There is a pattern inside Harlem Capital’s investment philosophy that shows up everywhere: in the founders they back, the industries they target, and the market conditions they treat as opportunity rather than obstacle. Nicole Tommaso, a principal at the firm, put it plainly during a recent episode of VC Uncovered: “The best returns come from investing in market inefficiencies.” That single idea shapes how she reads a founder’s character, evaluates a company’s defensibility, and decides where the firm will focus its attention when everyone else is looking somewhere else.

Meet Nicole and Harlem Capital

Nicole joined Harlem Capital as an intern and fellow at the tail end of Fund One. Five and a half years later, she holds a principal seat at a firm that has since moved into Fund Two and grown into something that resembles, by her own description, a startup finding its growth stage. “Similar to a startup, everybody was doing everything in the beginning,” she said. “As you think about growth stage, everybody kind of has to focus on what they’re good at.”

Harlem Capital operates as a generalist, early-stage firm writing seed checks between $1 million and $2.5 million. The firm prefers to lead rounds because it wants to stay close to its portfolio companies and provide real operational support. Its recently launched tagline, All Winners Welcome, captures a founding principle that has not shifted even as the broader market conversation around diversity and inclusion has cooled considerably.

“We hate to see what’s happening,” Nicole said, referencing the retreat from DEI commitments across the industry. “But we stay steady. We’re going to do what we did from the beginning.”

Reading the Founder Before Reading the Business

Harlem Capital’s evaluation process at the seed stage leans heavily on character over financials, partly because early-stage companies often don’t have much in the way of financials to evaluate. Nicole described the firm’s approach as one that tries to understand a founder’s internal wiring before ever digging into the business plan.

“Markets are volatile and you need the person who is able to pivot and make things work regardless of the external factors,” she said.

The firm asks founders about their personal histories, how they grew up, and what shaped their thinking. One of its signature questions is deceptively simple: what is the earliest entrepreneurial endeavor you can remember?

“You’ll be surprised that people bring things back to being like 10 years old,” Nicole said. “They’re at recess and they’re selling candies. You know that it’s kind of innate and it’s in them.” The firm also tests for what she calls a “high slope of learning,” the ability to absorb new information quickly and do something with it. In a market where the relevant knowledge base shifts constantly, that quality matters more than any specific domain credential.

She was candid about the risk Harlem is trying to avoid: founders who have jumped onto a moment without a deep-rooted reason to see it through.

“This journey is a lot harder than you think,” she said. “We want to know that this is something that has been so deep in your bones that it’s inevitable.”

Where Software Never Landed

Harlem Capital has developed a formal investment theme it calls “leapfrogging legacy industries,” and it reflects a bet that some of the most durable opportunities in the current market sit inside sectors that traditional software never penetrated.

Nicole explained the logic directly. Many legacy businesses, from trucking to home services to skilled trades, never adopted enterprise software because the learning curve was too steep and the operational disruption too disruptive. They ran on relationships, paper, and phone calls. But AI tools, which generate outputs without requiring users to learn underlying systems, are now reaching these businesses in a way that software never could.

“They could have skipped over software, but now they’ll do AI because it does it for them,” she said. “It doesn’t need them.”

Harlem has already backed one company built around this thesis. Trash Lab is building an AI communications center for truckers, essentially a system that handles dispatch and route optimization through a phone call rather than a dashboard. “Truckers are never going to adopt software,” Nicole said. “They were never going to be on their computer inputting data. But now if they could just pick up the phone and call, AI comms does it for them.”

She also pointed to a broader generational shift. Baby Boomers are handing family-owned and small businesses to Millennials and Gen Z, who are far more comfortable with technology and more willing to invest in AI tools that produce measurable outcomes. That transition, she argued, opens a wide window for venture-backed companies to enter markets that were effectively closed to them a decade ago.

What Makes a Moat in a Zero-Cost Build Environment

Nicole was direct about how the economics of company creation have shifted. The cost of building a product has, by her description, fallen to near zero. Anyone can ship something. That reality changes what a defensible position actually looks like.

“What you have, ultimately, is speed,” she said. “Velocity of learning, velocity of shipping product. And you have data.” Proprietary data access, in her view, is one of the last remaining structural advantages a startup can hold. A competitor can replicate a tool but cannot replicate the training data behind it if that data came from years of specialized industry experience or exclusive partnerships.

The firm is also watching revenue per employee as a meaningful signal at later stages. Nicole cited Lovable as an example worth studying: the company reportedly scaled to $100 million in revenue in a single month with a staff that generated more than $1 million in revenue per person.

“We’re kind of making up new metrics to underwrite businesses now,” she said, “because the landscape has changed completely.”

On the ongoing debate between investing at the application layer versus the infrastructure layer, Nicole took a pragmatic stance. Foundation models will not solve every industry-specific problem on their own. Applications that fine-tune those models using specialized vertical data, she argued, serve a real purpose and deserve serious consideration. The deciding factor, as always, is the founder and whether they have done the customer research to know what they are actually building and for whom.

Building for the Long Game

Nicole closed the conversation with a few personal notes that illuminated how she operates day to day. She uses Claude as a thought partner and pairs it with GenSpark for presentations. Internally, Harlem is building custom Claude projects to automate recurring processes like deal memos, allowing anyone on the team to move through standard workflows without reinventing them each time.

Her wellness habit was equally straightforward: she reads for 30 minutes before bed instead of scrolling. “It turns off my brain,” she said. “It helps me fall asleep pretty instantly.”

The simplicity of that habit fits the larger approach she described throughout the conversation: clear inputs, disciplined habits, and a willingness to go where others are not. When asked what industry she would invest in outside of Harlem’s current focus, she picked consumer and pointed to beauty as a sector that is easy to underestimate and hard to time but powerful when it catches. “When consumer hits, it hits big,” she said.

That instinct, to see value where the math is harder and the outcome less predictable, is what runs through everything Nicole and Harlem Capital are building. The best opportunity, as she sees it, has always been the one that everyone else decided was not worth the effort.

This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We’re proud to have them as our sponsor. Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.

Read Nicole’s VC Uncovered Profile

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Connect with Edwin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwin-andrade/

Edwin Andrade grew up in the San Fernando Valley without a clear line of sight into venture capital. Nobody in his immediate world worked in tech. Nobody explained what a VC did. When he arrived at Princeton, a first-generation college student who had initially planned on UCLA, he was not just crossing a geographic boundary. He was entering a world that had never been mapped for him.

That experience of discovering what he did not know existed has, by his own account, become the core logic behind how Edwin invests today. “The vast majority of my life has kind of been about uncovering things I didn’t even know existed but were obviously there,” he says. The orientation shapes everything from where he looks for deals to the kind of founder he backs to the physical distance he keeps from the Bay Area’s gravitational pull.

Going on eight years at Core Innovation Capital, he is asking the questions most people are not.

The Uncovered Profile: Edwin’s Ideal State

Edwin lives in Santa Monica with the Pacific in his backyard, but Rio de Janeiro hits differently. His wife is Brazilian and the rhythm of life along Rio's beaches has taken on particular weight since their August wedding. The ideal day begins at the water, chairs small enough to carry, time loose enough to stay a few hours. By evening, sushi and wine, an admittedly unconventional pairing, he has no intention of reconsidering. Then, salsa dancing, which he and his wife have committed to with enough consistency to call themselves genuinely good. The combination, beach by day and dancing by night, is less about luxury than about presence.

The Logic of the Lead

Core Innovation Capital concentrates on seed and Series A, with a bias toward the seed. The fund has stayed deliberately lean, a team of four partners, and has resisted the pull toward later-stage expansion that has reshaped many of its peers. The mandate centers on financial services, healthcare, and insurance, with a specific orientation toward the everyday American consumer, a category that has broadened over time as the financial pressures once associated with lower-income households have steadily moved up the income ladder.

“I don’t need to be the loudest person in the room to stand out,” Edwin says. “I focus on asking the right questions and building conviction.” He is, by his own description, an introvert who has made peace with the demands of a relationship-intensive business by leaning into what that posture actually enables. Listening longer. Synthesizing more carefully. Building trust at a pace that compounds.

The founders that Core backs frequently mirror that quality. Edwin calls them “silent killers,” founders who do not bring the conventional high-voltage energy many investors use as a proxy for conviction, but whose ambition becomes unmistakable if you stay in the conversation long enough and ask the right questions. “I prioritize the ability to inspire and build great products over the desire to chase the title of a venture-backed CEO,” he says.

He was a devoted Kobe Bryant fan growing up. The Mamba Mentality, he says, maps directly onto how he works and what he values in founders.

“It’s about putting in the hours, trusting that they compound over time, and never worrying about someone outworking you. That mindset of quiet, consistent execution is exactly what I look for in founders today.”

Capital as Culture

Core’s stated mission is to unlock wealth and health for the everyday American. Edwin draws a clear line between that orientation and conventional impact investing. Returns come first. In the markets Core targets, that priority and the broader social outcome tend to move together rather than pull against each other.

The reasoning runs through lived experience. Edwin watched his family interact with financial products designed for consumers like them in theory, but rarely in practice. When he joined Core, several portfolio companies were already names his family recognized. That proximity between thesis and personal reality has not faded. If anything, it has sharpened.

The current wave of AI investment is where Edwin parts ways with much of the prevailing narrative. He is skeptical of how evenly the benefits will land. “As this AI wave has kind of hit us all, it’s easy to lose sight of what the typical American is dealing with day to day,” he says. He believes the wealth gap is more likely to widen than narrow in the near term, and he frames that as an investable observation rather than a pessimistic prediction. The companies Core is backing are building toward a world where financial decisions can be automated for people who lack the time, tools, or background to optimize them manually.

One of the portfolio companies, Abode, addresses property taxes. The workflow is nearly entirely automated: a homeowner agrees to engage, the system identifies grounds for a reduction, and the savings arrive with minimal friction on the consumer side. Edwin describes it as a first step toward something larger, a platform that treats the home as a manageable financial asset rather than a static one. The analogy he reaches for is Credit Karma, applied to homeownership.

