Today is the 30-year anniversary of my venture capital career. My younger self would have found that hard to fathom. Reflecting back, there was a simple algorithm embedded in my investment strategy that has made it all the more exciting and engaging over time — I look for startups that are unlike anything I have seen before, yet adjacent. This novelty-seeking algorithm leads me and my partner Maryanna to explore numerous expanding frontiers of technology advancement and coincides with the innervation of ever more industries. The software-centric transformation we saw in automotive and aerospace is underway in manufacturing, construction, energy and agriculture. I know that I will be investing in new sectors five years from now that I could not name today, just as I would never imagined investing in Tesla or SpaceX twenty years ago. It’s a perpetual driver for lifelong learning. But it arose from a simple boredom. At DFJ, we were the most active VC firm in Internet startups in 1995-1996, but by 1999, all of the B2C and B2B businesses were looking like variants on the same idea, sometimes to absurd extremes. I transitioned to deep tech semiconductor and materials science startups out of some instinct to seek less competitive domains and try something completely different. I had not lost faith in the economic transformation that the Internet would still bring — far from it — but I exited the sector as all the companies I saw in 1999 looked the same. Interestingly, this had me exiting the Internet sector for new investments prior to the dot com crash. The same thing happened with cleantech investing, where we were one of the most active investors in the early years, but we stopped before the 2008 downturn. In both cases, the rush of fast followers and arbitrage-seeking opportunists preceded the crash. We did not predict the crash; we naturally moved on from when the novelty was gone. From our simple rule, various emergent properties become evident on different time scales. In the near term, we gained portfolio diversification (obviously). In the medium term, we exited sectors when it was emotionally least likely (peak boom times) but prior to a major correction. It also lets us become early leaders in new sectors (Internet in 1995, then cleantech and syn bio, then AI in 2014) since we don’t have fixed sectors of focus, but we try to follow a thread of predicate technologies opening new opportunities. But the most rewarding result has been the lesson learned over decades — that this investment strategy affords a lifetime of learning and dynamic adjustment to new areas of growth. Colleagues who have a fixed sector focus, in contrast, have a short-term competency dynamo (being the most experienced in a sector or niche), but ultimately, they seem unhappy 20 years later, retiring from venture regardless of their level of business success. Looking back over the past 30 years, my most important decision was to leave the competency trap of sticking with a single sector of focus.