Fun Raising

Alex was employee number one at Palantir and now sits as a partner at 8VC, which is celebrating its ten-year mark and writing larger checks as the firm has grown. He set up 8VC's build program, which incubates a handful of companies a year, and he still interviews engineers and builds alongside founders. His framing is blunt: you are not just taking money, you are marrying operator-builders who he...

Morgan's path starts with 9-11 in New York. That day shaped nearly every professional choice that followed: NYPD counterterrorism, Navy reserve time overseas, then nearly a decade building companies, including Data Miner from Series C through F and Peregrine Technologies from seed to Series B. Venture came next at Venrock, then earlier this year a move with Evan Loomis and Jordan Blaszczak to take...

Caie's path is late-stage finance into hardware growth. Econ undergrad, JP Morgan tech investment banking in the DTC-goes-public era (including WeWork), then private equity, then a move west when talent started clustering around hard tech builders. A couple of years concentrating on companies ready to commercialize and scale manufacturing, then Lowercarbon Capital for the last few years on the sam...

Michael Gibson likes to say he has no business being in this business. He was working on a doctorate at Oxford in moral and ancient philosophy, following a T.S. Eliot-shaped plan to be a professor who wrote on the side, then dropped out, took a job at MIT's Technology Review, and on his first day working with Peter Thiel got pulled into announcing the Thiel Fellowship. He and co-founder Danielle S...

Ian came up as an operator first. He joined SoFi at about 25 people, then became founding chief of staff at Invisible Technologies, where he and the CEO pitched roughly 100 investors, took 99 nos, and got one angel yes. Only four or five of those conversations felt useful. That knocked VCs off a pedestal and sent him into a year and a half of raising Cantos I. He started the firm when hardware and...

Taylor did not come to venture through a typical banker or operator path. Space was the through-line: physics undergrad, aerospace and defense consulting on NASA Goddard ground-station work, time with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, then two and a half years at DARPA headquarters helping deploy nearly $150 million across advanced technologies. When he left government, he chased the role that...

Patty Wexler is not a default VC. She spent the first half of her career funding consumer internet at a $1.9B firm, then made a deliberate bet around 2015 that "so much IQ and so much capital in this little zip code" could not keep chasing the same three ideas. She now invests out of a small fund one at seed to A, across nuclear fusion, industrial automation software, magnesium, and drilling tech....

Arkady is a scientist and repeat founder who moved into venture specifically to solve a translation problem he kept watching play out: deeply technical founders who can't tell their story, meeting VCs who can't tell whether the science is real or "Theranos 2.0." That background shapes a fund that behaves differently from a default seed check. He leads first rounds, wants to be the first VC on the...

Matt Logan is a GP at Earthshot Ventures, a climate fund spun out of the nonprofit Elemental. What separates him from a default climate investor is that he doesn't lead with decarbonization. He looks for companies that win because they are cheaper, better, or faster, with the climate benefit as a byproduct of the core value prop rather than the pitch itself. His thesis, the clean intelligence stac...

Sarah Kunst is a sole GP who has been on both sides of the table: operator roles at companies like Chanel, Red Bull, and Apple, a founder whose own startup wound down, and a Sequoia scout before raising a roughly $3M first fund in 2018. That combination shows up in how she sources. She invests pre-seed through Series B, and unusually says she prefers the two ends (pre-seed and Series B) over seed...

Jason is an operator before he was an investor. He ran a division at SunEdison up to roughly $250M in revenue, went through YC in 2015 as a founder, and built Pioneer Fund out of the alumni network he kept gravitating back to. The structural difference from a default seed fund is the 500 YC alumni who serve as venture partners and LPs. When Pioneer takes an investment call, Jason pulls in three or...

Chisa comes to investing from the founder side. She co-founded Darklang, a programming language, and boldstart had backed that company before she joined the firm. That background shapes a specific lens: she evaluates founders less on market math and more on how they think about product and engineering. boldstart also does only one thing, which she treats as a feature rather than a limitation. They...

David Goldman came to venture from the other side of the table. He started as a semiconductor investment banker, then worked at a multifamily office that was an LP in Celesta, evaluating co-investments alongside the firm before joining it about six years ago. That vantage point shapes his advice: he thinks about funds as institutions with incentives and internal politics, not as monoliths that eit...