The broader concept he returns to is agentic automation, technology that does not merely surface information but executes decisions within appropriate guardrails. He is also tracking SMB enablement, specifically how small business owners, many of whom are not highly tech-fluent, can now access tools that remove operational friction at a scale previously unattainable.

The View From Santa Monica

Edwin’s most useful distance from the consensus is geographic and intellectual. Being based in Santa Monica rather than San Francisco is not incidental to his process. “I think the ecosystem would benefit from being less tied to the Bay Area’s craziness,” he says.

“Being based in Santa Monica allows me to step back from the echo chamber and stay grounded when evaluating opportunities. Focusing on fundamentals is where the most meaningful innovation will happen.”

His thinking on fund construction has evolved alongside AI. He is more bullish than ever on small teams. AI has fundamentally changed what two or three people can build and how fast they can move. But he has pulled back from the more extreme version of that thesis.

The solo founder locking up a generational, category-defining company is a harder story to tell today. A lean team can absolutely build a billion-dollar business, but holding the category is a different challenge. The moment you prove out a market, someone will find the capital you left on the table.

“The venture business has never been better structured to fuel outsized outcomes with breakout companies able to access unprecedented amounts of capital.”

Getting to a billion is more achievable than ever. Staying ahead is the bigger problem.

The Founder’s Advocate

One of the less visible dimensions of Edwin’s work is narrative support. The founders Core backs are frequently not the ones building loud public profiles. They are building products. “Many amazing founders are executing well, but are not the first ones to post on LinkedIn because they are focused on the product,” he says.

“As VCs, part of our role is to help them clearly tell their story to other investors, whether that’s refining their narrative, sharpening their deck, or supporting them through diligence.”

There is something specific embedded in that commitment. If your edge as an investor comes from finding founders others overlooked, part of your obligation is making them legible to the next investor in the round. You found them because you ask better questions. Now you have to help them answer the questions others will ask.

Edwin has been asking better questions, in one form or another, since he sat in high school in the Valley, wondering where else to look. The answer has remained consistent: wherever the crowd is not, and wherever the problems are real.

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Connect with Charles

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chudson/

Charles Hudson has a simple theory about where venture capital goes wrong. The best opportunities, he believes, are not hiding in plain sight. They are standing outside the room, unable to get a meeting.

Charles founded Precursor Ventures in 2014 after leaving Uncork Capital, then called Soft Tech, where he had helped back Fitbit, Poshmark, Postmates, and Eventbrite. The financial returns from those early funds gave Uncork the runway to scale significantly, eventually reaching a fund size near $400 million. But as the firm grew, the model changed. Concentrated checks, more board seats, and founders further along. Charles understood why. He just did not want to do it.

“In order to do the kind of work I wanted to do,” he said, “I was going to have to be in a much smaller firm focused on writing those early checks.”

So he left, set up Precursor with a target of $15 to $25 million, and started writing 75 checks per fund to companies most institutional investors would not touch. Eleven years later, the math, as he puts it, feels like it has worked out.

The Uncovered Profile: Charles’s Ideal State

Picture Charles somewhere in Hawaii, a glass of white burgundy nearby, or a Chablis if the afternoon has that kind of ease to it. A Chelsea football match is on a large television, loud enough to feel like you’re right there. His family is around him, his nine-year-old son somewhere in the house, most likely settled into one of the audiobooks he plays through the Sonos system Charles has come to rely on for keeping the household running without interruption.

During the workday, a physical device called Brick sits between Charles and the apps that would otherwise compete for his attention. LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, and anything else he describes as “doom scrolly” are blocked during working hours by a hardware profile he cannot easily override in the moment. He did not realize how much time he was losing to mindless scrolling until he removed the option entirely. The same intentionality runs through how he thinks about capital, people, and time. Nothing idle. Everything placed with care.

The First-Time Founder Thesis

Charles’s most consistent conviction is one that much of the industry has moved away from: first-time founders are worth backing, and backing them early is worth the ambiguity.

Roughly 70 percent of Precursor’s portfolio companies are started by people who have never done this before. They have not managed budgets. They have not hired or fired anyone. They may not have a product. What Charles is trying to assess is something harder to observe directly.

“How much latent managerial upside and entrepreneurial talent does this person have that hasn’t been utilized in their previous career?” is the question he asks himself when a founder is in front of him. He is, by definition, making forward projections about people who have not yet been tested in the role they are about to take on.

The trait he values most is prior experience in a zero-to-one environment, though he is careful about what that means. It does not require a previous startup. He has backed people who started nonprofits, who led community organizations, and who built things informally. The relevant variable is whether they have opted into the chaos of creating something from nothing, and whether they are prepared to opt back into it.

Domain expertise is relevant roughly half the time. The other half of Precursor’s companies have been started by what Charles calls naive outsiders, founders who looked at an industry without the accumulated assumptions of someone who grew up inside it. In regulated markets, he finds this particularly valuable. People who know all the rules have often internalized those rules as constraints. People who are only vaguely familiar with them sometimes find creative paths that insiders never consider.

The portfolio example he returns to most often is Pair Eyewear, an eyeglasses company he backed when its two founders were 22 years old and freshly out of Stanford. A decade later, they are still running the company, which has scaled to a meaningful revenue level. No management changes are planned. Charles describes this arc as emotionally satisfying in a way that is distinct from a rapid return: finding someone raw and watching them build a sizable business over 10 or 15 years.

The Fund Within the Fund

Precursor’s model is built around a simple but underserved gap. About 60 percent of its activity goes into classic pre-seed rounds, defined as a company’s first investment of $1.5 million or less. Another 25 to 30 percent covers seed rounds in the two- to four-million-dollar range. The remaining 10 percent is a buffer for deals that are simply more expensive, such as a recent investment into a company raising a ten million dollar round at a 40 million dollar valuation, led by an unnamed multi-stage firm, alongside a founder Precursor had previously backed.

The fund’s investment team comprises five people: Charles, three principals, and an associate, with support at any time from two graduate interns. Charles is the sole general partner.

What makes the structure unusual is how he uses authority. A few years ago, Charles gave each principal a dedicated pool of capital they could deploy without his approval, subject to the fund’s LPA guidelines. The explicit goal is to filter for taste, not to teach a framework. If a principal wants to write a check larger than their individual ceiling, they involve Charles, and the deal requires his input. Otherwise, the call is entirely theirs.

“Whatever you pick is what you pick,” he told his team. The result is that the portfolio reflects genuinely distinct sensibilities. One team member turns over high volume, meets many founders, and moves quickly. Another is selective, rarely takes a first meeting, and moves slowly. Both are producing results.

No Standard Mold

Charles has never run a conventional fund and shows little interest in starting. Precursor’s portfolio includes an infant formula company, a women’s ski wear brand, a dog boarding concept that inverted the traditional hotel model, a space communications investment, a nuclear energy company, and what he describes as a “dating glow up” company started by someone he has known for years.

He connects this openness partly to a career that has moved between very different organizational contexts. Before and alongside Precursor, Charles has been involved with In-Q-Tel, the San Francisco Opera, and his alma mater, Stanford, among more than 40 listed engagements. He is candid about not being especially good at stepping back from commitments once he has made them.

What this breadth has given him, in his telling, is a better understanding of how non-startup organizations operate. When portfolio companies sell into universities or government agencies and find themselves frustrated by the pace, Charles can explain why. Those institutions are not broken. They are optimized for different things.

He extends this sensibility to software at large. His view on AI is more restrained than the current enthusiasm suggests. He is long-term constructive on the technology, but believes many of the first-generation application companies are paving a road that others will travel rather than capturing the bulk of the value themselves. His more pointed concern is structural. AI, in his view, is deflationary for software. It shifts value from vendor to consumer in a way the industry has not had to account for before. Products that cost $1,000 today may cost $100 in two years and perform better. Pure software businesses, he believes, face a harder long-term equation than most current valuations reflect.

Playing Their Own Game

Charles is direct about the deliberate choice at the center of Precursor’s model. The current moment in venture has concentrated an unusual share of the industry’s capital in the hands of a small number of large firms. Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Index, Lightspeed, and their peers effectively anoint which companies matter, and a meaningful portion of the industry calibrates its judgment by what those firms choose to pursue.

Precursor sits outside that system by design. The companies Charles is writing checks into are nearly always too early, too unconventional, or too outside established networks to attract attention from large funds whose minimum ownership requirements and fund sizes require a different kind of opportunity. He is clear-eyed about what that requires from him and his team.

“You’re just going to be unpopular for long periods of time,” he said, describing what it means to operate outside the current consensus. “Because many of the things we’re doing are not in the sweet spot of the biggest firms in our industry.” The key, in his view, is understanding which game you are actually playing. Strategies that work for a 250 million fund do not necessarily translate to a multi-billion-dollar platform, and vice versa. Copying a model without understanding its underlying mechanics is a risk in itself.

His advice to the founders he backs mirrors his own position. Have a point of view. Exercise good judgment about what actually matters in a fast-moving environment. Stay adaptable without treating every announcement as a signal worth chasing.

The people he is looking for, at whatever stage they are at, share something simpler. When he asks whether they have found product-market fit, he does not reach for a metric. He asks whether they are up at 11 p.m. because they are anxious and searching for an answer, or because the demand they have created can barely be managed.

Chasing a rock downhill, he calls it. That is the feeling. You can barely keep up.

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Connect with Rachel

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelstern/

VC Uncovered’s View

Most venture capital is a race for velocity. Rachel Stern’s work is a study in friction.

At GovTech Ventures, the risk is not that a company fails to find a market; the risk is that the founder lacks the endurance to survive the procurement cycle. In the state and local government sectors, growth is not measured in viral loops or weekly active users. It is measured in the legislative sessions, committee hearings, and the slow, deliberate movement of municipal budgets. Rachel is betting on the “sticky” reality of infrastructure.

