ACT Capital
This is a work in progress and will be updated over time. Last updated: 29.12.25.
In this post I will briefly introduce ACT Capital, an investment firm focused entirely on creating progress.
Our mission: why
Progress = make human lives better.
By committing to progress, we aim to always leave the world better after our investments than before.
The deeper reason for ACT Capital: most money is allocated in ways that don’t benefit humanity. It’s wasted, or it ends up in the pockets of people who contribute nothing to society.
Capital should work toward the progress of humanity. It should be used to create a better tomorrow. Full stop.
Progress isn’t straightforward. This article gives you a good intro to how I think about it.
Our work: what
Predicting is not what an investment firm should do. It should be a builder of the future: using capital to push reality toward possibilities that wouldn’t happen on their own.
Progress is our constraint. It isn’t negotiable.
We start by incubating and working closely with companies, we also do opportunity investing. Other strategies that let us actively shape the future are fine too, but likely less important at the beginning.
The power of science and technology is unmatched. It’s neutral. Things can go very well or very badly, but its potential to create the kind of progress we care about is incomparable.
We’re hyper realistic about how the world works, and we act on how we think it could be better. We combine that realism with imagination: we actively form our own view of the future.
Our main research domains: science, technology, humans, money, control & power. Everything about that research that we want to make publicly available, will be shared through this newsletter, The Bougnat.
We spend most of our time figuring things out, working hard, and discovering possibilities and solutions.
The business: how
Thesis: our mission and our focus define what we notice, and therefore the opportunities we have. Progress is where value comes from. By focusing on progress, we aim to find opportunities that generate significant returns through value creation and value capture.
The business model is simple: invest and make returns.
We make large, concentrated bets on what we consider the great opportunities. No hedging.
Execution principles: action over speculation, building over waiting, concentration over diversification, contrarian when it makes sense (meaning we think for ourselves), for-profit, long-term.
Aligning incentives: we need to align incentives between the investors, the investment manager, and the companies or people we invest in. This issue is one of the two reasons I abandoned the idea of an investment firm a couple of years ago (besides not seeing how investing could create real progress at the time) and put a hard stop to what I was doing. The investor wants as much money as quickly as possible. The manager wants long-term freedom to execute. The solution comes from Warren Buffett and has been adopted by many of the best investors today: you invest capital that belongs to the company, instead of relying on outside LPs. That’s how you build permanent capital. That’s the goal over time.
The team: a small team that scales to 15 people max. That’s how I imagine it for now.
How ACT might change: progress stays fixed forever. Everything else can change, size of the company, duration, stage (public/private), asset class, based on what we identify as the best path to progress and capturing some of the value it creates.