On Investing 2025

May 28, 2025 - 1k words (Shower thought +++, utilities were up that month)

This was a cold email that I sent to some investors, you can tell by the intro + alot of signalposting. Nevertheless, I like some of the thoughts I had here. I'm interested in religion and phil broadly, so it was also fun tying that into my upbringing and how I think about things as of 2025. My ideas change often, so I may turn this into a year in review sort of sitch in the future.

My name is Christian Okokhere. I recently graduated from Duke with a degree in CS. At Duke, I studied theoretical mathematics, political philosophy, and machine learning. I'm from Nolensville, a small, rural, Baptist town in the middle of Tennessee. There isn't much here but land, houses, and churches. So what do people from Nolensville do? They fucking work, and work, and work. While this toil is monotonous (small-scale farming isn't the most efficient thing in the world), people who come out of this town aren't gormless—they are winners. There is an irrevocable sense of beauty that comes from faith and meaningful work. I want to invest in a future where technology serves a higher purpose: eliminating the mundane, connecting humans, and allowing people to engage in genuine craft. My experiences thus far have given me a strong vision of what I value in investments and ideals I believe will shape the future. Here are a few of those thoughts:

One of my favorite works is "On Friendship" by Montaigne. It presents five axioms by which to view relationships. Montaigne doesn't believe in family relationships, romantic or sexual love, or marriage, but argues that real relationships are like the merging of two souls—"one soul in two bodies." This profound union, where identities blend while remaining distinct, represents the pinnacle of human connection. Yet this merging of souls emerges from shared struggle and vulnerability—precisely what technology often fails to accommodate. Technology innovations lack access to the existential struggle that encapsulates the human condition. This struggle is what allows us to connect on a deeper level and form the real relationships Montaigne outlines. It necessitates work and is the foundation on which charismatic founders are able to build truly great things.

In light of this, I believe technology will never be able to merge humans, and that the connection between humans is what technology should strive to enhance. The next generation of technologists will create technology that empowers perfect relationships, and thus enables truly meaningful craft and creation—work that emerges from human connection rather than isolating efficiency.

The current landscape of capital allocation points in the opposite direction. We invest in shortcuts and bandages that aim to annex toil from life completely. It's everywhere: social media serves as a facsimile for real connection; ads, short-form content, and recommender systems simulate genuine interest; AI chatbots now attempt to replace the depth of knowledge and perspective that comes from doing. While there are many factors at play here (macroeconomic conditions i.e., access to cheap capital biasing growth over depth, recency of the industry, etc.), and while I am a believer in these technologies and their transformative impact on society, from an investment standpoint I believe in companies that are rooted in creating perfect production and perfect relationships.

I am excited by founders who build for human flourishing, those who don't view AI as merely a means to an end, but as a next step in allowing us to connect more deeply with our work and with each other.

For me, the optimal founder goes by the name Islam Mohamed Islam Mohamed Islam Mohamed Tayeb. He's an Egyptian international student who was raised in Saudi Arabia, whose claim to fame was being top in the world at OSU and publishing chemistry papers in high school. I first met Islam while hosting an event for CUBE at Duke looking for interesting founders to connect with. He introduced himself and asked, "Do you believe you would turn out the same if your life experiences were different?" And from there we had an hour-long chat about existentialism. Islam articulated his belief that each person's unique experiences create a singular perspective—and in his case, a perspective he was certain would lead to extraordinary outcomes. He didn't have the standard founder "ethos," but what he did have was an innate ability to reduce ideas into first principles, the confidence to challenge convention, and a knack for rapidly synthesizing new frameworks from disparate concepts—in ways that I found refreshing and ultimately compelling.

To me this screamed founder, and with some convincing I got Islam to start meeting with other founders at Duke and eventually start building. This was 5 months ago, and since he has dropped premed, built an app, gotten hired as a Founding Engineer, and is now building an AI agent web browser and working at an YC AI Startup. He had no real CS background before this pivot and has willed his way into a completely different reality- embodying precisely the qualities I believe will define successful founders in the coming decade. As technology lowers barriers to creation and the attention economy further fragments, our focus on typical vestiges of ethos (technical experience, degrees, etc.) is becoming commoditized and are no longer reliable hallmarks of quality builders. Investors will need to index on a new set of criteria to evaluate candidates, looking at qualities that we can't automate

1. Sovereign conviction. An unwavering belief in one's vision that remains consistent even when challenged by conventional wisdom.
2. Optimistic Alignment. Great futures are created by individuals who have the vision that is rooted in definite optimism.
3. Reality-bending grit. Not just persistence, but the specific type of determination that transforms constraints into advantages.

These qualities aren't just nice-to-haves—they're the essential ingredients that separate founders who create incremental improvements from those who fundamentally reimagine industries. Islam exemplifies this framework perfectly; his transformation wasn't luck or circumstance, but an inexorable outcome resulting from these core attributes.

Small Bible belt towns are case studies for Durkheim's idea that sacred things bind communities together and profane things divide them. Communities with lower economic output obviously turn towards something to get them through the hard times, if you live in the south that “thing” is likely Christianity. But through lived experience, and history this view of faith is reductive, unamerican, and ultimately destructive to founders. Faith with respect to business is 1) not necessarily religious and 2) inherently American. The mix of pragmatism and strong optimism are the cornerstone of innovation. The same drive and purpose that Baptist faith provides to the people of Nolensville to continue working, is the same fervor that top founders instill at their startups (OpenAI comes to mind Sam Altman has created an entity that is almost larger than the work itself that attracts the best talent).

When founders create a sacred vision of the future—one that connects daily work to transcendent purpose—they tap into the same deep human needs that religious communities have addressed for millennia. Largely we have strayed from this idea. As theologian N.T. Wright observes, meaningful work exists when we ask: "What can we do in the present that will actually be Kingdom Work? How can we tell which bits of the stuff we find we can do now might be part of that vision?" Founders worth investing in will have compelling answers to these questions. They understand that to cultivate sacred technologies that transcend work, circumstance, and that bring the most talented people together- faith is what brings vision into reality.

In a world marred with disinterest and distraction, I aim to be a bastion for those who choose to continue to fight the good fight and use their short time on earth to create great things. As I meet more people, confront new ideas, re-adjust my mental model, I seek strong mentorship to help me become a killer investor.

Things I read/thought about but didn't touch on:

• Peter Thiel: You Are Not a Lottery Ticket
• Existentialism Is a Humanism
• Attention_economy

If you found this funky, fresh, or have comments shoot me an email and follow me on Twitter.