When launching Theory in 2023 along with the associated website and brand, simplicity was paramount. Why bother over-baking a website before our portfolio or team really took shape? However, two and a half years later, we found ourselves in a different situation: hundreds of theses on the market crafted from deep research and experience, a world class team, and a portfolio to be proud of. It was time for a visual refresh, and it was a moment to explain how Theory works.

Theory differentiates via our depth. We continually map the universe of companies and how they interact in the market, leading to investment theses and ultimately investments in a small cohort of exceptional opportunities. These were what we set out to communicate via our new website.

To give you the full story, we recorded a video talking through some of the considerations. 

The universe of theses

The key artifacts of our investors’ work are theses – written explanations of how the world works, what companies (nascent or established) will be relevant, and what it will take for those to be important pillars of the future. 

Internally, we have systems for building, remixing, and cross-referencing theses, but we thought the website would be an opportunity to give outsiders a telescope to peer into this data. We call the set of the companies, and their relationships, the universe of data. While there are many ways to visualize a highly-connected, unstructured, large-cardinality text dataset, we went with a 3D latent-space visualization of the companies, with an edge-graph defined by a sample of thesis cooccurrence. In other words: the companies Theory has looked at, grouped spatially, with connections based on our investment theories. 

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The Design

The other constraint was a design and presentation that paid respect to the data and the methods we embrace at Theory. Additionally, we’re aware of the environment where much web traffic is driven by AI agents; we’ve kept LLMs top of mind in this site’s execution.

To those ends, we worked with an incredible designer Richelle Rolli to help find our balance. With a love of paper & Edward Tufte, we prioritized showing, not telling via our universe of theses, married with the predictable sections of a VC website (team, portfolio, jobs, etc.) structured for absorption by a stylistically indifferent visitor. 

Our hope is that we’ve delivered on our objectives with clarity and playfulness. We hope you enjoy the universe of theories and the new website.

If you’re a founder who doesn’t find yourself in our universe, we hope you’ll let us know.