If VC was a Discovery Engine

If venture capital truly acted as a discovery engine, it wouldn’t size each cheque by a company’s projected terminal value. Instead, it would price the landscape value unlocked by that investment—the adjacent markets, technologies, and business models it could reveal. Capital would flow at the speed of learning, chasing the option-set created by every new insight rather than a single exit multiple. Funds would map and probe entire discovery landscapes—spanning geographies, supply chains, and emergent value webs—rather than pre-defined “hot sectors.” Their core metrics would be:

• Landscape coverage: How much unexplored territory did this investment illuminate?

• Learning velocity: How fast did insights travel through the firm and reshape subsequent allocations?

• Adjacency conversion rate: How many follow-on options did one probe unlock, and how quickly were they acted on?

In short, the next-generation VC engine would optimise for the speed of landscape discovery and “exploitation” (Hate word), not the size of individual wins.