Frontier Curve of Innovation®

If you’ve spent time with us at Bee Partners, you’ve inevitably witnessed us drawing this frontier curve on the whiteboard, just as I did over 10 years ago. With LPs. With prospective founders. With anyone who sits across from us long enough to get into the thinking. It happens every time: the marker comes out, the curve goes up, and the conversation changes.

The first time, I drew it for Garrett, my partner at the time. We were in the office at 180 Sansome, three offices ago, sketching out why some startup ideas felt like reckless bets and others felt like the right ones. The insight was simple: you want to be just beyond the frontier, not buried inside it, not orbiting it from a distance. The curve showed where to stand.

The framework makes more sense in motion. Press play and enjoy.

After the whiteboard sketch in ~2014, the insight about tech risk versus market risk hardened over the next few years, inferred from the beginning but named later. Then came the vectors layer: patterns that bundled what we kept seeing on the curve, which has since been reframed as “the futures we believe in.”

In August 2024, we registered it: Frontier Curve of Innovation, USPTO Reg. No. 7476040. Shout out to Austin Grisham for carrying the registration across the line.

The Frontier Curve is central to Bee Partners; to our history; to our firm. On founder calls, we still talk about how far out you are from the frontier. And if you want to see what’s coming, look at our most recent investments. Where the curve is taking us is at what we believe.

This page evolves. Last updated: May 2026.