Antonio Stancati

Some things about me:

• Born in 2006 to a southern Italian family
• Grew up between Milan, Basel, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Zurich
• Currently based in Zurich
• Italian by passport, multilingual by circumstance
• On the Internet since around 2012, old enough to remember when YouTube still felt small
• My father was an acquaintance of Steve Wozniak; I grew up around old Apple hardware and read the relevant literature early, which probably explains everything I'm interested in now
• Graduated high school with a 3.9 GPA
• Won the Accenture Switzerland entrepreneurship competition
• Building GMMU, a holding structure for what comes next
• Managing a small biotech-focused portfolio as an early experiment in concentrated investing
• Running an algorithmic trading experiment since 2024 on a dedicated Mac that researches, tests, and trades crypto and equity strategies. Living as its own being 24/7

Some things I believe:

• Technology is the most reliable lever for changing the world
  • The Wozniaks of every era are usually unfashionable when they start
  • Building beats commenting
  • The best technology disappears into ordinary life
• Concentration is underrated
  • A few well-understood positions beat a hundred shallow ones
  • This is true in investing, in friendships, and in careers
  • Diversification is what you do when you don't know what you're doing
• Compound interest applies to almost everything
  • Skills, relationships, reputation, knowledge: all compound
  • Most people underestimate the first decade and overestimate the second
  • The mathematical version is the least interesting one
• Specificity wins
  • Vague ambition is a tell that someone hasn't done the work
  • It's harder to lie about specific facts than about abstract ones
  • Specific writing reveals specific thinking
• Europe is underrated for what's possible
  • There is no good reason Europe should produce fewer trillion-dollar companies than the US
  • The talent is here. The capital is here. The will is mostly missing
  • Italian mid-market businesses are some of the most underserved sophisticated buyers in the world
• Quality of attention is the actual scarce resource
  • Most decisions get worse the longer you take to make them
  • Most thinking gets better the longer you give it
  • Knowing which is which is most of the game
• The efficient market hypothesis is approximately wrong
  • It's right enough to humble you and wrong enough to feed you
  • Most people who quote it have never actually traded anything
  • Mispricings exist mainly because most participants aren't paying attention
• Reading deeply matters more than reading widely
  • Most ideas worth knowing are in fewer than 100 books
  • Most of those have been around for a long time
  • Reading the same good book twice beats reading two mediocre ones

Ventures

• GMMU. Building. A holding structure for apps, financial products, and longer-term projects. More to come once there's something worth pointing to.

Reading

A few books I've returned to:

• iWoz — Steve Wozniak
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
• The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham
• Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charles T. Munger
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
• The Snowball — Alice Schroeder
• Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Shoe Dog — Phil Knight
• The Power Law — Sebastian Mallaby

Updated occasionally.

Questions

Things I'm thinking about:

• What did the Wozniak generation know about hardware that's been forgotten?
• If AI compresses time-to-evaluate from weeks to hours, what happens to private equity returns?
• Which industries get permanently reshaped by SMR nuclear, and which don't change at all?
• What do biotech investors systematically underweight?
• What questions should I be asking that I'm not yet?

Updated occasionally.

Contact

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: antonio-stancati