Altos Ventures revisits Ho Nam's 'hedgehog' founder thesis, 20 years on

In a rare video from Altos Ventures, co-founder Ho Nam and investors Dillon Krasnogor and Cathy Anderson, moderated by Brittany Hargest, revisit Nam's blog post on foxes and hedgehogs in Silicon Valley, written 20 years ago. Nam traces the idea to studying Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Sam Walton; the team describes hedgehogs as founders who treat one problem as their life's work and keep learning. Signals they look for: how 'boring' a founder is willing to get on customer detail, genuine care that scales through the organisation, and how they react when things go wrong. With founders younger and rounds faster, they speak of 'hedgehog potential' and say time is the ultimate filter.