Rachel does not view government technology as a subset of defense or federal contracting. She believes that framing ignores the five thousand cities and three thousand counties that manage the actual mechanics of American life. Capital in this space is not a tool for blitz-scaling. It is a strategic input designed to navigate the distance between a pilot program and a multi-year contract. In a market where adoption lags by nearly a decade, Rachel believes durability is the only true competitive advantage.

The Uncovered Profile: Rachel’s Ideal State

The setting is Napa, California, where the light is soft, and the pace is intentionally analog. Rachel is in the kitchen; the air is filled with the scent of fresh vegetables being prepped for a dinner for 10. Her husband is chilling a bottle of champagne, waiting for the precise moment to pour. At her feet, two large, aging doodles are asleep, undisturbed by the music playing in the background. This is a scene defined by hospitality and conversation. There is no performative networking here; there is only the quiet satisfaction of sharing a meal with people she loves, far removed from the theater of the boardroom.

The Geometry of the State Capital

Rachel Stern spent 15 years operating in the fractured landscape of state and local government before she decided to formalize her expertise into a fund. She did not arrive at this niche by accident. She previously founded a firm that transformed a network of state-level lobbyists into a strategic asset for category-defining companies. When Zoom, Lyft, and Square needed to navigate complex regulatory environments, they hired Rachel. She has seen, firsthand, the power of a state to create or destroy a market.

The launch of GovTech Ventures in late 2025 was a response to a specific hole in the venture ecosystem. While billions of dollars flowed into “frontier tech” and federal defense contracts, the mundane systems that manage trash pickup, school funding, and streetlights remained underserved. Rachel is raising a $15 million Fund to address this gap. She is a solo GP focusing on pre-seed and seed stages. She closed the first portion of the fund in December; a second close followed in April.

The logic of her investment thesis is rooted in the customer's “stickiness.” Once a technology is integrated into a government workflow, the churn is remarkably low. Rachel targets companies selling products to state and local governments, where the total addressable market is limited, but retention is nearly absolute. She looks for 80% margins and net revenue retention exceeding 100%. In this corner of the market, a company does not need to be a “unicorn” to be a success.

The Logic of the Lead

Rachel maintains a contrarian stance on federal contracting. She avoids the Department of Defense and the federal government entirely, viewing those markets as governed by fundamentally different buying mechanics. The federal government operates on a 50-year horizon of global dominance. State and local governments operate on one to five-year election cycles. They are concerned with the city’s immediate functionality.

This distinction shapes her fund’s architecture. Because the sales cycle in GovTech can range from six to 18 months, the capital must be patient. Rachel provides her founders with what she calls “optionality.”

“As an investor, I would love to invest in another billion-dollar company; I’ve done that, and I have that track record. But what I’m looking for now is a conversation with my startups that says my goal is to give you the optionality to sell at any point you want. There is no unicorn pressure. If you want to build a billion-dollar company, I will do my best to enable that. But if you want to build a $50 million, $100 million, or $500 million company and sell in the next three years, we can do that too. There are different decisions those companies have to make early.”

The exit environment in GovTech has shifted significantly over the last four years. Large incumbents, such as Cox Media, which acquired OpenGov for $1.8 billion, are actively looking to buy innovation. They are often willing to pay double-digit multiples for startups with less than $10 million in annual recurring revenue. For Rachel’s LPs, many of whom are existing GovTech founders and family offices, this model provides a faster return on invested capital than traditional venture funds.

Capital as Culture

Rachel describes herself as a hands-on investor. She does not merely write checks; she “beats up slide decks” and coaches founders on the nuances of go-to-market strategy. She often spends a month working with a founder before committing to an investment to ensure they are coachable. This is a requirement born of experience. The mistakes in GovTech are expensive and time-consuming; a founder who cannot hear strategic feedback will rarely survive the bureaucracy of a state capital.

Her advice to founders is rooted in a specific metric: 50 conversations. Rachel believes that a founder must talk to at least 50 potential government customers before building a product. She is looking for the “grit” required to navigate systems that are not designed to be navigated. In her view, early traction is defined by three pilots or one solid contract. Once that repeatable motion is found, Rachel uses her network of LPs to help the founder scale from one contract to 20.

This people-to-people approach is a departure from traditional B2B SaaS, where scale is often driven by marketing spend. In government, people buy from people they know. Success in one city often creates a network effect, with neighboring municipalities seeking the same solution. A happy government customer is a founder’s best salesperson; they want to tell their peers about systems that actually work.

The Messy Middle of the AI Era

Rachel has lived through three major cycles of government innovation: the cloud adoption of 2011, the mass digitization of the pandemic, and the current AI era. She is skeptical of “pure AI plays” in the current market. She believes government data is currently too messy for AI to be transformative on its own. Much of the critical data remains trapped in filing cabinets, legacy Microsoft 2003 systems, or analog forms.

“Bad data in, bad data out,” is her guiding principle. She is currently focused on the “messy middle”: companies that help governments digitize analog data sets to prepare for an AI future. She prefers traditional SaaS platforms with integrated AI functionality over speculative AI tools. While governments are eager to keep pace with the private sector, they will always require a “human in the loop.” They cannot simply automate their way out of their workforces.

Rachel also monitors the growing tension between federal and state regulations. While the federal government attempts to prevent states from passing anti-competitive AI legislation, states like Colorado and New Jersey are already moving forward with their own rules. This regulatory vacuum creates a challenge for founders; they are often unsure what they are legally allowed to sell. Rachel’s role is to help them navigate this friction while ensuring their tools remain secure and constituent data remains protected.

The Aesthetic of Durability

Rachel Stern’s work is entirely focused on the tangible. She values the durability of the systems that keep a city running. Her measure of success is not just the financial return for her LPs, but the increased visibility of state and local markets. She wants constituents and investors to pay more attention to the city councils and state senates that dictate daily life.

“Our day-to-day lives are impacted by state and local decisions in a much more profound way than anything happening in Congress. When’s the last time you thought about your city council or who is going to be in your state Senate? We have a level of control over those processes as constituents that we simply don’t have at the federal level. Success for me is getting people to think about those markets as a user, because these are the places where our lives are most directly impacted.” Her personal tools reflect this blend of the digital and the physical. She uses a mix of AI models such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, to refine her weekly video series on GovTech go-to-market strategies. She finds that bouncing ideas between models helps her maintain her own voice. At home, she is a proponent of Tesla’s Full Self-Drive technology, viewing it as a profound shift in how we interact with our environment.

Ultimately, Rachel is looking for a specific type of person: someone who wants to transform a legacy system that is slow and paper-based. She admires the patience required to work in a market that lags the enterprise by a decade. For Rachel, the work is about more than technology; it is about the grit required to make government function better for the people it serves.

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Connect with Mercedes

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mercedesbent/

The Logic of the Leap

On Sand Hill Road, where nearly every firm markets itself as founder-friendly, Mercedes Bent is building something far more exacting. As the co-founder of Premise, a venture capital firm launched last year, Mercedes is not merely writing checks, she is engineering a community-first ecosystem designed to solve the isolation of the technical founder.

The move comes after a distinguished tenure at Lightspeed and a career that spans the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, and senior operating roles where she helped scale companies to $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Mercedes is a generalist by trade but a behavioral economist by training, possessing a rare ability to identify the irrational heuristics that govern market cycles. While the industry remains fixated on B2B infrastructure, she is looking toward the “new real estate” of AI, in voice-driven consumer applications, prosumer tools, and B2B that spreads bottom-up.

Mercedes is part of a new vanguard of investors who view venture capital as a product rather than a service. Alongside her partner, Vanessa Larco, she is betting that the next generational companies will be built by “spiky” technical founders who prioritize product craft over consensus. In an era of groupthink, Mercedes represents the “discovery” moment for LPs seeking an investor who understands that the highest returns often hide behind the most unpopular opinions.

Meet Mercedes

If you want to understand Mercedes, look to the water. Her ideal day is a split-screen of high-energy connection and literary escapism.

“My happy place is somewhere waterside, Tahoe or Italy, on a boat or a lake house where people are running around and talking.”

Mercedes is a pragmatist who values efficiency, whether she’s using AI to structure voice data or outsourcing her wardrobe to Rent the Runway to avoid the mall. This tech-forward mindset allows her to protect her downtime, which she fills with active mornings on the trail and long-form sci-fi series like Red Rising. For her, a perfect day is defined by community; it starts with a hike, followed by lazing together by or in the water, then cooking a group meal with family and friends, and ends with falling asleep on the couch while watching something together.

The Architecture of Conviction

Premise is built on the belief that venture capital is currently failing the technical founder. Mercedes and her partner have structured the fund to stay small, focusing on pre-seed and seed stages with the intent of becoming a generational firm. The “value-add” here is not a generic platform team, but dedicated IRL communities, such as the engineering and research community called Surreal.

By treating community as a product, Mercedes has created a flywheel for deal flow that bypasses traditional application processes. Surreal brings together future founders and industry leaders, including executives from Anthropic, Roblox, and Character AI, in intimate dinner circles. This architecture reflects her “Hierarchy of Metrics” thesis, which places “customer love” at the base of the pyramid. To Mercedes, product craft is the ultimate signal. She targets founders whose products feel magical on first use, leveraging system design and embedded workflows to create defensibility in an increasingly commoditized AI market.

Market Friction and Contrarian Beliefs

Premise is a generalist firm, however we think the most unpopular opinion Mercedes holds is that firms that ignore consumer are not true generalists and that the consumer software market is not dead. It is being unleashed again thanks to AI. She argues that new technology waves require “new real estate” to thrive. While the mobile wave matured by 2015, resulting in saturated ad networks and algorithmic gatekeeping, AI has opened a new frontier. She identifies voice as a primary new input that expands the surface area of human-computer interaction, creating opportunities that “herdy” investors, blinded by recency bias, are currently overlooking.

