The best ideas often start as heresies.

Great companies are built on "secrets" - truths that most people don't (yet) believe. But I've come to think of these future-truths not as collective conspiracies (as Thiel would say), but as heresies: non-consensus, oft public, and provocative. A conspiracy is hidden; a heresy is more declared. Today's most ambitious founders don't whisper their beliefs – they broadcast them, knowing full well they may be rejected. That rejection is often the point.

Reflecting on the early years of my (young) venture career, I've noticed a pattern in the companies I passed on and later regretted. It wasn't that I couldn't stomach contrarian thinking. It's that there was always one too many heresies. One final belief that exceeded my threshold.

At 8VC, we use the simple phrase "Big, if true" to describe opportunities that could create massive enterprise value, conditional on one or more bold assumptions proving correct. In that framing, every "if true" is a heresy - a contrarian belief that, if validated, unlocks enormous upside.

The best startups often don't rely on a single heresy. They stack them. And as you stack them, something counterintuitive happens: while the probability of success may decline, the expected value of success can & should increase, often nonlinearly. Most investors instinctively discount each additional heresy. But if those beliefs are even modestly credible, the upside can compound in extraordinary ways.

In my early misses, the problem wasn't just intolerance of heresy - it was an inability to price the last one.

Three Meta-Heresies

Not all contrarian bets ask for the same kind of belief. Here's how I've started to think about them:

1) Capability Heresies

These are beliefs about what a team can accomplish despite lacking obvious credentials or experience. I've underestimated technical learning slope and overestimated commercial. Exceptional technical founders often display remarkable transfer learning. They jump domains and (sometimes) master them faster than seems reasonable. I've learned to give more credit to technical audacity than to commercial confidence.

2) Macro Heresies

These are contrarian views about where the world is going. Technology trends, reg shifts, or market readiness. They often feel speculative and are easy to dismiss as wishful thinking. But when they're right, they can create enormous tailwinds. The hard part is distinguishing between "early" and "wrong."

3) Execution Heresies
These are claims that a team will simply out-execute everyone else in a crowded or competitive market. They bet on velocity, grit, and iteration speed as differentiators. I used to dismiss these as naive. But over time, I've seen how much ground a hyper-focused team can cover when incumbents are asleep at the wheel. Don't discount a heresy just because the space is competitive.

Nonlinear Payoffs

Expected value doesn't scale linearly with belief. Imagine a startup with three contrarian assumptions, each with a 30% chance of being right. You might assign a ~2.7% overall probability of success. That seems low until you realize that proving all three correct could generate a 100x outcome, not a 3x.

When upside grows exponentially with each validated heresy, the expected value might justify the risk. In other words: you don't need to believe all the heresies - you just need to price them right.

A good heuristic: pay close attention to your reaction to the last heresy. The one that makes you uncomfortable enough to walk away. That final rejection often masks the biggest upside. Not because it's definitely true, but because the payoff if true is wildly underpriced.

As I've written before, feedback loops in venture are painfully slow. It can take 7–10 years to know whether a decision was right. That makes it essential to develop tighter heuristics and learn from intermediate signals, not just final outcomes. Heresy thresholds are one such signal. By tracking where our belief systems break, we can improve decision quality without waiting a decade.

Venture isn't about being right often. It's about being directionally right on the improbable.

Next time a founder walks in full of heresies, I'll be listening a little more closely especially to the one that makes me want to say no. That might just be the best heresy to back.