The Motion Problem
Introducing Carry On, a new podcast with Santosh Sankar, and an open invitation to tell us if it's working
There is a version of a basketball player who never stops moving and never actually gets anywhere. Always cutting, always talking, always going east and west, and somehow the ball ends the possession in the exact same spot it started. Coaches have a phrase for this, and it is not a compliment: motion is not the same thing as movement. Most people confuse the two anyway.
I have been circling that same confusion in venture for a while now. Plenty of activity. Term sheets, panels, LinkedIn posts, another fund closing, another logo added to a deck. Not always much progress underneath it. I did not have a clean way to talk about that difference until Santosh Sankar and I sat down to record, and it turned out to be the first real conversation of the show we are calling Carry On.
Santosh runs Dynamo Ventures. I have known him long enough to trust that he will tell me when an idea is not as sharp as I think it is, which is most of what you want from a co-host and most of what is missing from venture capital content generally. We did not start this because the podcast market needed another one. We started it because the honest conversations about what it actually takes to build a firm mostly happen off the record, in DMs and side rooms, after the panel ends. We wanted to put more of that on the record.
Episode one is called Motion ≠ Movement. We get into why urgency and momentum get treated as the same thing when they are not, and what it looks like when capital and attention concentrate into a narrow set of AI deals and mega funds. We also spend real time on something less comfortable: the erosion of intellectual honesty in this industry, and what it costs a firm when kingmaking dynamics start doing the work that judgment used to do. Santosh walks through the eras of venture, the pendulum between concentration and unbundling, and why craft still matters even when capital alone can buy you a seat at the table.
None of that is a finished argument. Some of it we are still working out in real time, which you can probably hear. That is the point. We would rather practice this in public and be wrong on the record occasionally than polish something into a highlight reel that does not tell you anything you could not have guessed.
So here is a genuine ask: listen to the episode. Tell us where we got it right and, more usefully, where we did not. Reply to this post, comment wherever you are listening, or just send me a note directly. If there is a topic you think two GPs owe each other an honest conversation about, tell me that too. We are building the list of episodes off of exactly that kind of feedback.
Grateful to AngelList, WilmerHale, and Citizens Bank for backing this from the start, and to the Heard Media team for turning two people talking into something worth your time.
with gratitude,
Earnest
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