This bias extends to the founders themselves. Mercedes points to a systemic failure in the venture ecosystem where investors often make decisions based on whether a founder “looks like a fundraiser.” This groupthink is a significant driver behind the stagnant statistic that only 2% of venture-backed CEOs are women. Mercedes views this not just as a social friction, but as a market inefficiency to be exploited. She prefers to ignore the consensus, instead focusing on “spiky” potential and visceral gut feel, a skill she has honed to avoid the “anti-portfolio” of missed unicorns.

"Most of investors' role is actually making clear non-emotional logical decisions consistently. Those are some of the biggest skills you have to master if you want to be a great investor."

The “Why Now” of the Portfolio

The Premise portfolio is being assembled at the precipice of an AI washout. Mercedes is vocal about her desire for the current AI hype cycle to “pop” sooner rather than later. Her reasoning is tactical, she wants to wash out the “herdy” capital and “hype driven opportunistic product ideas”, leveling the playing field for founders and investors who rely on first-principles thinking and solve real customer problems, rather than looking for a money-grab.

She is currently deploying capital into AI-native tools that serve “power users,” those who demand high-fidelity execution and magical user experiences. Her investment in research labs and prosumer tools is a bet on the “system of record” of the future. By investing in founders who ship fast and obsess over the emotional pull of their products, Mercedes is positioning Premise to lead the post-bubble recovery where utility and craft will once again outrank speculation.

The Capital Horizon

Mercedes is currently focused on identifying the next $100 million in opportunities within the prosumer and AI-native application layers. She remains a software generalist, moving across fintech, dev tools, and B2B app layers, provided the founder exhibits the technical “spikiness” she craves. As the market recalibrates, look for Mercedes to double down on voice-first interfaces and decentralized research labs, areas where she believes the “new land” is still waiting to be titled.

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Connect with Selina

https://www.linkedin.com/in/selinatroesch/

Selina Troesch grew up in Redwood City in the 1990s, when the early internet era made entrepreneurs feel larger than life, and technology felt both nerdy and electric. That proximity to innovation mattered. So did her instinct for numbers.

At NYU, she studied economics and mathematics, with a focus on behavioral economics. She was drawn to where models break down, where bias creeps into financial decisions, and where human behavior disrupts neat theoretical assumptions. That curiosity led her to mortgage-backed securities during the financial crisis, where she was pricing risk at a moment when financial models were under extraordinary strain.

The work was rigorous. It was also clarifying. As intellectually engaging as structured finance was, it did not feel close enough to how individuals and small businesses actually experience the financial system.

She decided to pivot.

Business school became the bridge. During her MBA, she met one of the co-founders of Touchdown Ventures, a firm that partners with large corporations to design and manage venture capital programs. She joined early and spent eight years working across corporate partners, including 20th Century Fox and ScottsMiracle-Gro.

One lesson crystallized during that time. Venture inside a corporation is its own discipline. It is not M&A. It is not business development. It serves a distinct role within an innovation strategy.

That foundation brought her to Intuit Ventures, where she joined a team of three and helped grow the program into a portfolio of nearly 20 companies.

Meet Selina

Q: You can be anywhere eating, drinking, reading. Paint the scene.
A: I’m in a coffee shop in a comfy chair, reading a mystery novel with hot chocolate. If my two-year-old is sitting calmly next to me, that’s even better.

Intuit Ventures

Intuit Ventures focuses primarily on Series B companies, with some flexibility around A and C. Selina is deliberate about why that stage matters.

“For us, Series B is really about companies that have established a solid revenue base, that have evidence of repeat customer behavior where we can assess just how resonant the solution is with customers.”

At that stage, she evaluates expansion behavior, reliance, and whether the product is solving a truly painful problem for consumers or small to mid-sized businesses.

The mandate aligns with Intuit’s broader mission of powering prosperity for consumers and small businesses. Some areas are too close to core products like QuickBooks, TurboTax, Credit Karma, or Mailchimp. Others are adjacent but non-competitive, such as a property tax solution for homeowners. The question is whether the company serves the same customers and advances financial well-being without overlapping directly.

Strategic and financial considerations sit on a spectrum in her view.

The team first evaluates whether a deal works on its own financially. Does the revenue trajectory support a credible return? Only then do they build the strategic case. The investment committee will not approve a deal that fails either test.

The Firewall

One structural feature matters deeply inside a corporate venture unit: the firewall.

Intuit Ventures reports to the same senior leader as corporate development, but sensitive startup data does not cross teams without explicit consent. Financial information shared during diligence stays within the venture team unless the entrepreneur agrees otherwise.

If corporate development expresses interest in a portfolio company, Selina brokers the introduction. She does not serve as a conduit for private information.

The separation protects trust. It also clarifies that the ventures program is designed for insight and collaboration, not acquisition leverage. In her view, the ventures program provides a high-volume, credible signal about what is gaining traction in the market. It is an addition to the innovation toolkit, not a substitute for M&A.

Investment Philosophy

Selina anchors on two dimensions: the customer and the founding team.

On the customer side, she asks whether the company delivers something customers cannot find elsewhere or solves a need in a meaningfully better way. At Series B, execution matters deeply. It is less about pedigree and more about whether a founder’s experiences uniquely position them to tackle this problem at this moment.

The most compelling founders can clearly articulate what they have seen fail before and why today's technology enables a different outcome.

During due diligence, she supplements references with public review platforms such as G2 when appropriate. In direct customer conversations, she listens not just for praise but for hesitation, especially around renewal or expansion. Tone often reveals more than language.

How She Thinks About Risk

As a corporate investor, reputational risk carries particular weight.

If a company could plausibly face regulatory investigation, especially in lending or consumer finance, the bar rises. Intuit’s name will appear prominently in any negative headline. That reality shapes diligence.

She also guards against overcorrection. A failed investment in a category can create internal scar tissue. The harder question is whether that failure reflects structural risk in the category or execution issues specific to one company.

Speed presents another tension. Rounds close quickly. Lead investors move fast. Intuit Ventures does not lead deals, which means Selina often operates on someone else’s timeline.

Her stance is clear:

“I would prefer to miss out than to give up on doing the work that I think is important to understand the risks and opportunities that I am putting capital behind.”

She would rather miss a deal than relax her standards.

Signals and Success

Success at Intuit Ventures is measured across multiple dimensions.

Yes, the team tracks financial metrics such as IRR and MOIC. But they are also evaluated on how effectively they disseminate insight across the organization.

That can mean introducing business units to potential partners, helping corporate development understand a landscape, or flagging patterns such as a cluster of seed-stage companies building in the same space. Even if those companies are small relative to Intuit’s scale, the pattern itself is a signal.

Trends and What’s Ahead

In fintech, Selina sees a post-hype phase. The overinvestment of 2021 and 2022 created a reset. She is wary of products that blur the line between investing and gambling. She believes regulation in financial services exists for a reason.

When companies deal with people’s money, respect for that framework matters.

What interests her is a reframing of personal finance.

Personal finance, she argues, is not an individual sport. It is a team sport.

As financial lives become more intertwined across generations, she is watching companies that help families coordinate and protect their financial well-being. That includes tools that prepare families for children, platforms that support financial literacy for kids, and services that help adult children monitor fraud risks for aging parents.

These companies may be small today. But they reflect a deeper shift in how financial well-being is managed collectively.

Advice to Founders

The window for figuring things out is narrowing.

If a founder intends to build a venture-funded business, the bar for revenue, metrics, and clarity is higher than it was several years ago. Rounds close quickly for companies that hit the right pressure points. When a round lingers, investors ask why.

For founders still refining product-market fit or customer segmentation, that dynamic creates additional pressure. Selina finds it frustrating at times. It also makes her job harder, particularly when operating on compressed timelines.

But her position remains steady. Diligence matters.

A Final Thought

Selina describes herself as someone who sits between cultures. As a first-generation American with parents born in Europe, she is comfortable in nuance. She sees context before absolutes.

That instinct shapes how she invests. Different business models demand different benchmarks. Patterns evolve. Metrics that defined a breakout SaaS company five years ago may not apply today.

In a market that often prizes speed and certainty, Selina moves deliberately. She weighs financial and strategic dimensions carefully, maintains clear boundaries inside a corporate structure, and keeps her attention fixed on the customer.

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Connect with Sherman

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sherman-williams/

The Calculus of Command

In the volatile landscape of deep tech, where the horizon between a laboratory breakthrough and a market-ready product can span decades, Sherman Williams is building a different kind of ledger. As the co-founder of AIN Ventures, Sherman anchors the fluid, often chaotic world of early-stage venture capital with the military's rigid discipline. While the broader market frequently chases the latest SaaS iteration, Sherman is looking toward the stars and the microscopic, anchored by a proprietary internal intelligence system he calls the AIN Brain.

The transition from a syndicate model to a fully institutional fund in 2024 marked a pivotal shift for the firm. Sherman, a Kauffman Fellow who sharpened his financial teeth in M&A investment banking after serving in the military, has designed a fund architecture that treats human potential as a quantifiable asset. By focusing on dual-use technologies, those that serve both government interests and commercial markets, he is betting that the most significant returns lie where national security meets private sector productivity.

Meet Sherman

Sherman Williams lives at the intersection of data-driven discipline and a deep-seated optimism for the future. When he envisions his “happy place,” Sherman is happiest being at the beach with his partner.

However, the true centerpiece of Sherman’s perfect day isn’t the scenery; it’s the dialogue. His mind is rarely far from his core mission: the power of innovation. “I believe technology can change the world,” he says, a mantra that appears on his LinkedIn and drives his career. To Sherman, a day well-spent involves sharing great food and deep conversation with “amazing people,” debating how science and technology can be leveraged to improve the human condition. It is a philosophy of being “present in the present”—recognizing that life is a gift and using his time to ensure the world is better for those who follow.

The Logic of the Lead

The architecture of AIN Ventures is built on a foundation of “data-informed” conviction. Sherman is quick to distinguish this from being purely data-driven, a distinction that allows for the “serendipity of the outlier.” At the pre-seed stage, the firm’s internal weighting is aggressive, assigning the overwhelming majority of its investment decision to the quality of management. The market size and technological differentiation, while important, make up the rest of the investment decision-making calculation.

