The test, when there is no category to apply.

Without a thesis to check a company against, the office checks three things instead. Whether the thing being built is infrastructure that other people will need rather than a product one set of customers wants. Whether it survives its regulator rather than depending on one. And whether the founder has done the unglamorous half of the work before arriving — the compliance, the integration, the second market — because that half is what the category will be won on and it is the half nobody funds.

The office is comfortable being early and uncomfortable being consensus. It has been wrong in both directions and the record of it is published on the portfolio, including the positions that were written off.