Notes on technology.

I am Jan Buza, a partner at zaka.vc, investing at seed in health and industrial technologies across Europe and the United States. I write early cheques into companies where the open question is still whether the science works.

I have been arguing for a living, in one form or another, for about twenty years. It began competitively, in debate at secondary school and university. You learn that almost every position has a stronger version than the one being defended in front of you, that finding it is the whole job, and that the person who most enjoys arguing is rarely the person who is right. It continues now in work that consists almost entirely of deciding which claims about the future are worth money. Somewhere in between I helped found an academy for critical thinking, on the theory that this is a teachable skill and that not enough people are taught it.

The route ran through management consulting, then a venture fund inside a family office, where I both evaluated investments and took operating roles inside the companies we had backed. Among them Exponea, where I led business development from incorporation to around fifty people and a couple of million in revenue, and HubHub, where I did the same while building a community of technology companies across five countries. Then I stopped watching and built. CourtQuant used machine learning to predict outcomes in litigation. It worked, and I sold it early, having picked a market too small to reward it. Trama, which I co-founded and no longer run, has filed tens of thousands of trademarks and is still growing on a market many times the size. I would like to claim the difference was judgment.

Even when the market is large enough, it is the easiest of the questions to answer, and the least decisive. Software has become cheap to build and trivial to copy, and none of that has made biology, physics, regulatory approval, or a decade of accumulated laboratory data any easier to acquire. Whatever stays hard is where the durable companies are, and seed is the only stage at which you can own enough of one for it to matter. In practice the work is still the debating work: find the argument that kills the company, then see what is left standing. This site is where I keep the thinking that helps me decide.

There is also my wife, our daughter, a lot of travel arranged around food, a kitchen I am territorial about, and a small wine import project my wife and I run together that was meant to be a hobby and now has a warehouse.

You can reach me at jan@bjazn.com.