Sandy Kory

Sandy Kory put roughly half his net worth into Palantir’s bridge round around March 2009 — near the market bottom in hindsight — primarily on a talent-density inference, not a detailed business analysis. A Stanford grad-school friend, whose name varies in the transcript between Shawn/Shyam Sankar, raved about the team; Kory’s read was statistical: “this might be the smartest, most ambitious group of people in the world.” The company could barely explain its business — Kory recalls explaining “the definition of revenue” to Joe Lonsdale in 2008 — and top-tier VCs dismissed it as government consulting.

His screening method is radically product-light: “90% of the conversation is going to be on the things you’ve done before the startup,” and founders who want to show slides are told to send them afterward. Founders are coached on pitches but not on telling their life stories, so he believes there is more signal in the life before the startup. He also argues the earliest stage offers more alpha and more room for legitimately different approaches.

Talent magnetism is one of his highest-weight signals — “it might be the most important thing, frankly.” Given a two-year crystal ball, he would ask for the caliber of the engineer who just joined. A recurring reason he passes on otherwise attractive deals is that he is not convinced the founder will recruit great people; hiring quality is his leading explanation for why funded startups slow down.

He favors missionary founders over mercenary ones and says many VCs do not care about that distinction. He would take the Anthropic founders over founders who left for Meta, while noting that highly competitive winners such as Uber or Facebook may not have been genuinely mission-driven. Mission can attract talent, connecting back to the talent density he saw at Palantir.

BillionToOne illustrates the approach: Kory found it through a TechCrunch article about YC’s short-lived Fellowship, invested before a later $4 million valuation round, and repeatedly added to the position. The host says he thinks the company is now worth about $4 billion. The public company reported roughly $100 million in quarterly revenue in the discussion — about a $400 million run rate at roughly 100% growth — and was profitable, with most revenue from NIPT prenatal testing and a faster-growing liquid-biopsy line using a “chemical microscope.”

His competition heuristic is that a real insight will attract funded rivals — Sequoia, Kleiner, and Andreessen-backed competitors — within six months to a year. The key question is how the founder and investor will feel when that happens: with BillionToOne, “100 competitors came to the market — oh, this is going to be fun.” He puts little stock in references, rejects claims that conviction can reliably be formed in 10 minutes, and looks for inconsistencies by asking basic questions without embarrassment.

SendCutSend shows a different sourcing path: a high-trust M&A relationship with founder Jim Belosic, whom Kory advised not to sell his bootstrapped software business. Kory invested $1.5 million through an SPV in 2021 when the manufacturing business struggled to attract investors. The vertically integrated parts company shifted from mostly tinkerers and SMBs to mostly industrial customers; its customers include people working at Tesla, SpaceX, and Anduril, and demand is largely inbound. Patrick Collison later heard Belosic’s $1 billion valuation target and offered $10 million, then introduced him to Sequoia and Paradigm’s Matt Huang.

Kory expects the founder formula to remain useful in an AI-heavy future, while acknowledging uncertainty about his own ability to execute it. Invoking a quote he attributes uncertainly to Jeff Bezos or someone else about focusing on what stays the same, he points to exceptional, determined, resourceful, mission-oriented, intellectually honest founders — even if companies have a thousand agents per human — and says the formula should work as long as capitalism runs reasonably well.

🔗 Original source & video: Sandy Kory: The Founder Obsessed Investor Behind BillionToOne, BaseTen & Palantir