As a company matures into the seed stage, Sherman shifts the calculus, placing much more emphasis on the market's expected growth and technological differentiation. This shift reflects a belief that, by the seed round, a founder must transition from a visionary to a technician of market penetration. The AIN Brain, the internal AI platform Sherman developed as his Kauffman capstone project, tracks these metrics across hundreds of deals, seeking to identify and eliminate the unconscious biases that often cloud human judgment in the high-stakes world of deep tech.

Market Friction and the Dual-Use Pivot

The “Contrarian Signal” at AIN Ventures is a rejection of the traditional skepticism surrounding government contracts. For years, the venture community viewed government funding as a “kiss of death,” suggesting a lack of commercial viability. Sherman views this as an outdated relic. He argues that dual-use capability is a potent de-risking tool, providing non-dilutive capital and a stable, albeit demanding, anchor customer.

However, Sherman maintains a “commercial-first” philosophy. He expects his portfolio companies to eventually derive the majority of their revenue from the private sector. He treats the government-commercial split not as a balance, but as a series of tactical priorities. Much like the work-life balance debate, he believes that at any given moment, one side must take precedence to ensure the survival of the whole.

“What attracts me to founders are those who can clearly and concisely articulate a gap in a market, why they are uniquely qualified to build for it, and how they will go to market. You have to be able to recruit talent to join you on a crazy, Don Quixote-type experience. That is a skill.”

The Convergence of Space and Life

Sherman is currently deploying capital into two primary frontiers: the orbital economy and the automation of drug discovery. In space, he sees a complete greenfield, driven by the collapsing cost of launch and the rise of on-orbit compute power. He isn’t just looking for rocket companies, but for the infrastructure that will support a multi-planetary species, from lunar logistics to asteroid mining.

Simultaneously, Sherman is focused on the “marginal cost of labor” approaching the “cost of energy.” He believes that AI-driven automation in wet labs will rescue failed drug discoveries and create massive, proprietary data sets that were previously impossible to aggregate. By investing in technologies that increase productivity exponentially, he is positioning AIN Ventures to catch the wave of price deflation that typically follows such massive efficiency gains.

The Capital Horizon

As Sherman looks toward the next $100 million in deployment, he is focused on the global race for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). He views this race as more consequential than the development of nuclear weapons, with the potential for far greater humanitarian benefit. His focus remains on “FLOPs per second, per kilowatt-hour, per dollar,” seeking the efficiency gains that will allow the United States to lead in AI without compromising the environment. For Sherman, the goal is clear: building the world he wants to live in, one data-informed investment at a time.

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Connect with Demi

https://www.linkedin.com/in/demiladeobayomi/

VC Uncovered’s View

While the common narrative portrays the investor as a central decision-maker, Demi Obayomi operates under the conviction that the actual work is that of a recruiter, community builder, and/or product person. To Demi, the investment is the byproduct of a well-maintained network.

The hardest part of Demi’s day is maintaining a high-velocity filter while navigating the B2B spectrum at Sapphire Ventures, where he evaluates everything from Series B startups to pre-IPO companies. The pressure lies in distinguishing "spiky" outliers from the noise of a saturated market; if he defaults to safe, structured resolutions, he misses the unconventional founders who drive outsized returns. In this high-stakes environment, getting it almost right but failing to take raw action results in the loss of a deal to more agile competitors; movement matters more than a perfect plan.

Demi believes that AI is not an efficiency tool, but a structural shift that will eventually require every individual to operate as their own small business. He believes the most significant transformations will occur when this technology is integrated into the core backbones of the economy like real estate, healthcare, and supply chain; this integration will effectively flatten the ecosystem so that geographic proximity to major tech hubs no longer dictates a founder’s access to capital.

Meet Demi

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.

A: Some of my happiest moments are always outdoors. I remember a trip to Tahoe with a couple of friends where we skied all day, no breaks. Even though I’m not an amazing skier, the high from that exertion and being outside all day was just incredible; it was a very visceral high.

Key Quotes

“Success is the ability to make other people’s dreams come true.”

“At this point, what I really care about is instinct. I care more about inputs than I do about outputs.”

“The ideal way to practice venture is as a side job. Your main job is being a recruiter, an amazing connector, or a product person; venture is just the way you monetize that network.”

“The very act of doing something and moving yourself closer in that direction is much better than not doing anything at all.”

“I’m looking for the outliers. There’s always been something spiky, or something different about the business, the founder, or the market that we’re invested in.”

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

My transition from Nigeria to an international school in Canada at age 16 gave me a sense of agency that was not as prevalent in a more regimented society. This experience, followed by starting a chocolate company at Johns Hopkins and interacting with the Dorm Room Fund, gave me an appreciation for student-led initiatives and access to capital.

Moment Inspiring Venture Capital Career

The butterfly moment occurred when I drove from Baltimore to Philadelphia to pitch my student startup to the Dorm Room Fund. I was struck by the idea of students making investment decisions to back other students’ ideas. This led me to start A-Level Capital at Johns Hopkins to provide similar access to capital for my own campus community.

Unconventional Belief

I have moved away from being overly structured and rigid towards valuing instinct. I believe that after putting in the proverbial 10,000 hours, following your instincts and trusting your intuition is what ultimately distinguishes you.

Best Advice Received

The idea that raw action solves everything is the best advice I have received. I believe that taking any action to move in a certain direction, even if it does not always work, is better than doing nothing at all. I recently put this into practice by cold-texting alumni of my university to kickstart a tech community event, proving that movement matters more than a perfect plan.

Philosophy and Insights

The Full Spectrum of B2B Growth

I joined Sapphire in 2021 because I wanted to continue pursuing my interest in B2B software, while also having the ability to invest across multiple stages. Now, I look at everything from Series B companies doing single-digit ARR all the way to pre-IPO companies doing hundreds of millions in ARR. It was a logical decision for me to move to a place where I could see that full spectrum of growth.

Identifying Spiky Grassroots Outliers

One great example is Clay.com, which we invested in last year. We’ve seen many go-to-market companies; however, with Clay, there was this incredible grassroots adoption and community love on LinkedIn that we had not seen before. Another is EliseAI; they are doing a fantastic job of bringing AI to specific verticals. They’ve seen great success in the real estate industry and are now expanding that same transformational technology into healthcare.

Investment Philosophy

I would say outliers. I focus on identifying what's spiky or different about a business or a founder. The venture business model is built on finding these unique founders and convincing them to work with you.

The Perfect Founder Pitch

The perfect pitch requires infectious energy from the founder and the ability to clearly verbalize what is unique or different about the business compared to everyone else in the space.

Measuring Success Beyond Returns

Success is the ability to help make other people’s dreams come true. I find fulfillment in helping young, ambitious people realize their visions, such as the students I mentor at A-Level Capital.

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Trends and Technologies

I am an AI maximalist. I believe AI will eventually require everyone to become their own small business. I am specifically excited about AI applied to verticals like real estate, healthcare, and supply chain, where the technology can transform the core backbones of the economy.

Misconception About VCs

I challenge the idea that venture is a main job. I view venture as a side job used to monetize an excellent network, while the main job is helping founders with recruiting, business development, strategy & insights, etc.

Improving the VC Ecosystem

I want to improve access to capital for those outside of major hubs. Access is not evenly distributed. I want to flatten the ecosystem so that the best ideas can win regardless of whether a founder is in the right circles.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Daniel

linkedin.com/in/daniel-ramirez-maz/

VC Uncovered’s View

Investment in deep tech and biotech is not a high-risk gamble on isolated scientific breakthroughs. It is an exercise in platform engineering. For Daniel Ramirez, the goal is not to fund a single "lucky" discovery, but to back underlying transformational technologies that can expand across multiple use cases and markets. The same principle applies to software. 10VC operates on the reality that large value pools lie in the creation and development of transformational platforms. 

The operational reality at 10VC is defined by high-touch concentration rather than high-volume betting. In the early institutional stage, getting it "almost right" is often a prelude to failure; a founder who lacks the muscle memory to pivot based on feedback or fails to de-risk key milestones quickly will hit a wall that capital alone cannot fix. Daniel acts as an "agile athlete," moving across verticals and business problems, leveraging his international exposure as an investor, management consultant, and corporate executive. The hardest part of his day involves the intensive work of "making the decision right" after the check is written, engaging with founders bi-weekly to navigate the friction of early-stage growth where any lapse in alignment can stall a platform’s momentum.

Daniel holds a conviction that the current hierarchy of the tech stack is nearing a total inversion. He believes that the massive, standalone platforms dominating today’s headlines are destined to become mere features of the more specialized, integrated mega platforms of tomorrow.

Meet Daniel

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. What is it?

A: My favorite moments correlate with family; we are a family of four, and when we share time and everybody is fully present, the energy that can be felt in the air fills me up. California nature also fills me up significantly. I also enjoy traveling, engaging with people from different backgrounds, and learning what they like.

Key Quotes

“Our philosophy -and I think this is pretty important: try to make the right decision and then try to make your decision right. That changes a lot the way you invest. Once you invest, you have to work on it.”

“We get as involved as possible. We believe we can de-risk or help the companies de-risk their own business. For that reason, we dedicate a lot of time to founders.”

“AI is changing the whole thing. One trend that excites me a lot is that the platforms of today are going to be the features of the platforms of tomorrow.”

“What we want to see is platform thinking. They know already where to expand and how to expand. The more you know your customer, the more likely you are going to have PMF.”

“Interconnectivity is the biggest area for improvement in the Venture Ecosystem.”

Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

My path started as an industrial engineer. Upon graduation, I joined McKinsey and Company, where I spent time working with banks, petroleum firms, and insurance providers. Later, I served as an innovation director at the Coca-Cola Company. My journey eventually led me to a Danish pharmaceutical company where I helped create digital health startups in Copenhagen. This journey naturally opened the door to an invitation to lead a small venture capital fund; I view every experience as a source of growth and value.

