I Asked a $450M VC Where to Invest in 2026

**Sheel Mohnot** (0:00)
I could only lose 3 million bucks. I could gain 300 million bucks.

**Shaan Puri** (0:12)
All right, Sheel, what's up, dude?

**Sheel Mohnot** (0:14)
Not much, man, doing well.

**Shaan Puri** (0:16)
Dude, always good having you on. You are, as always, I give you this title, the most interesting man in tech. You're a great investor, you're a tech investor. How big is the fund, or how much total have you invested now at this point?

**Sheel Mohnot** (0:28)
About 450 million total.

**Shaan Puri** (0:29)
Okay, 450 million dollars. So, I've learned a lot from poker, right? And in poker, you learn all these lessons that actually cross apply totally outside the domain of poker. What would you say are the lessons from investing that apply to life?

**Sheel Mohnot** (0:41)
I think one is just like, upside can be greater than downside. So, if I invest in a company, let's say I put $3 million into a company, there is a possibility of it being $300 million. But the downside is capped at $3 million. I could only lose $3 million. I could gain $300 million.

**Shaan Puri** (1:05)
Yeah, because if you don't work in investing or anywhere where you have that sort of asymmetric risk versus return, let's just say you have an hourly wage job.
Your mind gets trained into this linear. I put one in, I get one out. I can't put one in and get 50 hours of pay out of this next hour. That doesn't really ever happen in a normal job. But if your job is investing, you're like, of course, that happens all the time. I lose one times my money, but sometimes I gain 100 or 1,000 times my money back. That breaks the brain and you start to see other opportunities similarly that have that, as I can say, the asymmetry of risk return. So that's one. There's something around portfolio theory, like out of the 450 million you deploy, what does winning look like? You probably need to return some multiple of that 450 million. So what does winning look like for you? You put in 450, what do you need to get out for this to be a success?

**Sheel Mohnot** (1:55)
A couple of billion dollars.

**Shaan Puri** (1:57)
Couple of billion dollars. Let's say two billion. Let's just use a rough math.

**Sheel Mohnot** (1:59)
Let's say it's 500 million to make math easy. Right.

**Shaan Puri** (2:03)
So 500 million for exit, that would be great over some 10-year period.

**Sheel Mohnot** (2:06)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (2:07)
Now, of that two billion, how many companies would you go into and how many companies would be responsible for returning all of that money? It's only going to be a few. Give me the math there.

**Sheel Mohnot** (2:18)
Yeah. So almost all of the returns are going to come from 10 companies out of hundreds that we will have invested in. Correct.

**Shaan Puri** (2:29)
So there's something like that in life too, right? Whether it's people you meet or dating or like, there's some portfolio theory, some power law where the few will drive all of the joy, the value, the relationships, the opportunities, whatever. Then you just do the rest because you need a portfolio in order to find the few that are like the big outliers.

**Sheel Mohnot** (2:48)
It's true. It's also in a related note, there's like, if you increase the surface area of companies you meet, you have the better odds of finding that one, like when you really know it's going to work. In life, I think increasing surface area is good, like saying yes to stuff.

**Shaan Puri** (3:06)
Right. There's a great blog post this guy wrote called Building Your Own Yacht. Have you ever read this blog post? It's like very obscure. I got this from some random Twitter account, the real estate G6. Normally, I'd be like pretty low expectations, but this is over delivered. So basically, it argues the following. It says most people in their life, they don't do anything that compounds. Most people are non-compounders in general.
Then we know that money has this compounding thing. You can compound some interest, a rate of return, 10 percent a year in the SAP 500, and every seven years, that's going to double. Great. So you see compounding financing, but everything compounds including relationships, skills, knowledge, everything else. He has this story about building your own yacht. So let me read this out for you. Okay. So he goes, if you aren't familiar, Aristotle Onassis, by the way, this might be a totally fictitious person for all I know, but it doesn't matter. The story works either way. He was one of the wealthiest businessmen of the 20th century. He started off as a tobacco trader and he ends up being this big shipping magnet. So he makes his bones in the shipping industry. He's dating famous actresses. So he lives this life, but he has this one sort of hack for relationship building. He called it building your own yacht. So he basically talks about how this guy, basically one of his investments was this yacht, which seems just like a splurge purchase, like a discretionary purchase. But he argues, think about the power of having a yacht. And he goes, the way that humans are wired is like, we are very suspicious of cold introductions, strangers on the street, people emailing you that you don't know. But like a warm introduction or a warm relationship is so much, you've already bypassed like 10 hurdles that come from taking somebody from cold to warm. And so he argues, he's like, think about it this way. If you think about relationships, you would want to have, if you meet somebody, you want to do business with them, or you just want to socially connect with them, you would want social proof. Like, is this person cool? Are they legit? Are they friends with people that I already am friends with or respect? And basically he's like, from the moment you step foot on a yacht, social proof is done, credibility is done. And he's like, on top of that, you enter their frame. Like you are literally on their turf. And from the end, he's like, there's also the law of reciprocity, which is like, if I invite you or give you something, there's a part of you psychologically that will want to reciprocate and return in some way. And often the law of reciprocity, the way it works is like, it's not one for one. So like, if I, you know, just do you a quick favor, bring you a drink, and then I ask you for a much bigger ask than the drink, you're more likely to say yes to it. And so he talks about how, he's like, yeah, okay, that works with the yacht. But he's like, in life, there's actually all these little yachts that you can create that don't cost the same amount as a yacht. So, you know, you host a dinner, right? You create an event, you send out, you know, free materials, a newsletter, content, these are all little yachts that you can create and create all this like inbound luck and relationships and things that can compound because you create this like asset that you get to use from there on out. So, I thought that was like a very interesting point. I'm curious what that brings up for you.