Betting on Founders Who Build the Real World

Lior Susan described his career as a “purpose build without the strategy.” He grew up on a farm, began in agriculture, served in the Israeli Special Forces, then co-founded a networking-hardware company with his brother that was acquired by Cisco. He next joined Flextronics after meeting its CEO and helped build the company’s digital-transformation team. Those experiences gave him exposure to defense, hardware, and manufacturing. Susan said he had always been drawn to building in the physical world and, by 2015, believed those industries were about to undergo major digital transformation without investors focused specifically on them.

Susan said his first partner, Pierre Lamond, was 85 when they met, while Susan was 30, and invited him to build a firm together after a short conversation. They shared a preference for small, tightly aligned teams, influenced by Lamond’s time at Sequoia and Susan’s Special Forces experience. Eclipse’s first fund was $125 million, including Susan’s own contribution, and took 16 months and five closes to raise. The thesis was that roughly 85% of the world’s approximately $120 trillion GDP comes from physical industries such as manufacturing, mining, defense, logistics, agriculture, and aviation, where companies must connect “bits and atoms.”

Susan said Eclipse initially expected its best company to reach about a $5 billion valuation, but the firm now has several companies that could reach $70 billion or $80 billion. That changed the business model: Eclipse grew from its initial fund toward funds of more than $1 billion, added later-stage investing and follow-ons, and developed the ability to compound capital as companies inflect. The firm’s core approach did not change: high conviction, high ownership, high involvement, operator hiring, a shared economic structure, and exclusive focus on physical industries. The strategy adjusted because the opportunity set and capital needs became much larger.

Eclipse hires exceptional operators and trains them to become investors; none of its members had previously worked as venture capitalists. The firm grew from four people to 26, but its nine partners make investment decisions collectively rather than allowing individual partners to invest alone. A deal requires at least three partners to pound the table, and anyone strongly opposed joins the deal team so the concern is resolved or the investment is rejected. Susan wants everyone to feel, when money is wired, “fuck yeah,” even if important questions remain. Eclipse has no associates or platform team: partners source, win, support, and eventually exit investments themselves.

Susan rejected the idea that Eclipse’s primary product is capital, calling capital a commodity and the partners’ time, networks, and operating knowledge the real offering. Founders in manufacturing can work with Greg Reichow, who built Tesla’s manufacturing operation; robotics founders can work with Charlie Munger, who deployed robotics at Tesla, Rivian, and CloudKitchens; enterprise founders can draw on executives who closed major deals at Rivian, Flexport, and Samsara. Eclipse mobilizes those partners around a company’s needs—for example, helping a business sign a $3 billion commercial agreement and then bringing in manufacturing expertise to build two additional factories.

Susan said moving from operating to investing remains difficult, and Eclipse has had former partners join portfolio companies. Operators accustomed to managing thousands of people suddenly become individual contributors who write memos, conduct outreach, and build deal materials themselves. They also go from being elite performers to venture-capital rookies, which creates a difficult psychological switch. Eclipse learned to screen for two traits: the ability to “scale down” and strong business instinct. Deep expertise in manufacturing, engineering, or supply chain is not enough because early-stage founders often need help with go-to-market, fundraising, and explaining how they will transform an industry.

Susan does not spend much time deciding whether venture is in a bubble; he focuses on building companies. His structural argument is that venture capital is a way to introduce technology, and the addressable technology economy has expanded from internet, cloud, consumer, and enterprise software into space, automotive, defense, mining, and manufacturing. He noted that software itself is becoming more capital intensive, including through AI. Although he accepts that there is too much money and that some valuations are foolish, he believes the world will use more technology across more industries, which supports a larger venture opportunity.

Susan said Eclipse evaluates investments through blended entry and follow-on costs and continually calculates whether the eventual cash-on-cash multiple remains attractive. He also argued that the venture model’s roughly 60-year-old duration assumptions need reconsideration. Public markets have become difficult to access, with burdensome SEC requirements, quarterly reporting, and a very high bar for companies seeking to list. Susan believes companies should either have simpler paths to IPOs or a better private-market system that lets substantial portions of a cap table change hands without signaling risk. In his view, employees currently receive liquidity before the original investors, creating a misalignment that should be fixed.

Susan credited Pierre Lamond with embedding discipline and “maniacal” honesty at Eclipse: teams must accurately assess company status, risks, opportunities, and whether to double down rather than look only at the half-full glass. His biggest investing lesson was that venture is a power-law business. Operators may believe they can fix everything, but a few companies generate most of the returns, so identifying them and concentrating time and capital matters enormously. For 2026, Susan predicted that deglobalization will accelerate. He argued that Western countries must better align capital, policy and government, talent, technology, and customer demand because China has benefited most from globalization and the West is behind.