The Moment That Inspired My Venture Career

Life usually takes me to new places rather than me following a strict, intentional plan. The opportunity to start 10VC alongside Ben Patterson arrived at the perfect time. Ben possesses an extraordinary track record and a wonderful personality. Silicon Valley felt like the ideal landscape for this mission; there is no better place on earth to build a fund of this nature.

Influences on My Worldview

Close family ties shape my perspective. Happy moments are almost always tied to time spent with my wife, daughters, parents,siblings, in-laws,etc. Nature and travel also provide significant energy. I enjoy engaging with people from various backgrounds and learning about different ways of life; this openness allows me to connect with founders from all walks of life.

An Unconventional Belief

In the world of corporate venture capital, success comes from identifying things that are low cost for the corporation but high value for the startup. Problems arise when firms promise high-cost initiatives that they will rarely risk for a minor equity stake. When you focus on low-cost synergies that provide massive value to the founder, the model works beautifully.

The Best Advice Received

Our core philosophy is to try to make the right decision and then try to make your decision right. This mindset shifts how you approach an investment; you cannot simply write a check and walk away. Once you commit, you work alongside the founder to ensure the partnership reaches its full potential.

Philosophy and Insights

Investment Philosophy

We focus on the very early stages. We are typically the first institutional partners to join a round; our strategy centers on investing in platforms rather than isolated products.

Why We Choose Concentration Over Volume

We chose a concentrated model because we believe in getting as involved as possible to help companies de-risk their own business. Unlike a typical pre-seed fund that might spread bets across many companies, we write larger checks and dedicate significant time to our founders. We view our investments as long-term partnerships; once we invest, we work like crazy to pave the way for the founder. We believe that if we can help the company succeed through this high-touch approach, everyone wins.

Defining the Boundaries of a Generalist Scope

While we are generalists covering B2B, B2C, deep tech, and life sciences, we do have clear limitations. We avoid areas like crypto and NFTs, and generally stay away from VR or AR. We also avoid single-point or single-asset solutions like a pharma company with only one asset or a single-use medical device. We are looking for platforms with an expansive mindset rather than isolated products. If it is just business model innovation without a unique underlying technology, we typically pass on those opportunities.

Values When Working with Founders

We prioritize de-risking the business through deep involvement. We dedicate a significant amount of time to our founders; most of our portfolio companies choose to chat with us every other week. We want to be the support system they rely on during the early days of building.

Betting on High-Efficiency Academic Founders

Since we do deep tech and biotech, we often work with PhDs and scientists who may not have traditional entrepreneurial muscle memory yet. What we look for in these individuals is a hyper-efficient mindset and a big ambition. We love to see founders who have made massive progress no matter what, even before they have incorporated or raised money. That drive to keep moving forward, combined with a willingness to listen to external feedback, is a great predictor of success.

The Perfect Founder Pitch

The perfect pitch is the one that clearly conveys this message: unstoppable team building an interesting solution to solve a really big problem. In our context,a perfect pitch also demonstrates platform thinking. I want to see that a founder understands how to expand into new use cases, markets and technologies. Platform thinking implies deep customer knowledge, which leads to a higher likelihood of finding product-market fit. I also value founders who listen to feedback. Startups move through short life cycles, and those who can incorporate external perspectives avoid hitting the same wall twice.

Approach to Risk

We look for companies that can do a lot with a little (capital efficient). Their goal should be to find paths to growth that require less capital to reach major milestones; this efficiency often allows companies to become sustainable and enables an exit to happen sooner.

Measuring Success Beyond Returns

We serve as a bridge between our LPs and the entrepreneurs. Success means serving both groups effectively; when a company succeeds and changes its industry, everyone involved finds satisfaction. That is our primary mission and this is my first priority. My second priority is that I should become a better person while executing the first priority.

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Trends and Technologies

Artificial Intelligence is redefining every industry. I believe the major platforms of today will become the basic features of tomorrow’s systems. These systems are what we call the giant vertical or horizontal automation platforms. In addition, we think that the combination of multimodal AI with other breakthrough technologies can rewrite the rules of each vertical allowing new challengers to gain significant market share in massive industries.

Misconceptions About VC Innovation

A common misunderstanding involves the nature of synergies in CVC. Corporations will not risk their multi-billion dollar brands for a startup where they hold a minor stake. Real innovation happens when CVCs facilitate access to assets that are low-cost for the Corporation but provide breakthrough value for the startup.

Improving the Venture Ecosystem

Interconnectivity is the biggest area for improvement. Many founders struggle because they lack access to the right investors and sometimes enter suboptimal partnerships just to survive. On the other hand, we -as investors- would love to meet more companies. If we could strengthen the links between these two groups, the entire ecosystem would benefit.

Challenges for Early-Stage Founders

The Early Stage landscape is going through deep changes and founders need insiders who are willing to share the necessary insights that will help them navigate successfully. There are a lot of bad outcomes that can be avoided by making the right decisions early.

More from Uncovered Media

Atlas Berry (M1C)

Read the VC Uncovered Profile:
https://www.vcuncovered.com/p/atlas-berry-m1c

In this Episode

Drew Glover talks to Atlas Berry from Mission One Capital (M1C) on the “physical AI” revolution and the industrial infrastructure required to power it.

Atlas, the founder of M1C, explains that the U.S. power grid is facing a “comfort crisis,” currently unable to meet the massive energy demands of AI. He positions M1C as a specialist partner focusing on three pillars: energy, industrial resilience, and earth systems. By prioritizing “behind the meter” power generation and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), the firm aims to build a decentralized, resilient power landscape that can operate independently of the traditional, strained grid.

The conversation takes a compelling turn as Atlas shares his transition from high-stakes investment banking in South African mines—where meetings required security sweeps for explosives—to managing the global footprint of Linkin Park. These high-pressure environments, coupled with early venture experience backing companies like Lyft and Snap, shaped his “performance protocol” for evaluating the next generation of industrial founders.

The episode is particularly insightful when he discusses the “Misogi”: an annual challenge with a 50% chance of failure designed to recalibrate a founder’s mental and physical endurance. Atlas argues that building in hard-tech is an endurance sport, requiring “battle-tested” individuals from military or elite engineering backgrounds. He cautions that in an infrastructure-heavy future, specialized VCs must act as more than just capital providers, serving as deep value-add partners for those solving tangible, world-scale problems.

Sponsor:

This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We’re proud to have them as our sponsor.

Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Itamar

https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamarnovick/

VC Uncovered’s View

Success in the current AI cycle is not about participating in the infrastructure gold rush; it is about identifying the application-layer survivors. While the common narrative suggests that the real value lies in the massive capital expenditures of AI infrastructure, Itamar Novick and Recursive Ventures operate on the reality that we are currently navigating an infrastructure bubble; one that mirrors the 1999 Cisco era before the inevitable correction. For Itamar, the goal is not to fund the "routers" of the AI age, but to back the "services-as-software" platforms that will emerge from the burst with exclusive, defensible data moats.

The operational reality at Recursive is defined by the high-velocity precision of a "solo capitalist" model; a structure designed to eliminate the friction of committee-based decision-making. In a market where founders now "seed-strap" companies with lean teams and agentic workflows, getting it "almost right" means backing a team that lacks the architectural foresight to build a "winner-take-most" dynamic. The hardest part of Itamar's day is the rigorous filtering of execution risk; he leans heavily toward repeat entrepreneurs because he understands that the "trail of fire" inherent in scaling to a $5 billion IPO leaves no room for first-time muscle memory errors. If a founder cannot demonstrate a marginal cost that trends toward zero while owning a unique data set, the business fails the "venture scale" test.

Itamar holds a sobering conviction regarding the immediate future of the ecosystem; he anticipates that the current AI infrastructure bubble will burst in 2026 or 2027. He believes this correction will fundamentally erode the advantages of old SaaS systems of record, giving rise to a new frontier where AI accounting firms and automated enterprises do 99 percent of the work with near-perfect accuracy.

Meet Itamar

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.

A: I am a huge traveler. I spent a year in India backpacking; another six months in Latin America with my wife; and months backpacking in Australia. We skip the Four Seasons; it is about the experience and genuine connections with people. When I am not traveling, I tinker. I am a geek who wrote my first line of code at 11. I have over 250 connected devices in my home and I love playing with everything; installing it, fixing it, and sending bug reports.

Key Quotes

“The ones that really go big are companies that get to a one winner take most dynamic.”

“AI can eclipse SaaS and take over a lot of what SaaS is capable of doing; it is a pivotal point for venture capital.”

“If you’re talking to Recursive, you’re talking to me; a person who just finished building a 5 billion dollar company.”

“I believe we are in an AI infrastructure bubble. I think it will burst in 2026 or 2027.”

“Go dig up the unsuccessful companies that shut down and ask those founders what happened. That is when people expose their true face.”

Background and Personal Journey

Influential Experiences

I have been in startups for 25 years on all sides of the table. I am a serial entrepreneur and executive who took my last company, Life360, public at a 5 billion dollar market cap. I started as VP of Product and ended up as the CFO who took it public. I even borrowed 2x my net worth to buy out a co-founder early on. Before that, I was at Gigya, one of the first SaaS companies. Having built engineering, product, sales, and support teams from scratch gives me a superpower in supporting founders. I have a high-level understanding of every single thing they need to build to be successful.

The Inspiration

My VC career actually started on Sand Hill Road as a senior associate at Morgenthaler Ventures, which is now Canvas Prime. I was there from 2010 to 2012; a storied old-school firm where we were in companies like Lending Club, Evernote, and MuleSoft. That is where I really landed the role of venture capital. From there, I started angel investing and set up an accelerator called UpWest to bring Israeli companies to the Bay Area. I have been deploying capital for 15 years now.