Vidyuk is not a generalist software investor applying pattern-matching to hard science. She has a physics degree, three PhDs and a Nobel laureate on her team, and she writes $500K to $2M checks from pre-seed to Series B in fields most funds avoid on principle. That background changes the diligence itself: she spent 18 months studying fusion and concluded the technology is roughly 20 months from wo...

Paige Doherty is a former engineer (Northrop Grumman, working on unmanned autonomous systems) who got into venture after writing a children's book about VC, and that background shapes a thesis most generalist seed investors don't share. She backs what she calls "technical storytellers," founders with deep domain expertise who can also communicate, and she writes $250K to $500K checks into overlook...

Aaron isn't a default VC. He spent ten years as an Army helicopter pilot and a West Point grad before an MBA pulled him into startups, and in 2015 he co-founded FirstMile with Bill Miller to be the first check for founders building in non-coastal markets. He writes $400K to $800K into rounds generally below $2M and leads roughly a third to a half of them, which he frames as deliberate: a check tha...

Winfield is a four-time operator (two IPOs, two acquisitions) who spent two years as investor-in-residence at the Allen Institute for AI before launching Ascend in 2019. That background drives a blunt thesis most polished VCs won't say out loud: pre-seed money from finance-trained "quants" is dangerous, because the people writing first checks need to understand the zero-to-one journey, not underwr...

Adam's route to running a venture studio puts him in a different position than most people giving fundraising advice. He came up through investment banking at Goldman Sachs, then spent time at Eric Schmidt's family office, and then worked inside a post-quantum encryption startup before founding Roadrunner. That last stint is the one that shaped the thesis: traditional VC is a pattern-matching mach...

Bob Mason isn't a finance-first VC. He spent his career as a software engineer and CTO, building two enterprise companies from team formation through public offering, and he invests the way an operator reads a room. That shows up in how he triages: before opening a deck, the only question is whether the company maps to a pattern already in Argon's portfolio. If you're a consumer shopping app or a...

Santiago Pliego built his thesis around a specific macro claim: the last 70 to 100 years represent an anomaly characterized by globalized Pax Americana, the offshoring of physical industry, and a massive over-rotation into software and financial abstraction. His argument is that we are now exiting that anomaly and returning to hard physical things, national sovereignty, and critical supply chains....

Rishabh is a pre-seed deep tech and frontier specialist at Gaingels, a 12-year-old venture syndicate that does not lead rounds. Instead it co-invests behind a lead at roughly 10% of the round (typically 250K and up at pre-seed and seed). His background is atypical for a VC: engineer trained in India, a stint at Goldman, deploying deep tech for the Indian government in remote terrain, then an inter...

Jake Storm came to venture through an unusual route: enterprise software sales at Qualtrics and Zuora, then investment banking (including working on Zuora's IPO), before Felicis. That background shapes how he thinks about founder outreach, pitch construction, and the investor relationship in ways that are meaningfully different from investors who came up purely through finance or pure operating. H...

Kenan brings a perspective that's rare even among founder-turned-investors: he's sitting inside one of the most visible early-stage programs in venture (Speedrun sees 20,000+ applications per cohort) while being only about six months into his role at a16z. That freshness means his advice isn't abstract or ten years removed from the founder experience. He sold his first company, Halo, to Lyft, got...

Zal isn't your average seed investor. He's the solo GP behind Refactor Capital, a hard tech seed fund based in Burlingame, and he just closed his fifth $50M fund. Before going solo, he spent a decade in product at Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn, then jumped to A16Z where he helped launch the Bio Fund. Today, he writes $1-2M checks into energy, aerospace, robotics, bio, and health. The cap tables he...

This is the role-reversal episode where Mat steps out from behind the host mic and gets grilled by Ali Rohde about his own playbook. Mat invests at Harpoon Ventures (deep tech, $1M to $5M checks) and runs Black Flag, Harpoon's pre-accelerator that often writes the very first check into companies before they've even incorporated. He came up as a YC founder (Zestful, killed by COVID), pivoted into V...