The moment of ignition

I burned the boats of a comfortable life in late 2019 to build something that didn’t exist. The world didn’t (and doesn’t) need another incremental venture capital fund. That’s not what I wanted to build. What I wanted to build didn’t exist. Lots of people thought I had a few screws loose and encouraged me to take the safer path. I couldn’t. With the inspiration of my little girl, Frankie, and the unwavering support of my wife Leanne, I knew I would regret not trying more than trying and failing.

The initial spark became a memo. That memo became ReGen Ventures. In the midst of COVID, I worked from our bedroom, local cafes and the front seat of our van parked at the beach. Founders got used to seeing the sun rise from the east coast of Australia. In these fragile early days I was privileged to meet a handful of folks who believed in my vision and were crazy enough to jump on the journey. The first term sheet was agreed in August 2021 during a sunset walk overlooking the Pacific. We’ve been heads down ever since.

Five years on, we are privileged to be building businesses alongside over fifty founders across the globe, enabled by the trust of our UnLimited Partners to steward capital on their behalf. We have only just begun to manifest our ultimate ambition.

What started as a spark is now Onto. The root of the word Onto is concerned with the nature of being, existence and reality. The process of ontogenesis is an individual organism’s development and growth from conception to maturity. We’re early in our ontogenesis.

Creating the conditions for abundance

At Onto, we believe the purpose of technology is abundance. Not incremental improvement. Not efficiency or optimization. Real abundance. Energy, food, materials, health, experiences, connection. More than we know what to do with. These are conditions that enable human flourishing at societal and planetary scale. Onto is an explicit commitment to generating abundance from the atomic scale to the cosmic scale.

Our life’s work is to enable founders to pursue their life’s work

Onto is the partner we wished for as founders. The partner that this generation of founders deserves. All-in, all the time. We are concentrated in our commitment to the small number of founders we partner with, and earn their trust through our everyday actions in the face of adversity, struggle and growth. We will spend the rest of our lives in service of founders who are committed to building the most meaningful companies of all time. We will not stop.

Forging foundational technologies

We are living through the most significant convergence of technology in human history. Foundational forces are accelerating each other via compounding feedback loops across intelligence, robotics, materials and energy. The leverage is multiplicative. The rate of change is faster than almost anyone can project. This is not a cycle. This is a paradigm shift. It is radically reshaping every sector of the economy and the opportunity to build the most consequential companies ever built is sitting in front of us.

Amplifying aliens

The founders we seek are, in a word, aliens. Oddly shaped, polymathic, relentlessly pursuing a unique insight that most people don't yet see. They’re not contrarian in a performative sense, but because the problems they are working on are genuinely novel, requiring genuinely novel approaches to solving them. Comfortable in their own skin, playing their own game, their way. They are impossible to pattern-match or archetype.

Operating in the liminal space between what’s impossible and what’s becoming possible they are grounded with a deep technical foundation and an urgency to test their ideas against reality. The scale of their ambition is often uncomfortable. Their conviction hard to shake. These are our partners.

A Thermal Dome

Onto is a place where ideas, talent, trust, capital, and ambition converge. Beyond a fund. Beyond a firm. A Thermal Dome. The Costa Rican thermal dome is an unsung wonder of the natural world where a convergence of conditions creates an invisible engine of life in the open ocean. Invisible to the eye, the thermal dome cultivates the conditions to generate an abundance of life.

Onto was founded to cultivate the conditions for the world we want to live in. An enabling technology that delivers abundance at cosmic scale. We are acutely aware that founders are the heroes in the arena and we are the support staff. Our role is to create an environment where each founder can be the best they can be. Onto is an enabling force. A shared context through which the best versions of all of us get made.

Kintsugi - the strongest gain strength in those broken places

Building Onto is the privilege of a lifetime. This is not something I say lightly. My daughter Frankie, the one who dared me to dream big and start this quest, spread her wings and took flight from this human life in October 2022. Frankie’s wild and free spirit of adventure will forever be infused in all facets of Onto. Frankie would sing A Million Dreams at the top of her lungs and lived like her heroes Steve Irwin, Jane Goodall and David Attenborough.

I’ve written about Frankie and our family’s experience in A Rainbow in the Clouds. Frankie blazed brightly for her short time with us and continues to show us how to be the best we can be.

Being a founder is insanely difficult. It tests you in every way. We are confronted daily with pain, suffering, disappointment, and fears of failure. And yet… we push on. We persevere when all seems lost. The journey is the essence of what makes us. We are not made whole despite our difficulties, but because of them. It is easier to find a way through when surrounded by a thermal dome on a mission that is infinitely bigger than any one of us.

The source of abundance

Onto is our quest to build the enabling technology to make future abundance our reality. The source of abundance. A reality indistinguishable from magic. We are grateful for the opportunity to build something that is the complete expression of who we are and what we stand for. Our metamorphosis reflects our deep commitment to the founders we serve and the epic mission we are on.

The job will never be done.

Onto.