The Solo GP Superpower

I believe solo GPs are the best partners for founders. When you talk to Recursive, you are talking to a single decision-maker who has actually built something real. In bigger partnerships, the dynamics can be negative for founders; you show up to a Monday morning meeting where four other partners who do not know your business throw random questions at you. As a solo GP, I can make a decision in a day. I can make contrarian bets on crazy ideas that a committee would turn down; and those often end up being the best investments of my career.

Unconventional Belief

I believe venture capital is under threat by AI. The whole model is going to change completely. We are entering an era of seed-strapping where founders can raise 1 million or 2 million dollars and build what used to take a 100 million dollar check. With vibe coding and 10x engineers, you do not need 50 engineers and 20 salespeople anymore. This is a fundamental shift in technology that erodes the advantages of old systems of record.

Intuition vs. Data

I am institutionalized in the sense that I have a rigorous process, but I live for intuition. There are three things that are a absolute no-go for me: Team, TAM, and Moat. If I am not blown away by the people, I am not doing the deal; everything else is secondary. In pre-seed, your ability to diligence only goes so far because there are typically no customers. I rely on soft signals; who sent me the deal, what have they built, and what is their founder-market fit.

Philosophy and Insights

Principles for Founders

I am a little bit of a unique VC because I do not pretend to know how to run a founder’s business better than they do. I am friendly, helpful, or I get out of the way. I do not take board seats. My founders call me when “S hits the wall,” whether it is founders fighting or board issues. I have raised over 500 million dollars and built a public company board; I use that experience to be there for my founders when things get aggressive.

Practical Back-Channeling Tactics

My word of advice for founders is to never take money from a VC without back-channeling them first. Do not just talk to the successful companies they give you as references. Go dig up the unsuccessful ones that shut down and ask those founders what happened. How a VC deals with the downside when things are bad is the only way to understand who you are actually partnering with.

The Perfect Pitch

I look for a strategic long-term advantage; a moat. If you are building a product, can you generate unique, exclusive data sets that help you continuously improve your AI? I want to see a business where the marginal cost of servicing one more user trends to zero. If you can show me a path where, 10 or 20 years from now, you are making 500 million to a billion dollars in revenue because you own the market, that is venture scale.

Approach to Risk

I do not like taking execution risk. That is why two-thirds of my deals are with successfully repeat entrepreneurs. There is so much risk in startups already; I cannot back people who do not know how to build stuff. I also lean away from “blue ocean” projects that might have a market 10 years from now. I would much rather invest in a disruptive business model that caters to an existing large market where I know the TAM is real.

Trends and Future Vision

Emerging Trends

I am operating under the assumption that we are in an AI infrastructure bubble that will burst in 2026 or 2027. We are in 1999; Cisco was worth a trillion dollars for building routers, then it blew up, but Google and Amazon came out of it. I am focused on the application layer. I see three big areas: consumer AI rewriting human-machine interaction; agentic automation in the enterprise; and services-as-software. We are going to have AI accounting firms that do 99 percent of the work accurately. That is the next frontier.

VC Misconception

VCs get too much credit. I give all the credit to the entrepreneurs. We are just here to finance them and make sure they do not do really stupid stuff. The general audience thinks VCs help these companies come together and win, but that is a misconception. It is the founders doing it; we just need to give them money and get out of the way.

Systemic Improvement

I would kill preferred shares at the seed stage. It is controversial, but preferred shares make it more complicated for everyone. Venture is governed by the power law; if I get my 1x back on an investment, it does not move the needle for me or my LPs. We are really there for the 100x returners. By slapping on protections that you do not need at the early stage, we are just slowing things down.

The Founder Challenge

The biggest challenge for first-time founders is the “trail of fire” they have to go through. They have to learn everything from scratch; like how to let go of half a team or manage a board. Second-time founders have already gone through those ups and downs. VCs can help by being the first call when things go wrong and providing a narrative for subsequent funding rounds. I have supported over 25 startups in graduating to Series A because I know what the next level of investors is looking for.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Ahmad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmadjtahir/

Ahmad Tahir didn’t arrive in venture capital chasing the role. He arrived after watching how companies actually behave when conditions change, and realizing that most investment theory only makes sense once you’ve lived through a few cycles yourself.

He began his career in investment banking in the shadow of the financial crisis. Like many people graduating at that moment, the path he imagined didn’t exist in the form he expected. Wall Street roles were scarce, and opportunity looked different than it had just a few years earlier. Ahmad took a banking role in Cleveland, not because it was the destination he had planned, but because it was where the work was. That decision, taking what was available and committing fully to it, set the tone for much of what followed.

From banking, Ahmad moved into corporate development roles across multiple industries, including energy, IT services, and technology. He joined companies at different stages, in different markets, and across very different points in the economic cycle. He experienced what it feels like to operate inside an organization when markets are expanding, capital is flowing, and optimism drives decision-making. He also saw the other side: what happens when conditions tighten, priorities shift, and leadership decisions suddenly matter a great deal more.

Those experiences fundamentally shaped how Ahmad evaluates businesses today. Rather than relying on abstract frameworks, he looks for patterns he has seen repeat over time. He has watched strong management teams adapt and survive downturns. He has also seen organizations with early advantages slowly lose ground because they failed to evolve. That kind of pattern recognition doesn’t come from spreadsheets alone, it comes from proximity to the work.

At Moderne Ventures, Ahmad brings that operating awareness into every investment conversation. He tends to focus first on the people. Ideas matter, but only in the hands of teams who can execute under real-world constraints. Having spent years in corporate development seats, Ahmad understands the complexity of aligning product, engineering, finance, and go-to-market teams, especially as companies grow. That vantage point allows him to identify not just what a company is doing well, but what might break later if left unaddressed.

His emphasis on multivertical businesses emerged naturally from that background. After seeing how cyclical industries like real estate, energy, and finance behave during downturns, Ahmad became cautious of companies built to serve only a single market. In his view, products that can apply across industries offer more than growth potential, they offer resilience. When one sector slows, flexibility can mean survival. Multivertical design buys founders time to adjust, refine, and continue building even as conditions change.

Geography plays a subtle role in how Ahmad operates. Based in Chicago, he sits outside the intensity of the Bay Area while remaining closely connected to it. He spends significant time in San Francisco and New York, but values the distance enough to preserve independent judgment. Being in the Midwest allows him to slow decisions down, pressure-test assumptions, and avoid the momentum-driven dynamics that can emerge when everyone is chasing the same companies at the same time. It’s not about avoiding competition—it’s about maintaining clarity.

One of the most defining aspects of Ahmad’s approach is how he treats relationships. Venture, in his view, is a deeply human business. If he can’t invest in a company, he introduces the founder to someone who might. He keeps a running list of investors he trusts and shares opportunities openly. That generosity isn’t transactional, it’s how he operates. Over time, it creates better conversations, stronger deal flow, and mutual trust with founders and peers alike.

For Ahmad, venture capital isn’t about having the perfect answer or predicting the future with precision. It’s about being honest about what you’ve seen, being thoughtful about risk, and staying close enough to operators and founders that your advice is grounded in lived experience.

Meet Ahmad

Q: You can be anywhere eating, drinking, reading. Paint the scene.

A: I’m with my wife and kids at a restaurant on the beach in Kauai.

How Ahmad Thinks About Venture

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

Ahmad’s interest in investing was first sparked during his freshman year when his cousin gave him Warren Buffett’s autobiography. He found the process of evaluating businesses fascinating, noting that it closely resembled solving a puzzle.

The turning point occurred during his junior year at Indiana University while enrolled in an investing class. Ahmad entered a stock investing competition, applying the frameworks he had learned from Buffett’s book to his own evaluations. After his use of these methods resulted in a competition win, the experience of seeing those frameworks lead to successful stock selection solidified his interest in the field.

What He Looks for in Founders

Ahmad starts with execution. He looks for founders who can take something from zero to one, who understand the problem they’re solving, have a credible reason for being the ones to solve it, and can sell the vision to customers, employees, and future investors. Ideas evolve. Teams determine outcomes.

How He Thinks About Risk

Having seen how quickly conditions can change across multiple industries, Ahmad favors companies designed with flexibility in mind. Multivertical products reduce dependence on a single market and give founders room to maneuver when external forces shift.

He’ll lean into uncertainty if he believes the team, market structure, and timing give him a shot at a power‑law outcome, but avoids avoidable risks like weak founding teams, misaligned incentives, or unclear ownership.

Advice He Gives Most Often

“Investors don’t just back ideas—they back traction, learning velocity, and ability to execute under uncertainty. It’s not about having the perfect plan; it’s about testing hypotheses fast, learning faster, and adjusting direction before the market moves.”

Unconventional Belief

Ahmad observes that some VCs still underprice or stay away from "hard pivots." He finds that founders who cleanly kill a prior idea, remain open and honest with their teams, and rebuild around a sharper wedge illustrate sharp decision-making skills. In many cases, he views these founders as more investable.

Trends and What’s Ahead

Ahmad is particularly interested in:

• AI tools that dramatically accelerate research and internal workflows.

• Payment infrastructure built on crypto and stablecoins, especially for large transactions like rent and mortgages.

• Cybersecurity, as the rise of generative and “shadow AI” introduces new vulnerabilities into legacy systems.

Across all of these areas, he looks for practical adoption, not just technical novelty.

A Final Thought

The most common misconception about venture capital is that it’s purely intellectual. In reality, it’s relational. The best outcomes come from trust, collaboration, and sustained engagement, not just sharp analysis.

Ahmad believes the ecosystem would benefit from more openness: more conversations, more shared ideas, and more willingness to slow down and think together. Venture works best when investors stay grounded in experience and remember that behind every company is a group of people trying to build something durable.

More From Uncovered Media

Connect with Natan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/natan-reddy/

VC Uncovered’s View

The world of making and moving things often feels invisible to the everyday person. But for Natan Reddy, this world is at the forefront every day at industrial-focused VC fund, Ironspring Ventures. Before Ironspring Ventures, Natan was at CB Insights tracking how blockchain might revolutionize maritime shipping or how sensors could optimize a factory floor, eventually establishing and leading supply chain innovation research at the firm. 

