Refuse the Label

A label is a pre-installed way of seeing

Micky Malka states the case against labels as a claim about perception rather than about identity politics. Walking through life letting things carry a label makes life harder, in his account, because a label stops a person from seeing past it; once something is labeled, a person sees only what they have been told to see.¹ He traces the instinct to growing up in Venezuela, where he says the practice of sorting people into labels was simply absent from his environment, so he never learned to do it. He applies the refusal identically whether the label is trivial, being tall is treated as evidence a person must play basketball, or structural, being asked whether he is an investor or an entrepreneur. His answer to the second question is to reject the premise: "what about if I'm both? What about if I'm not any? Why do I need a label?"¹

The replacement is built to never be wrong

In place of a label, Malka uses a constructed description with two deliberately mismatched halves: an entrepreneur at heart, an investor by design. At heart signals something internal, which can change without ever contradicting a prior version of himself. By design signals a learned skill, something that only improves with practice and therefore never needs defending as fixed. Together the phrase is general enough to license any behavior on any given day without ever being provably wrong, and Malka is explicit that this is the point: "such a general line that allows me to do anything." His venture firm, Ribbit Capital, answers positioning questions about itself the same way. Early stage, yes. Late stage, yes. Fintech, yes. Defense, yes. He is explicit that he will not let anyone force a narrower category onto the firm.¹

The one exception, and what it reveals

There is a small set of labels Malka does want: good friend, good partner, good father, and, for his own tombstone, rebel. What distinguishes these from the labels he refuses is that each one describes a way of behaving rather than a category a person belongs to. A label that names conduct cannot trap the way a label that names a class can, since it is renewed by action rather than assigned once and then applied forever.¹

Why it is a strategy, not a pose

The practical argument is about keeping option value rather than about resisting categorization for its own sake. A label functions as a public commitment, and a public commitment constrains what a person or a firm can do later without being accused of drift; a firm that never claimed to be a fintech firm does not have to explain itself when it starts underwriting defense companies. The cost is real and Malka appears to accept it knowingly: refusing a label makes a firm harder to market, harder to recommend by word of mouth, and harder for a limited partner to file into a familiar category, a cost that is only affordable once a reputation exists that can substitute for the category a firm refuses to claim. David Senra's corollary, offered in the same conversation, is that a label implies conformity to an existing mold, and that great founders tend to be non-conformists by nature. Malka turns that observation into a stated reason rather than a temperament: "you have to be non-conformist because the world can always be better. So why accept whatever is there today?"¹