Exclusive: AJ Scaramucci comes out of stealth with a $350 million bet on ‘Programmable Reality’

For most of the last decade, AJ Scaramucci has built companies nobody outside his network was watching. He backed a bitcoin miner years before it became a Trump family venture. He wrote the first check into a satellite ground-station startup when its founder and her husband were the entire company. He quietly amassed a collection of comics, trading cards, and even dinosaur bones that he now argues belong in asset classes comparable to gold and bitcoin. And he assembled it all under one investment thesis he has been developing since college.

Solari Capital, the venture firm he is taking out of stealth today, has deployed roughly $350 million across early-stage investing, late-stage growth checks, and in-house incubations since its founding.

The astronomer-turned-venture capitalist

Scaramucci’s route began in science, far from finance. Describing an interest in “amateur astronomy” as a kid, Scaramucci said he worked in a bioelectronics lab, studying implantable therapeutics and the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway, before moving to the Bay Area and taking a job at Tesla in 2013, then a rotation through Google, where he briefly worked alongside Eric Schmidt.

Scaramucci traces his current thesis to April 2012, when he sat in his dorm room at Stanford reading Peter Diamandis’ Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. He described it as something of a spiritual successor to Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book “The Singularity Is Near, calling the pair “the Old and New Testament,” as both predicted the shape of the current AI boom years before the underlying technology existed.

He immediately started working to get to know Diamandis via methods Scaramucci describes as “brute force”: emailing XPRIZE’s general inbox “dozens of times,” failing, and eventually finding his way in through Chris Lewicki, then-CEO of the asteroid-mining startup Planetary Resources. By 2015, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence under Diamandis, building the CAR-T cell therapy startup Cellularity and the education venture Abundance Group. He later worked at Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures, splitting time between San Francisco and Beijing.

Scaramucci traces the same “brute force” instinct to his upbringing. The oldest of five children in what he called “a big, loud Italian family,” he watched his parents go from a one-bedroom apartment above a fire station in Tarrytown, N.Y. — “negative money in debt,” in his description — to a house in posh Manhasset, Long Island, by the time he reached high school. His mother, a chemical engineer, and his father, serial entrepreneur Anthony Scaramucci, gave him “a front row seat to [the] American dream.” That upbringing, he said, shaped his sales-first, ask-forgiveness-not-permission approach to sourcing deals and mentors alike.

Andrea Pasinetti, founder of the AI education startup Kira Learning, a Solari portfolio company, met Scaramucci at Stanford roughly 10 years ago, when Scaramucci was an MBA student. “He basically shared his worldview with me when we first had lunch. He started talking to me about programmable reality,” Pasinetti said. “There’s a remarkable consistency at a macro level with AJ that also permeates the micro.”

The Programmable Reality thesis

But what is Programmable Reality, really? As Scaramucci describes it, it’s the idea that as computational power keeps compounding, biology, intelligence, physical matter and money........

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