Most VC funds underperform public markets. The ones that don't, the top decile, are often the ones no one's heard of yet. On the Top Decile Podcast, Decile Group's Connor Sattely sits down with the emerging managers building those funds before the rest of the world catches on. This time he talked with Doug Griffin, Founder and Investment Lead of Spatial Follow Fund I, a manager who spent decades building the exact category he now backs.

Watch The Full Episode Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TUXW0KOFbQ

Doug founded companies in the computer vision and AI sector, several of which exited, including acquisitions by leading technology and entertainment platforms. He's one of the rare investors who has been the kind of founder he now funds. That operating history sits underneath everything about how he runs his fund.

For most people, AI still means a text box in a browser. Doug is betting somewhere else. His conviction predates the current wave, going back to what he saw coming in computer vision before generative AI became a household phrase. "It's the reason I decided to start the fund was I could see the trends happening," he said. He describes his first fund as focused on the perception layer, taking AI "out of the chat window and into the real world," and then a newer trend of embedding intelligence directly into physical systems, the category now widely called physical AI.

The shift he's chasing is a fundamental one. It's "the difference between AI being trained on text to AI being trained on the 3D world around us and understanding the world," he said, "not just understanding what it sees, but how to navigate it, to extract information from it, how to interact with the real world." Autonomy and robotics are the leading edge. As Doug put it, "that autonomy, the ability to navigate autonomously through the physical world, it's like the tip of the spear for physical AI." He's clear that these first markets are early. In his words, it's "just the very start of what we're going to see over the next decade."

Doug spent a good decade building, and he calls it the most rewarding work he's done. So why move into investing? Part of it is reach. As a founder he could pour himself into one company at a time. As an investor he can back many, and the leverage on his experience is far higher. "The impact you can have as a venture investor is just so strong and so powerful," he said, "not only in selecting the type of companies that you want to see build the future, but also helping them become successful." Rather than spending an entire week inside one company, he can spend a handful of hours across a portfolio, and often it's a single conversation that changes a company's trajectory.

Doug is candid that his advantage is not being the smartest researcher in the room. It's range. Over decades in a single industry he worked as an engineer and engineering manager, led product, ran corporate development, built and exited companies, and sat on the buy side of deals. He has seen nearly every function a company needs, all in computer vision and AI. That perspective shapes how he shows up for founders. He remembers pitching big funds and hearing investors who had gone straight from school into venture, with no operating experience, tell him how to run his company. His differentiator is the opposite. "One of the values I bring is a significant amount of operating experience in VC backed startups, in this space of computer vision and AI that I've been involved in for multiple decades," he said. That history opens doors with founders and gives the fund early access to companies larger firms may never track down.

The backers of the fund look different from the pension funds and endowments behind mega firms. "The vast majority of people who've backed our fund are what I call working blokes," Doug said. "They are people working in the field," operators, computer scientists, and vision researchers embedded in the industry worldwide. That makes the LP base a source of direct value, not just capital. After each investment, the fund schedules a call between its investors and its founders. "There's nothing better than that kind of personal interaction you can have when you can actually have the founder of that portfolio company pitch to your VCs," Doug said. Those conversations routinely turn into strategy help, and in some cases LPs have taken operating roles inside portfolio companies.

For managers churning through their first LP meetings, Doug keeps it simple. Domain expertise and network are the price of entry, and beyond that it comes down to one question. "Finding what your edge is, is the critical thing," he said. "Why should someone give you some money to go out and invest?" His own hunting ground reflects that discipline. "We like to look for really big industries," he said. "Ideally, the less sexy, the better." He points to old, non-digitized businesses that power the world, from mineral discovery to heavy industry, where AI applied to the physical world can compress timelines and costs dramatically. On building the fund itself, he credits Decile Group with handling the parts of fund operations he did not want to navigate alone, work that let him focus on his LPs and portfolio.

Doug Griffin is the kind of manager the Top Decile Podcast exists to surface. He backs founders in a category he helped build, he brings operators rather than passive capital to the cap table, and he hunts in overlooked corners of the physical economy where the next decade of AI will actually land. For LPs who want exposure to physical AI with a manager who has lived on the founder's side of the table, and for founders building AI for the real world, this is a fund worth a closer look.

Learn more about the fund and request access on Decile Access: https://decileaccess.com/funds/spatial-follow-fund-i

Spatial Follow Fund I backs US and Canadian pre-seed and seed founders building AI for the physical world, spanning applications from orchards and forests to mines, drones, and power grids. Doug Griffin is the Founder and Investment Lead, bringing a background shipping hardware and building companies in computer vision and AI, with prior companies acquired by major technology and entertainment platforms. The fund pairs that operating experience with a globally networked base of industry LPs who work directly with portfolio founders.

Watch The Full Episode Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TUXW0KOFbQ