The Waves of History
History is not random. It moves in waves. Empires rise and fall. Civilizations emerge and collapse. New powers rise when they unlock something their predecessors could not: a technology, a trade route, a system of organization. They dominate until that advantage diffuses or a new unlock emerges elsewhere. Then they decline, and the cycle begins again.
Bronze gave way to iron. Cavalry gave way to gunpowder. Sail gave way to steam. Each transition reshuffled the hierarchy of nations. The underlying pattern is legible across millennia. Dominant powers do not fall to competitors playing the same game better. They fall to competitors playing a different game entirely: one enabled by a breakthrough the incumbent either missed or dismissed.
We study these waves as both historians and investors. Because the same dynamics that governed the rise of Rome and the decline of the Visigoths govern the rise and fall of companies, technologies, and investment trends today.
“A small set of technologies has fundamentally altered the course of humanity. These have come from singularly extraordinary individuals and trace directly to new physics breakthroughs. We’ve built a machine to find the next ones.”
— Nathan Montone, CEO
The Pattern of Power Transfer
Technologies that affect power dynamics dramatically shape the direction of civilization in ways that are not immediately obvious when they first arrive.
Technologies like blockchain don’t just offer incremental improvements: they fundamentally alter power dynamics between individuals and institutions. The printing press didn’t merely improve book production; it shattered the Church’s monopoly on knowledge and ignited the Reformation. Gunpowder didn’t just make warfare louder; it ended the age of castles and redistributed power from armored knights to common serfs. The microprocessor didn’t simply speed up calculation; it transferred computational sovereignty from institutions to individuals.
We believe the shape of these transformations is discernible. Not with deterministic precision, but with enough clarity to position capital ahead of consensus. The printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the microprocessor, the internet: each represented not merely a new tool but a fundamental reorganization of human ability, a transfer of power that seemed impossible until it was inevitable.
- Emergence — Technology appears in obscurity, understood by few
- Dismissal — Incumbents reject it as impractical or irrelevant
- Adoption — Visionaries recognize the potential and begin building
- Suppression — Threatened interests mobilize to stop or control it
- Triumph — If robust enough, the technology prevails and reshapes civilization
The Physics of Progress
Progress happens via “unlocks”, new discoveries about the nature of physical reality. These upgraded understandings of physics give us a deeper understanding of how the world works, and manifest in an increased ability to do things in the physical world.
Civilizational progress is not continuous. It is punctuated.
Long periods of incremental improvement are interrupted by sudden “unlocks”: moments when humanity discovers something new about how reality actually works. These discoveries do not merely improve existing systems. They reveal that entirely different systems are possible.
Electricity did not make better candles; it made candles obsolete. Computation didn’t give us a better abacus; it dematerialized our world. Bitcoin didn’t solve payment latency; it redefined the dynamic between states and their citizens.
These are phase transitions: new physics, new math, new chemistry, new biology that restructures what can be built and what cannot. The companies and nations that internalize these unlocks first capture the surplus. Everyone else adapts or declines.
We track the frontier of human knowledge not because we are scientists but because science determines the boundaries of the possible. And investment returns are highest at the moments those boundaries shift.
The pattern is consistent: someone perceives a deeper truth about reality, and that perception cascades into technologies that reshape civilization.
Great Founder Theory
Civilizational breakthroughs don’t emerge from committees. They come from singularly extraordinary individuals: people who challenge consensus to pursue a more accurate understanding of how reality works.
The historical record is unambiguous. The paradigm-shifting insights that restructure industries and reshape civilizations trace back, again and again, to singular minds operating at the edge of what their contemporaries considered reasonable. Individuals, not committees.
This is not a romanticized retelling of history. It is pattern recognition.
Tesla with alternating current. Einstein with relativity. Satoshi with Bitcoin. The structure is the same. One person sees what others cannot, builds what others will not, and persists through the dismissal that greets every genuine departure from orthodoxy.
These individuals share characteristics that can be identified. They exhibit obsessive focus on problems others consider solved or unsolvable. They operate outside institutional constraints that would sand down their edges. They often describe their insights in terms of flashes of sudden clarity rather than gradual deduction.
We call these individuals “Live Players”: people with the agency and capability to take novel strategic action in the world. They are not bureaucrats executing a predefined playbook. They are founders in the deepest sense: builders who bend reality itself to engineer their vision of the future into existence.
Venture capital, properly understood, is the art of identifying these individuals and providing the capital and resources they need to reshape reality.
This is our mission.
