similar end markets, or they face the same retention and pricing challenges, or they depend on the same kind of field workforce. That’s the level where patterns start to show up.
The idea of having a lens isn’t about filtering out everything that doesn’t match a specific checklist. It’s more like building a pattern recognition system you trust. Something that reflects your own experience and lets you move faster when a new opportunity comes along. It also helps others understand what you’re about. Whether you’re raising a fund, building a company, or shaping your own career, there’s real value in being legible to other people. When someone can understand how you think and what types of things tend to fit your framework, it makes it easier to work with you, invest with you, or bring you into something they’re working on. And that legibility doesn’t come from being able to do everything but rather it comes from having a throughline.
That throughline can stretch across multiple areas. It doesn’t have to mean you only do one thing. In fact, most of the people I respect have experience in a few different domains. But there’s some connective tissue between them. It might be a way of operating. It might be a particular customer dynamic they understand deeply. It might be the stage of a business they’re best at. The point is, it adds up. It doesn’t feel random. And that’s what makes the lens useful. It helps you understand why certain things resonate and others don’t. The sweet spot, in my view, is being really good at three to five things that complement each other. Areas where you can pattern match, cross-pollinate, and move with confidence. That’s a lot stronger than being okay at everything. Or even great at just one thing and blind to the rest.
That table in LA, in the quiet of the last afternoon, wasn’t where I expected to find clarity. But that’s often how these things go. When the noise dies down, the good conversations happen. What stayed with me was how important it is to have a view of the world that reflects the way you actually work. Something you’ve developed through experience. Something you’ve tested over time. It’s not the loudest or flashiest signal, but it helps you stay oriented when the rest of the landscape gets noisy.
I don’t think anyone needs to have all the answers. But it helps to have a way of seeing or a lens that makes sense to you. And over time, that lens starts to make sense to other people, too.