Barend Van den Brande is a philosophy-driven venture investor at Hummingbird VC who approaches investing as an exercise in understanding human nature, opening internal memos with discussions of concepts like Cartesian dualism and focusing intensely on finding founders he calls beautiful misfits with non-linear lives and unusual cognitive wiring. He maintains extreme selectivity with roughly a 0.1% hit rate, investing in only four companies per year while also designing and building houses in challenging locations like the Alps as a creative outlet to balance the slow feedback cycles of venture capital. Barend Van den Brande is a philosophy-driven venture investor at Hummingbird VC who approaches investing as an exercise in understanding human nature, opening internal memos with discussions of concepts like Cartesian dualism and focusing intensely on finding founders he calls beautiful misfits with non-linear lives and unusual cognitive wiring. He maintains extreme selectivity with roughly a 0.1% hit rate, investing in only four companies per year while also designing and building houses in challenging locations like the Alps as a creative outlet to balance the slow feedback cycles of venture capital.