The premise of Hemi’s venture approach is both quantitative and qualitative—it is a science in its methodology and an art in its application.
On June 22, Hemi Ventures sponsored the Form Through Narrative: New Chinese Art opening reception, paying its respects to global perspectives and contemporary storytelling.
The gallery featured pioneering Chinese artists who explored generational stories, perspectives, and applications, archiving their thought in porcelain, secondhand objects, acrylics and more. Flirting with absolute abstraction, these artists deconstructed functional attributes to achieve a sophisticated-simple aesthetic juxtaposing with contemporary themes of urbanism and mass consumerism.
For these artists, narrative is founded on identity, tradition and story rather than peripheral objective. To truly capture the modern evolution of consumer culture, they deliberately departed from the obvious present. Rather, they explored covert subject matters by allowing background, composition and process to dominate their works.
An analogous approach of this idea deconstruction and re-interpretation can be found in a prominent, universal german maxim — one routinely voiced by value investors. Adopted by Charlie Munger in the book Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Nineteenth century German mathematician Carl Jacobi’s maxim, “Man muss immer umkehren” (translated to “Invert, always invert”), expressed his belief that working problems backwards often led to their answers. Inversion can be seen as a mode of critical thinking—a mental model of an observed system can be visualized by breaking the system down to its fundamental parts and understanding each variable individually.
For Hemi Ventures, Jacobi’s maxim — invert, always invert — is actively rediscovered in its mission toits founders. Hemi believes that Jacobi’s inversion approach, a pragmatic and heuristic mental approach, requires the addition of a humanistic vantage point to optimize the fund’s outcome. With this approach, Hemi is able to identify the clever industry rebels and appreciate their divergence and story. Beyond the objective capital, Hemi focuses on people, spending time with teams and cultivating nourishing environments.
‘Hemi’ (hēmi-) means ‘half’ in Greek. As a fund, Hemi Ventures aims to serve as a second hemisphere for its founders. Whether it be identifying potential synergies in its networks and portfolio companies or providing strategy direction, Hemi’s goal is to become the most reliable other half to stand beside them. To best achieve this, Hemi supplements its objective approach with ahumanistic interpretation of individual situations, people and environments, ultimately having its portfolio tell the story of du jour technology.
And it is with finding form through narrative where Hemi best creates impact and tell its story.