Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄

Managed $5Bn AUM | Early stage VC and 3x founder | Invested $770MM in 60+ companies, seeded 9 unicorns, and generated $10Bn in exits.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

12/12

I explore why in my latest article:

"Why Pattern Recognition Isn't Enough Anymore."

Link: https://t.co/RkdJNALHAf

I'd love to hear from founders, investors and operators:

What investing skill do you think AI is making more valuable?

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

11/12

Pattern recognition isn't disappearing.

It's no longer sufficient.

The defining venture skill of the next decade may be adaptive judgment: recognizing when the future no longer resembles the past.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

10/12

Experience hasn't become less valuable.

Its depreciation schedule has simply accelerated.

The firms that win won't be those with the biggest library of precedent.

They'll be the ones that know when to stop relying on it.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

9/12

Information is becoming abundant.

AI can summarize markets, competitors and financial models in seconds.

Judgment, not information, is becoming the scarce resource.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

8/12

The advantage isn't simply AI expertise.

It's cognitive flexibility.

The willingness to abandon yesterday's assumptions before the market forces everyone else to.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

7/12

One founder recently told me experienced VCs now fall into two camps.

Some immediately search for familiar analogies.

Others ask how AI changes the economics of the entire market.

That distinction says a lot.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

6/12

Think about OpenAI.

Or Airbnb.

Or SpaceX.

Each looked strange because conventional frameworks couldn't fully explain them.

History only made them appear obvious after the fact.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

5/12

Pattern recognition still matters.

But it was always a backward-looking skill.

Its strength is asking:

"What does this resemble?"

The best investments often begin by refusing to resemble anything that came before.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

4/12

Business models evolve in months.

Technical moats appear and disappear.

Entire categories emerge before investors have enough comparable companies to build reliable pattern libraries.

By the time you've recognized the pattern, the market has often moved on.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

3/12

Today, the opposite is increasingly true.

AI isn't just creating new startups.

It's shortening the useful life of the experience investors rely on to evaluate them.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

2/12

Experience used to compound.

Every investment expanded your mental library of what great companies looked like.

That worked because technology changed slowly enough for experience to become more valuable over time.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

1/12

For decades, venture capital's greatest competitive advantage was pattern recognition.

The more companies you saw, the better you became at recognizing exceptional founders, markets and business models.

AI is changing that.

🧵

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

https://t.co/gH2sOHFYO0

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

11/11

I explore this idea in my latest essay:

"The Reindustrialization Trade: Why AI Is Driving Capital Back to the Physical Economy."

Link here 👉https://t.co/gH2sOHFYO0

I'd love to hear where you think the biggest opportunities will emerge over the next decade.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

10/11

Investors looking only at AI applications may be missing the bigger opportunity.

The real trade may be everything required to put intelligence to work in the real world.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

9/11

History often swings like a pendulum.

The internet rewarded software.

AI is rewarding software and the physical infrastructure that enables it.

We're moving from a digital-first economy to an intelligent physical economy.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

8/11

We've spent decades optimizing digital systems.

The next decade will focus on modernizing physical ones.

➡️Factories.
➡️Warehouses.
➡️Transportation.
➡️Construction.
➡️Energy.

That's where much of AI's value will ultimately be realized.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

7/11

This isn't a temporary investment cycle.

It's a structural shift.

AI doesn't eliminate the physical economy.

It makes it dramatically more valuable.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

6/11

The winners of the AI era may not all look like software companies.

Some will build transformers.

Others will manufacture robots.

Others will modernize factories.

Infrastructure is becoming a growth industry again.

[Jonathan Tower 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 @jonathan_tower]

5/11

That's changing where capital is flowing.

Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google aren't just buying chips.

✔️They're securing power.
✔️Building campuses.
✔️Financing nuclear.
✔️Signing long-term energy agreements.