“The people who always see a door, and if there isn’t a door, draw a door, and it turns into one, because they can manifest it through sheer will —that type of thing is what I look for.”
Asking venture investor Kanyi Maqubela to describe the throughlines that render his hodge-podge-y gamut of investments at Kindred Ventures — spanning from lab-grown leather to tokenization APIs — into a coherent thesis generates metaphors fitting for a naturalist’s memoirs. The answer can be found in mountaineering and birding, Maqubela says.
“In bird watching, you don’t follow trends, because the trends are that sparrows fly south in the winter. Great. Who cares. You’re looking for rare birds and birds of prey,” he tells Fintech Nexus, paraphrasing Sequoia heavyweight Michael Moritz and likening desirable founders to such rare birds. “All this is pointing to a thesis that … is about the founder: and really, really, really, really unique founders take a machete and they chop their way through the jungle to get to the destination.”
Though mixing metaphors a little — birds lack opposable thumbs and therefore can’t swing machetes — Maqubela’s point is that his venture outfit, which he established with Steve Jang in 2019 and with more than $600 million in AUM, seeks intrepid entrepreneurs set on success. Cue another metaphor:
“People who go on Everest trips are super impressive, don’t get me wrong, but it’s the Sherpa who goes back up and down that’s really impressive. And the Sherpas are the founders, and the founders are the ones that forge the future,” he says.
Maqubela’s professional background and biography are nearly as kaleidoscopic as his portfolio. Born in the township of Soweto in Apartheid-era South Africa to two teachers, Maqubela, along with his family, eventually moved to the United States as refugees by way of Botswana. Growing up in New England, he attended Phillips Academy Andover, and went on to major in philosophy at Stanford. Combing through the annals of YouTube shows a young, fired-up Kanyi Maqubela as a field organizer in Northeast Las Vegas for the Obama ‘08 campaign; skimming over his CV reveals a founding role at a peer-to-peer career networking platform, leadership in a nationwide solar initiative, bylines in The Atlantic during his time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Collaborative Fund, and an adjunct faculty position at NYU Tisch. (Rate My Professors came up empty.)
Self-authored musings by Maqubela scatter cyberspace; most find a home on his blog, which dates back to 2008. What starts as a Tumblr-esque feed for infographics, paintings, photography, article clippings, and music videos has, over time, developed a more Substack-y vibe that includes takes on distribution strategies and the hypothetical theo-sociological implications of artificial general intelligence. This online archive foreshadowed the artsy veneer of Maqubela’s office: a large-format painting by Ghanaian artist Aplerh-Doku Borlabi; a tower of monographs on business-y topics like network effects (don’t let the Fitzcarraldo-blue book covers fool you); a light-wooden shiplap accent wall equally at home in Tokyo’s Muji Hotel. A diachronic reading of Maqubela’s online reflections also contextualizes his approach to venture investment — including the potential civilizational impacts of the outfits he and Jang back.
In particular, Maqubela is bullish on throwbacks. On the topic of developing new investment themes, he says: “One good heuristic is, when you mention it to somebody, are they like, Ugh, or are they like, Oh, this is a graveyard that’s so over.” He cites former boom-bust cycles — Webvan being a failed precursor to DoorDash and Uber (in which Jang was an angel investor); Pets.com preceding Chewy — as examples that things can come back from the brink, and can be a sign that a there still exists among the rubble.
“Frankly, AI itself for us in 2019 was this. A lot of people were calling the generative media side deepfakes … but it turned out that two or three years later, it was totally normalized, and we’re Studio Ghibli-ing everything, and generative media is everywhere,” he says. “If you’re just ahead of the culture curve, just ahead of the comfort curve, you’re probably onto something.”
Editorial caveat: Concern over deepfakes, including in the form of revenge porn, is alive and well, and is a timely subject of legislative action across the globe; AI-generated graphics and aesthetics are an ongoing topic of boisterous debate and critique as well; and, despite Anthropic’s recent copyright-infringement win, plenty of creative professionals and writers are rallying to prevent their work being scooped up for use by AI companies.
Among other technological resurrections Maqubela sees coming down the pike are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs — blockchain-backed proof for digital ownership of assets. NFTs fueled a remarkable gold rush in 2021 featuring uncanny digital apes, shilling by Paris Hilton, and a spectacular crash in asset value. “There was something there,” Maqubela says, arguing that its original iteration wasn’t “expressed quite properly.” Unique identifiers that can be assigned to a digital object “[will intersect] incredibly productively with fintech in the next three to five years,” he predicts.
He similarly anticipates a rebound for HR technology, given the “massive Industrial Revolution-level upheavals” that may come with the proliferation of AI. “The people who are running infrastructure and systems and marketplaces and intelligence around that are going to be extremely well-positioned,” he predicts.
But, even as many then-gutsy investments have generated returns for Kindred’s partners (Uber, Postmates, Coinbase), some paradigm-shifting predictions have fallen short. Perhaps most notable was the botched launch of portco Humane, a hotly hyped AI-enabled wearable pin designed by Apple alums that was ultimately rife with bugs and received almost unequivocally negative reviews, in part due to the fundamental premise of the tool. It was sold for parts to HP, and the AI powering Humane’s pins went totally dark in February. “If you start a capital-intensive business before a major breakthrough happens, you have to adapt very quickly. It’s very hard when you have physical infrastructure like leases and hardware,” Jang shared retrospectively in an interview with Pitchbook.
The stickiness of meatspace may therefore partially influence the coming wave of investments from Maqubela and Kindred. Changing foundational conditions are driving the kinds of entrepreneurs and missions they’re looking to back as well. In the fintech realm, despite the regulatory ire it’s drawn in the past, Banking as a Service (BaaS), is, in Maqubela’s eyes, potentially ripe for another cropping of startups.
“We’ve got more stablecoins, we’ve got more digital banking writ large, where UPI and Pix start to appear in other countries, then core infrastructure being there to enable smart services to be built on top of it… it makes too much sense not to [come back],” he says, adding that agentic payments could further fuel a BaaS glowup.
Whether these new visions materialize or don’t, the zeal Kindred looks for in its portcos suggests the rare-bird founders it backs will return with a new idea or pivoted solution. Maqubela cites the old adage, “when one door closes, another door opens,” to describe founders’ determination. (The final metaphor of our conversation.)
“The people who always see a door, and if there isn’t a door, draw a door, and it turns into one, because they can manifest it through sheer will, that type of thing is what I look for,” Maqubela says. “I didn’t have that when I was in startups, and so I wanted to identify that in others.”
