Most portfolios are built around one big win. Ours isn't.
In venture capital, it’s long been accepted wisdom that one startup will carry the fund. This belief shapes how many portfolios are built: cast a wide net, back 30 or more companies, and hope that one of them returns the entire fund—and then some.
That model may be common, but it isn’t conviction. And it’s certainly not how we operate.
The Volume Trap
Spray-and-pray is the natural outcome of scale. If you’re raising and deploying hundreds of millions, you need to write a lot of checks. The result is a statistical mindset where the individual company matters less than the eventual outlier.
But this approach has consequences—many of them subtle, some not. It thins out diligence. It encourages reactive decision-making. It crowds a portfolio with companies that may never be truly understood or supported. And it creates distance between investor and founder. In portfolios built for volume, attention becomes a scarce resource.
Who Pays the Price
Founders feel this first. They get funding, but little else. For them, it’s hard to know where they stand—or what value their investor actually brings.
Co-investors are often left in the dark, especially when there's no clear lead or structured guidance. Even limited partners, the ones ultimately underwriting these funds, are left hoping the math holds up.
Our Alternative: High-Conviction Investing
At Paligan, we take a different approach. We invest selectively and deliberately, one deal at a time. That gives us the space to do proper diligence, to structure investments thoughtfully, and to show up post-close in meaningful ways.
We don’t build portfolios that rely on one big win to carry the rest. Every deal we back has to work on its own. We go deep into business models, unit economics, and founder dynamics. We’re not in the business of exposure. We’re in the business of building.
The Case for Focus
High-conviction investing isn’t just about doing less. It’s about doing the work. Saying no more often. Asking better questions. Committing to fewer companies—and committing properly.
That’s the mindset we bring to every investment. And we believe it’s the only one worth having.
