Scott Sage
Scott Sage

A few months ago, I had the privilege of being on stage at Crane Festival with Kenneth Stanley, an AI researcher and co-author of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. We talked about one of his more provocative ideas: the stepping stones that lead to something extraordinary often look nothing like the eventual destination.

When Krishna Visvanathan and I started Crane Venture Partners in 2015, we didn't set out to build a global investment platform. But we kept following one stepping stone to another, which led us to now. We recently announced that we raised $484 million across multiple investment vehicles, giving us considerably more capital to invest from inception to Seed globally, including in Europe, the United States, India, and the Asia-Pacific region.

I'm obviously excited about that. But what excites me most is the much bigger search space it gives us: the ability to find more synthesists.

A synthesist founder isn't a generalist. They can go deep in a particular field or discipline but refuse to stay inside its boundaries. The physicist who ships software. The biologist who thinks like a machine learning researcher. The materials scientist who understands computation.

More of the world's important companies are going to be built by people like this.

There is a reason.

For most of history, becoming genuinely fluent in a second discipline was incredibly expensive. It took another degree, another career, or an unusual series of life's stepping stones. AI is collapsing that cost. And that is happening at exactly the moment when many of the hardest problems in science, for example, are becoming computational problems too.

Biology and materials science meet AI. Physics meets software. Robotics meets cognition.

The interesting opportunity isn't on either side of those combinations. It's in the space between them.

I think about it like this: The next great category may not exist yet because the disciplines required to create it have only just learned how to speak to each other.

This is the idea behind The Meridian Principle. Human progress accelerates when extraordinary people connect ideas across disciplines, cultures, and generations.

The next generation of foundational companies won't simply be better semiconductor companies, better AI companies, or better materials companies. Some will emerge from combinations for which today's venture categories aren't particularly useful. That's uncomfortable for an industry organized around vertical expertise, but very exciting if your job is to find things before they become obvious.

Boyd Varty, another favorite author of mine, might describe it differently. In The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, he writes about following the track rather than becoming fixated on the destination.

Venture investing at its best has some of that quality.

You follow exceptional people. You notice unusual intersections. You remain curious about things that don't yet fit neatly into a category. Occasionally, those tracks converge into something much bigger than anyone could have planned. And so, consensus is very good at pricing categories that already exist. Venture returns come from recognizing the ones that don't.

That's why I'm so excited about the investment vehicles we've announced. They don't just give us more capital. They give us more places to engage, more disciplines to encounter, and more opportunities for unexpected connections with extraordinary human beings across the globe.

The search and adventure space just got much bigger, my co-founder, our team, and I intend to spend our next chapter following the most interesting tracks we can find.

We believe the future belongs to synthesists.

About the Author

Scott Sage is the co-founder and partner at Crane Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2015 alongside Krishna Visvanathan. With over 20 years of experience backing technology founders, Sage specializes in seed-stage foundational technology and deep science. Originally from Texas and now based in London, his diverse background spans marketing, strategy, and finance. At Crane, he leads investments in cross-disciplinary "synthesist" founders across Europe, the US, India, and the Asia-Pacific region.