Everyone Is a Nerd About Something: Introducing the Nerd Oath
We're at our best when we're living our passion -- so take this solemn vow to live your hobby everyday, no permission needed.
Seven years ago I wrote about why I’m obsessed with nerds and why Ubiquity Ventures backs them almost exclusively. Several times a day I still describe the firm as “nerdy and early,” and that part hasn’t changed. What has changed is how much I notice nerdiness everywhere, far outside the labs and the startups where I spend most of my time.
The thing I keep coming back to is simple. People come alive when they talk about their nerd topic. You can watch it happen at a dinner. Someone who has been pleasant and a little reserved all evening mentions the thing they’re deep on, and suddenly they sit up, talk faster, and lose track of where the conversation was. They are at their best when they’re living inside their passion.
When I watch that happen, I notice the same two traits every time: obsession and evangelism.
Obsession: Go Deep
A nerd goes about 100 times deeper into a topic than the average person. I mean that close to literally, 2 orders of magnitude, not just a bit more enthusiasm than the people around them. They understand their topic from the bottom up and the top down, they know every technique and every major figure in the field, and they immerse themselves to the point of losing track of time.
The topic doesn’t have to be technical. While you can be a nerd about machine learning hyperparameters, and you can also be a nerd about sneaker history, NFL draft trivia, true crime, or 19th-century photography. What makes someone a nerd is the depth, not the subject.
We tend to be a little shy about admitting what we’re nerdy about, which is a shame, because it’s usually the most interesting thing about a person.
The obsession doesn’t have to last forever either. Sometimes it’s a lifelong passion, and sometimes it’s a two-week rabbit hole where you have to get into the innards of how something actually works, you turn over every stone, and then you surface and move on to the next thing. What stays constant is the pull to understand how something really works, not just what it does, to go all the way down rather than skim the surface.
My oldest obsession is space, and I’ve never managed to keep it casual. I’m the kind of person who gets a thrill from this photo: NASA scientists figured out the exact right time and place to point our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite to snap a photo of the Curiosity rover just as it was parachuting down to the surface of Mars in 2012, from orbit, while moving. Yes— really!
Evangelism: Share the Passion
The second trait is the insatiable need to share it, and this one you usually catch in glimpses. The coworker who does pottery on Thursday nights and shows up Friday lighter than they’ve been all week. The friend who pulls every piece of their costume out of the closet for one Renaissance Faire weekend and lights up the moment they put it on. A nerd’s obsession naturally turns into a need to bring other people in, which makes nerds some of the best evangelists you’ll ever meet.
My space obsession does the same thing to me. As a past President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, one of the coolest parts of the organization is that they created the astronomy badge for the Girl Scouts. Astronomy is one of the best on-ramps into science there is, since you don’t need a lab or a grant to look up and start asking questions, and getting a kid to fall in love with the night sky is often the first step toward a lifetime in STEM. It’s the same door that pulled me in.
Living the hobby
Somewhere along the way most of us absorbed a seemingly unshakeable rule of life: you’re only allowed to have dessert once you first finish your dinner, and you can only start your hobby after you spend the work day at your normal job. The thing you actually love is the reward you earn once the obligations of the day are done.
I’ve started to wonder what happens when you flip that order, when the thing you’d do anyway becomes the center of your day instead of the reward at the end of it.
It’s part of why I started Ubiquity Ventures. I wanted my working days built around the thing I’d happily do for free, which is spending time with deeply passionate nerds and the problems they can’t stop thinking about.
That idea matters enough to me that I had it stitched into our hats! The more I sit with it, the more the nerd idea looks like a safe space, a place where you can go as deep as you want, for as long as you want, on whatever you want, with nobody judging you for it.
What this has to do with startup founders
My favorite moments on this job are when a founder is so deep in what they’re building that they can’t help pulling me in too. Their eyes light up and they stop pitching. Suddenly they’re giving me a tour of something they built and clearly love, the way someone walks you through their hometown and shows you the spots no map would ever take you to. Before long I’m just as hooked as they are, telling everyone I know about what they’re up to.
That’s exactly what I look for before I invest. The founders I back have gone 100x deep on a real-world problem most people walk straight past, and they pull in everyone around them the same way they pulled in me. It’s most of what I mean by founder-market fit, and most of what “nerdy and early” means when we say it.
It’s also why Ubiquity’s thesis lives where it does, in software beyond the screen, where the deepest nerds gravitate toward physical problems nobody else thought to look at.
Tying it all together: The Nerd Oath
That pull, the one I see in founders and feel in myself, isn’t really about startups at all. It’s the same thing whether you’re building a company or just falling down a Wikipedia hole at midnight. Eventually I wanted to put it into words. I call it the Nerd Oath:
If you’re a founder with that same pull, building something most people walk right past, I’d love to talk. And if you’re not building a company but you know someone who goes 100x deep on what they love, send this their way.
Ubiquity Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm investing in software beyond the screen. We back founders building AI, software, and smart hardware for the physical world — technology you can touch, hear, and feel.
If you know a founder working on something nerdy and early, we’d love an introduction.
Advice to kids: be nice to the nerds, you'll probably be working for one once you're an adult!