I have written before about what we look for in new investments: thesis fit, our five focus areas, 100x return potential, and why founders should focus on building a great company rather than optimizing for an exit. Those are all important. They are necessary filters. But they are still not the full answer.

Of course, every VC, including Two Small Fish, will tell you that backing high-quality companies matters. Of course, that is not wrong. But it is also almost meaningless. No VC wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I am going to invest in a crappy company.” Saying you invest in quality is like saying humans need to sleep, eat, and drink. True, yes. Useful, no. The real question is: what does “high quality” actually mean in venture?

For us, one important part of that answer is this: the company must have the potential to become uniquely world class.

That is a very high bar. It is meant to be.

A 100x outcome, by definition, usually requires a company to become a multi-billion-dollar business in a decade or so. That means it has to operate at a very different level of scale, ambition, and defensibility. It is a very different ball game than building a successful SMB. And I can tell you from my own experience, your day-to-day decisions are drastically different. They are two different sports that are played by very different rules. As I wrote before, venture is a home run derby with uncapped runs.

This also connects with The World-Class Mindset. World class is a different benchmark. It is not just about doing well, or even winning. It is about setting the standard.

In venture, however, setting the standard is often still not enough. To generate exceptional returns, a company usually has to do more than become world class. It has to become uniquely world class.

We are not looking for a company that can become one of several good alternatives. We are looking for a company that can become the clear winner in an important category, or at least capture most of the value in it. To be clear, TAM of zero is perfectly fine, as long as the company can create a large category that it owns — yes, monopolizes — within a decade. Unique is what enables winner-take-all dynamics, or at least winner-take-most dynamics.

That matters even more in deep tech, where durable advantage usually comes from something extremely hard to build and extremely hard to copy. A uniquely world-class deep tech company typically has a very strong technology moat, a very strong data moat, or both.

That moat can take different forms: a fundamental technical breakthrough, years of hard-earned know-how embedded in the product, proprietary data that compounds over time, or an architecture that improves with scale while becoming harder to replicate. Often, it is some combination of these.

And then we ask another set of questions. Can the product be used by millions of people, directly or indirectly? Does it change behaviour at scale? Is it uniquely valuable enough that, once commercialized, people will pay a lot of money for it? That is core to our thesis: investing in the next frontier of computing and its applications, reshaping large-scale behaviour, driven by the collapsing cost of intelligence and defensible through tech and data moats.

This is why we spend so much time trying to understand what is truly unique about a company. Not what is interesting. Not what demos well. Not what sounds differentiated in a pitch deck. Not what the ARR is today. What is actually hard to replicate? What gets stronger over time? What creates a widening gap versus everyone else? And the only way to know is to spend time with these deep tech founders and really understand how the technology, the product, and the company work, and most importantly, how they are connected.

That is the bar. Because in venture, uniqueness is not a nice-to-have. It is often the foundation of outsized outcomes. That is how you win the home run derby with uncapped runs.

That is why uniquely world class is what we are looking for.