Our Fourth Canto: For Legends in the Making

Earlier this year, Cantos closed an oversubscribed $70M Fund 4. This is our second institutional fund, and one that we are excited to finally unveil.

Cantos is 10 years old now, but in many ways we feel like we’re just at the beginning. As we hit the decade mark, we decided to use this opportunity to revisit our brand.

We’ve spent the past 6+ months working with the Asimov team to build a brand that embodies what Cantos (and each of us at the firm) stands for. I think we nailed it.

This is one of the, if not the most consequential industrial buildouts of our lifetime. Cantos has been investing here for 10 years, and as you’ll see below, we intend to keep partnering with people working assiduously to make their mark on the world.

Thank you to our founders, friends, supporters, and LPs. We are just getting started.

Founders often ask us why we named the firm Cantos. To us, it represents a core reason why we choose to do this job in the first place: we think startups are the modern day epic stories.

The Greeks have Homer’s The Iliad & The Odyssey; Romans have The Aeneid; Persians have The Shahnameh; and Indians have The Mahabharata. The list of Epics goes on.

Today’s epics are the stories of trillion dollar companies, of people accomplishing things never done before.

A constant thread through history is our desire to distill and share great acts of triumph. The world has changed, and yet some things always remain the same. Our desire for stories of toil and triumph, of sacrifice, persistence, and victory — persists. Superhuman feats of willpower and spirit still deeply speak to us. And in some ways we crave them even more now.

In many ways, the Cantos team considers startups the modern day Epic, each filled with their own tales of devotion, perseverance, and ascendancy. We believe founders are on the Heroes Journey. And we want to be dutiful companions and guides on that path.

Definitionally, a canto is a major section in a poem, they’re the chapters in the epic story.

We want to be involved in the very first canto in your epic — the first chapter in what we hope will be a marvelous and glorious story. Our team deeply believes in supporting founders, and we specifically want to be the first investors to join you on your quest to greatness.

The new Cantos site reflects all of this. We set out to embody the classical might and meld it with an expressive, optimistic taste for the future.

The resulting visual identity is a deliberate collision of the ancient and the new, a classical-future hybrid. We wanted something that draws on the age of heroes, but also drives them forward. Throughout our site we have etched metal and stone, bas-relief inscriptions and monuments that all embody the stories that have carried across millennia. We turned away from marble and leaned into CNC machined metals, illuminating everything with a blue dawn horizon gradient with bronze accents.

Most hard-tech aesthetics these days lean aggressively one direction or another. Cantos is used to embracing countervailing thoughts, and having an art direction that also does so further drives the point home. We wanted the lighting, reflections, and overall aesthetic to signify a weightiness, something that feels serious, challenging, and monumental. The intention is for the colors and the light to signify a future that feels exciting, abundant, and optimistic.

Starting with our new logo, we chose a winged quill to represent the writing of these epic stories. The bottom has a hooked talon-like tip that in some ways make it a Rorschach. Font wise, we selected something that stands out for its craft — something that calls back to the old while juxtaposing it next to the futuristic quill.

The landing page for our new website builds off all of this. We open with our call, and above it we have a rotation of multiple metal chiseled plaques, each blending the various art directions.

Our anchor motif is Trajan’s column, rebuilt with our portfolio — we call it the Cantos Column.

As you scroll through the site, the column spins to reveal different depictions of our portfolio companies. Each company plaque is CNC-engraved into the column, with bronze and steel detailing. Technically speaking, we lit and shadowed the relief with displacement maps and PBR textures that give it physical depth.

THIS THING IS SICK.

Below the Cantos Column, we have our manifesto, penned by Ian. I’d encourage you to read the thing in full (it’s succinct).

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The future is written line by line,

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where purpose and tempo

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warp space and time.

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— A Cantos Proverb

Below our manifesto we have our portfolio section, where every one of our companies features their own plaque. This and the Cantos Column are my favorite parts of the site. We designed imagery for each company, then rendered them as an engraved metal plaque. We had a ton of fun making these.

The rest of the site has a ton of other hidden Easter eggs and goodies that I’ll let you explore. And while this is all well and good, the most important part of today’s post is the section below.

As we detailed in our SOA announcement post, every technological era has new knowledge frontiers. What worked for the Dotcom era was distinct from mainframes and PCs. What worked for SaaS and Internet 2.0 differed from Internet 1.0. And what works for AI is different than what came before.

This is a law of physics for technology and investing. What worked then probably won’t work now.

The same is true for hardware. It’s really hard, and materially different than prior paradigms.

Not only do you need a different type of founder profile, you need to build fundamentally different businesses than the past wave of tech startups. You can’t pivot your way to greatness in hardware. The taxonomies, frameworks, and playbooks for building in the physical world require a new approach.

This is where our decade of knowledge gives us a compounding advantage. We know what to look for, we know what lessons to apply, and we know how to help these companies succeed.

One of my favorite quotes from Brent Beshore is: “Every business is a loosely functioning disaster.” My addendum to that is, “yes, and startups aren’t even businesses yet, so you can imagine how they look.”

Everything here is really hard, and we aim to provide our founders and their companies every tool in our arsenal to help them win.

Building a new company is perennially challenging. Conventional wisdom tells us you have a 10% chance of success. I think that’s wrong:

When you succeed, you graduate to new problems.

The 10% odds aren’t a static figure, it’s a perpetual calculation. ⅒ is really ⅒!

⅒•⅒•⅒•⅒•⅒•⅒… and so on. Especially so in the ADCU.

If you’re a founder, one of the most important decisions is figuring out who to partner with as you begin your journey forward. A number of factors go into these decisions, but if you distill them all down to their essence, there’s one question that matters:

Do they improve my odds?

If they materially do, then you know what your answer is.

Creators make things that did not previously exist. They make companies and paintings and songs. They even make other people. If there is one unique characteristic that sets the human animal apart from other species, it’s that a human can envision a different world and then work to create it.

— Donald Miller, Hero on a Mission

As we finalized our new design, Ian, Amee, and I wanted to create an official Cantos motto to be the keystone for our brand. After much deliberation we settled on Resonat in Æternum. Resonate in eternity.

We are fortunate to partner with some of the most extraordinary people. They are on their path, pursuing their calling.

Our aim is to work deeply with the most consequential companies in this century, ones that are building for, in, and around the physical world.

The ones that succeed will resonate in eternity. Those are the fables future generations will talk endlessly about. The path will be dangerous, deadly even.

We exist to find and support the heroes on these journeys. So if you’re interested in making an eternal dent in the universe, look no further.

We’re here to help you write your epic story.

Resonat in Æternum.

“If they ever tell my story let them say that I walked with giants. Men rise and fall like the winter wheat, but these names will never die.” — Odysseus

Thank you again to our founders, friends, supporters, and LPs. And a special thank you to the entire Asimov team.

_{This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security or interest in any fund or portfolio company managed or advised by Cantos. Any such offer will be made solely through definitive offering documents to eligible investors. The views expressed are the author’s own as of the date of publication, are subject to change, and should not be construed as investment, legal, or tax advice.}