KARTHIK MENTA




ABOUT ME

Karthik is a founder / investor interested in the physical world, information asymmetry, and ecosystems.

He is drawn to building things that close the gap between those who have vs. those who don’t and problems where the health of the whole system is at stake. 

He runs Dichromatic Capital, a secondary venture fund investing in late-stage tech (e.g., SpaceX, Stripe). Before that he worked on growth strategy across TMT / industrials at McKinsey, and product roles across tech startups in the bay area.

Based in Brooklyn, NYC.  

Fortitudine vincimus

CONTACT

mentakarthik@gmail.com
linkedin
twitter - @karthikmenta

Fun

Your name in Landsat


PEOPLE 




Christopher Nolan

Graham Weaver

Patrick Collison

John Steinbeck

Stanley Druckenmiller

Nirmal Purja

Elizabeth Rosenthal

Ernest Shackleton

Bob Iger

Carl Jung


RESEARCH I’M FOLLOWING


https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2123536119









inspired by Tina He




MATERIAL








General Intelligence and collapse of markets
Spring 2026

When general intelligence becomes cheap and universal, product quality stops being a durable advantage because everyone's baseline gets reasonably good, and the real fight shifts to operations, speed of value capture, and depth of customer entrenchment.

That same dynamic lets the largest capital holders cross into markets they were previously gated out of, collapsing the historically separated "value pools" that businesses have long operated within and depend on and eating them the way an unleashed predator wipes out biodiversity when the barriers between habitats fall. 

This loss of market diversity is genuinely dangerous, but this means that ultimately physical-world and hard-tech businesses, the ones intelligence alone can't commoditize, are where it now makes the most sense to build.




The opponent who already read the tape on you 
Spring 2026

Enterprises are deploying AI agents into the highest-stakes moments of ordinary life, hiring, lending, insurance, housing, and on the other side of the table sits a person with no equivalent tool, no view into what's being optimized, and no way to know when they've lost. Derek Mobley applied to over a hundred jobs through one screening platform and was rejected from nearly all of them, many in the dead of night, without ever learning what he'd done wrong; he thought he'd had a fair shot.

The three mechanisms that have historically corrected this kind of imbalance: competitive markets, government regulation, and protective consumer products, are all failing in this current age. Models / agents trained on behavioral data compound into moats no new entrant can cross, regulation is being actively dismantled rather than merely lagging, and the harm stays invisible until enough of it accumulates.

Every infrastructure layer eventually grows an immune system, and the window before it does is where the damage concentrates. What's missing is what needs building: an advocate agent that fights for the individual, auditing that surfaces bias at scale, and a protocol floor for how agents must behave when the stakes are someone's job or home.