Sep 15, 2026

Greatness begins with rituals

When I decided it was time to update Ritual Capital's brand, I called one of my oldest friends.

Kurt Parker and I have known each other since high school and college. Since then, he’s built an incredible career working on brands like Nike and lululemon. I’ve spent most of mine investing in startups. We took very different paths, but we’ve always shared an appreciation for great brands and the craft that goes into building them.

I figured we’d start by talking about logos, fonts, colors and websites. Instead, Kurt gave me homework. Write the word Ritual 100 times. By hand. So I did.

At first, I thought about every letter. I tried different ways of writing the R. I changed the spacing and the angle. Some were neat. Some were messy. Some looked like I was trying way too hard. But after writing the same word again and again, I stopped thinking about it so much. My hand found a rhythm. A few versions started to feel right. Kurt circled them. One of those eventually became the Ritual logo.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the exercise wasn't really about designing a logo. In some ways, it contained the entire idea behind the firm.

What are we actually building?

As Kurt and I kept working, the conversations became less about what Ritual should look like and more about what Ritual actually was.

What kind of venture firm did I want to build? What had I learned after nearly two decades of investing? What did the founders I admired most have in common? What parts of this job did I love? What should Ritual protect as it grew? And maybe most importantly, what did I never want it to become? The answers were surprisingly clear.

Ritual should stay small by design. We're not trying to build an asset manager or a giant venture platform. We want to practice venture as a craft. Invest early. Make decisions with conviction. Help founders where we're actually good, particularly around storytelling, marketing and recruiting. Be present when things are hard. And stay out of the way when we're not needed.

The brand process gave us language for something I'd felt for a long time: Not a factory. Not a platform. A craft.

That became one of the most valuable parts of the exercise. We started out trying to define a brand and ended up defining the firm.

Why Ritual?

It also made me think much harder about the name itself.

A ritual isn't quite the same thing as a habit. Habits can become automatic. Rituals have intention behind them. They mean something to the person doing them.

That's how I've come to think about company building. We tend to celebrate breakthroughs. The launch. The financing. The huge customer. The acquisition. The IPO. But those moments are usually the visible result of thousands of much smaller ones.

It's the founder talking to another customer. Rewriting the product. Recruiting one more person. Going back through the deck. Calling the candidate who said no. Changing the message. Making the product a little better. Doing it tomorrow and then doing it again.

The founders I've been fortunate enough to work with who built extraordinary companies were incredibly different people. But they tended to share something: they treated company building as a craft. They were resilient, obsessive about details and remarkably consistent. The playbook eventually described them as building “not for hype, but for endurance.” That led us to the idea at the center of the new brand: Greatness begins with rituals.

Precise and human

Once we understood that, the rest of the identity started to make more sense. We kept coming back to a set of tensions. Ritual should be precise, but never sterile. Ambitious, but not self-important. Bold, but not loud. Disciplined, but deeply human.

You can see those ideas throughout the design. The typography is clean and precise, while the logo is literally someone's imperfect handwriting. Black and white create structure, while the blue adds energy and warmth. The photography focuses less on polished portraits and more on people doing the actual work.

One of my favorite lines Kurt's team wrote about the logo was that it wasn't “polished into perfection,” it was “practiced into confidence.” That's not a bad description of building a company either.

The quiet signal

There was one other idea that came out of the process that stuck with me. We talked a lot about what role Ritual should play in a founder's story. The answer wasn't to be the loudest investor in the room. In fact, it was almost the opposite.

We want Ritual to become the quiet, trusted signal. The investor founders tell other founders about when they're at the beginning and need someone who believes before it's obvious. We want the founder onstage and Ritual somewhere behind them, helping when we can.

That feels particularly important in venture, where it's easy for investors to confuse proximity to extraordinary founders with being responsible for their success. We're not building the companies. They are. Our job is to believe early, help where we can, and keep showing up.

Back to the beginning

Which brings me back to that sheet of paper. I wrote Ritual again and again until I stopped trying to make it perfect. Eventually something natural emerged. Kurt found it, circled it, and turned it into our logo.

It's imperfect. It's personal. It's unmistakably ours. And somehow the process of creating it ended up capturing exactly what we wanted Ritual to stand for.

The best things aren't created in a single moment of inspiration. They're shaped through belief, craft, repetition and care. They're built through rituals.