The Venture Mechanism
Venture Capital is uniquely positioned to both benefit from a correct understanding of where the world is going and to help decide where the world goes by choosing which founders, companies, and technologies receive funding and support.
Venture capital is not simply an investment class. It is a mechanism for coordinating human progress. It is the deployment of capital to accelerate the emergence of paradigm-shifting technologies, and to capture the asymmetric returns that come from being right before consensus forms.
When a Live Player unlocks a new technology, capital is the accelerant that transforms insight into infrastructure. The investor who backs the right founder at the right moment captures a share of the value created when the world reorganizes around the new capability.
This is the highest-returning asset class in history for a reason. It finances the expansion of the possible and raises global living standards in the process.
But the mechanism only works if you can identify the unlock before it becomes obvious. By the time consensus recognizes the shift, the paradigm premium has already been captured. The returns accrue to those who see clearly when it requires conviction rather than consensus.
For most of history, this was an art. Intuition, networks, pattern recognition developed over decades. The best investors were those whose mental models most closely approximated the actual dynamics of technological change.
But something has changed.
The Vertical Curve
The pace of breakthrough is no longer measured in generations. Manual processes cannot keep pace.
Technological Acceleration
The pace of breakthrough is no longer measured in generations. It is measured in years. Sometimes months. This changes everything about how paradigm shifts must be identified.
Plot technological progress on a timeline. Not progress in any single domain, but overall human capability. The ability to manipulate matter, harness energy, process information.
For most of human history, the line is nearly flat. Millennia pass with minimal change. A farmer in 1,000 BC would recognize the tools of a farmer in 1,000 AD. The pace of change was slower than a human lifetime.
The Agricultural Revolution. The Scientific Revolution. The Industrial Revolution. Each transition faster than the last. Each building on the unlocks of its predecessor.
- Hunter-Gatherer Age → Agricultural Age 2,500,000 years
- Agricultural Age → Industrial Age 10,000 years
- Industrial Age → Atomic Age 150 years
- Atomic Age → Information Age 30 years
The old methods (intuition, networks, decades of pattern recognition) cannot keep pace. By the time human judgment processes one breakthrough, three more have emerged. If your process for identifying technology shifts is manual, you have already lost.
The M31 Machine
A systematized process for identifying technology paradigm shifts and the Live Players building them. Designed to capture patterns of history, detect physics and technology breakthroughs, identify extraordinary founders, and navigate the investment landscape of the future.
We built something different.
M31 operates a systematized engine for identifying technological paradigm shifts and the Live Players driving them. Not a replacement for human judgment: an augmentation of it. A machine that processes the patterns we would miss, surfaces the signals we would overlook, and operates at the speed the current moment demands.
This is not quantitative investing. It is systematized judgment. Human insight about the dynamics of progress, encoded into a process that can operate at scale.
“We believe history has a shape to it and that we can quantify where we are on that progress curve. Technology investing is the best way to simultaneously catalyze and capitalize on human progress. But it’s accelerating too fast for a manual approach. So we built the machine.”
— Nathan Montone, CEO
The Results
The machine works.
Not by predicting price movements or timing markets, but by identifying paradigm shifts before consensus formed and backing the Live Players driving them.
We studied AI while the consensus dismissed it as science fiction. We saw Bitcoin’s institutional adoption before it was obvious. We tracked the DeFi explosion, the compute infrastructure race, the physical intelligence revolution, psychedelic medicine, and the new emergence of defense tech startups. Each time positioning capital before the paradigm premium had been captured by the crowd.
These returns are not replicable with legacy investment processes. They are the result of systematically applying the lessons of history to the accelerating present.
The Path Forward
History moves in waves. Progress comes through unlocks. Unlocks come through individuals. Venture capital both catalyzes and captures the value these individuals create. But the pace has accelerated. The window between breakthroughs is narrowing exponentially.
M31 Capital exists to navigate the acceleration. We built a machine to discover what manual processes miss, to operate at the speed the moment requires, and to identify the paradigm shifts that will structure the next phase of human progress.
“We study the underlying forces that shape history and systematically identify patterns around the technologies today that will fundamentally reshape our lives tomorrow.”
— Nathan Montone, CEO
Humanity’s standard of living comes from technology innovation. Innovation comes from breakthrough insights about how the world really works. Extraordinary insights come from extraordinary individuals.
Our role at M31 Capital is to find, fund, and empower those rare individuals who push the boundaries of knowledge and turn those insights into world-changing technologies.