Now a Principal at Ironspring Ventures in the NYC office, Natan represents the nimble, sector-focused investor who chooses depth over breadth. Ironspring operates as a specialized VC fund  for the digital industrial world; the firm focuses on the backbone of the global economy: manufacturing, construction, transport & logistics, and alternative energy.

He understands that you cannot simply apply a software-as-a-service playbook to a construction site or a factory floor. These industries have slow sales cycles and long-standing ways of working. Success here requires what Natan calls “industry DNA.” By investing in early-stage rounds, Ironspring acts as a catalyst across legacy industrial industries and pioneering founders taking on complex challenges to modernize these critical sectors

The relevance of Natan’s work today is clearer than ever. With nearshoring trends bringing manufacturing closer to home and the urgent need for supply chain resiliency as well as increasing physical infrastructure and energy demands fueled by the AI boom, the industrial sector is the new frontier for bold capital. Natan is not just writing checks. He is navigating what it takes to succeed commercially in the ruggedized real-world with out-in-the-field operators across heavy industry.

Meet Natan

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.

A: I’ve been enjoying time on the water and in nature again. I am climbing Mount Kilimanjaro shortly, and that will be a big milestone for me personally. I’m also a huge history and architecture buff, so anything related to that is very interesting to me.

Key Quotes

“Industrial tech winners will be determined, not only on their speed of entry, but by how adept they are in their commercialization strategy.”

“Small Language Models excite our team. I am looking for sector-specific data for ruggedized equipment and factory floors where generalized models often fail.”

“Something that might look hot one day is also guaranteed to go through something tough at one point... remembering ‘this too shall pass’ is very helpful for getting through the ups and downs inherent to venture.”

“After years of leading research on industrial supply chain tech at CB Insights, I wanted a bigger stake and more of a hands-on approach, shy of being an operator myself, in the companies I was researching.”

“Is this someone I want to work with in the long run? When things invariably get tough, is this someone you want to be at the table with?”

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

My path into the industry was a mix of personal happenstance and the people I met along the way. Growing up in Palo Alto with parents in tech gave me a natural inclination toward the industry; however, my specific focus was shaped by an intersection of interests. While I was a generalist at CB Insights, my lifetime love of everything nautical led me to explore the link between blockchain and maritime supply chain back in 2017. Joining (and then helping to run) the New York Supply Chain Meetup community before the pandemic unlocked my passion for industrial tech. This eventually set my path toward an industrial focus and led me to Ironspring Ventures.

Moment Inspiring Venture Capital Career

The move to venture capital was less about the title and more about the depth of involvement. After years of leading research on industrial supply chain tech, I wanted a bigger stake and a more hands-on approach with the companies I was already researching across the industrial space.

Best Advice Received

I often rely on the advice that “this too shall pass.” I apply this to the volatility of venture capital; it provides helpful context for both the high and low points. Something might look hot one day, but it is guaranteed to go through something tough at one point. Remembering that the difficult times will also pass is very helpful for getting through the inherent ups and downs.

Philosophy and Insights

Values When Working with Founders

Integrity is my number one priority when working with founders. I always ask myself if this is someone I want to work with in the long run. When things invariably get tough, I want to know if this is the person I want to be at the table with. Additionally, I look for clear communication. I believe the ability to communicate well and provide consistent updates is highly correlated with a company’s success.

Approach to Risk

I view distribution and go-to-market strategies as two of the primary ways to de-risk an industrial investment. Industrial tech has extremely slow sales cycles; you cannot move at the same pace as other sectors. The major risk is whether a company can outlast the time it takes to break into the industry from a cash perspective. I also look to de-risk by ensuring there is industry DNA on the founding team to navigate specific personas, such as general contractors versus owners in the construction world, for example.

Measuring Success Beyond Returns

I measure success through three tiers of relationships. First, do the founders trust Ironspring enough to refer other founders to us? Second, have we stewarded the capital appropriately to maintain the trust of our LPs? Finally, I look at the ecosystem. I want Ironspring to be the ecosystem glue in the digital industrial space. Have we been able to foster that connectivity for folks even beyond our portfolio?

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Trends and Technologies

Small Language Models excite our team. I am looking for sector-specific data for ruggedized equipment and factory floors where generalized models often fail. I am also very bullish on Mexico and the Latin American industrial market due to many macro tailwinds. There is a massive opportunity to apply established playbooks to white space in those markets. Finally, I am watching data silo integration. We need technology that actually connects disparate systems such as Warehouse Management, Transportation Management, and ERPs.

Misconception About VCs

A common misconception about the industry is that supply chain or industrial tech is no longer relevant following the collapse of a few high-profile companies. The underlying need for digitization in the physical world is unquestionably a necessity. The winners will be determined by how they are capitalized, execute, and approach go-to-market, not just because a category is deemed exciting or not.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Monique

linkedin.com/in/moniquewoodard/

VC Uncovered’s View

Monique Woodard is an investor who sees the world through a wide-angle lens. While much of the industry is busy pattern-matching the past, Monique and her firm, Cake Ventures, are underwriting the future. She is a prime example of the independent, forward-thinking investors we celebrate at VC Uncovered, approaching venture capital with the technical precision of a researcher and the lived experience of a two-time founder.

The math behind her thesis is undeniable. We are currently witnessing a "three-layer cake" of massive demographic shifts: a global population aging at an unprecedented rate, a $30 trillion wealth transfer to women over the next decade, and a shift toward a much more diverse population, with Gen Alpha already leading that charge. Cake Ventures targets these shifts at the pre-seed and seed stages, focusing on the forward momentum of these groups rather than relying on what the internet user base looked like a decade ago.

Ultimately, Monique’s work is about measurably improving the global quality of life by investing in technology that meets human behavior where it is going. Whether she is backing "silver economy" solutions or tools for the deskless workforce, she is proving that the internet’s user base has outpaced the industry’s imagination. Her approach reminds us that the most significant value is created when we stop "artificial gating" and start building for the massive, universal markets of tomorrow.

Meet Monique

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the Picture:

A: My happy place involves a mix of art, nature, and community. I find joy in looking at amazing pieces of art, specifically the work of artist Scherezade Garcia, and enjoy riding horses followed by sharing a glass of Pinot with my friends.

Key Quotes

“I believe that the future is really about this intersection of technology and demographic shifts, because demographic shifts reflect changes to the internet user base.”

“We’re investing where we’re going, not where we came from.”

“I wish there were more independent thought in a lot of the [VC] ecosystem. We’re all focused on AI in the same ways and trying to shove the same dollars into the same types of companies.”

“I track specific trends like the $30 trillion wealth transfer to women, the global aging population, and the increasing diversity of Gen Alpha. These are the forward-looking forces that create value.”

“I view an investment like a stack of layers, similar to a cake. Data and demographic trends inform the basis of my thinking. On top of that, I layer the team and their ability to execute.”

Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

I have been in tech and startups for most of my career; I have been a founder twice and started a community of founders. My early career in investing at 500 Startups (now 500 Global) was where I began realizing I was investing in demographic change. I saw this clearly through early investments like Blavity, which is a media platform for Black millennials, and Silver Nest, which focuses on home sharing for the aging population.

The Path to Venture Capital

Moving into venture capital was a logical progression from my time as a founder and community builder. I love spending time with people working on their life’s work; I realized that building a new type of business in venture capital was the best way to stay close to builders while satisfying my own desire to create something new.

Worldview and Decision Making

I am heavily influenced by demographic shifts and the intersection of technology and human behavior. These shifts reflect the evolving internet user base. I track specific trends like the $30 trillion wealth transfer to women, the global aging population, and the increasing diversity of Gen Alpha. These are the forward-looking forces that create value.

Philosophy and Insights

Investment Philosophy

I focus on investing at the intersection of technology and demographic shifts to capture forward momentum. This approach grew from my observation that the internet user base is evolving rapidly. We have to look at what the forward momentum is rather than what we have seen in the past.

Unconventional Perspectives

I believe in investing in where we are going rather than where we came from. I avoid the practice of artificial gating, which is the idea of building a specific version of a product for a specific demographic (e.g., “Coinbase for Women” is just, well, Coinbase). Instead, I look for category-defining companies that use demographic shifts as a beachhead to build massive, universal markets.

Balancing Intuition and Data

I view an investment like a stack of layers, similar to a cake. Data and demographic trends inform the basis of my thinking. On top of that, I layer the team and their ability to execute. Finally, I use my gut to decide if I would go to war for a founder. Sometimes the best investments happen when you drop the thesis-driven portion and follow your intuition.

Working with Founders

I value the team piece heavily; I look for founders I feel I could go to war for. I view my role as building a partnership that satisfies my entrepreneurial itch by being hands-on with a portfolio. Success in venture capital involves having a big impact and finding other investors to walk alongside.

Specific Fund Mechanics and Targeted Sectors

I invest primarily at the pre-seed and seed stages. While I describe myself as a thesis-driven generalist because demographic shifts impact every category, I specifically focus on digital health and wellness, the future of work (particularly deskless or non-office work like healthcare and manufacturing), consumer tech/brands, and the evolving enterprise workforce.

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Emerging Trends

I am excited about the silver economy and the aging of Gen X into retirement. I am also focused on the deskless workforce, including healthcare, infrastructure, and manufacturing. I want to see how we can put AI into the hands of these workers who make up the majority of the workforce. While developers have been the early beneficiaries of these tools, we must now expand that focus to include AI-driven innovation for these other critical industries.

Improving the Ecosystem

I wish there was more independent thought in the venture ecosystem. Everyone seems focused on AI in the same ways, shoving dollars into the same types of companies led by the same types of founders. We should be applying technology to diverse categories like the deskless workforce. I write white papers and research reports to share my thinking; I do this to find people who see these big opportunities.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Atlas

linkedin.com/in/atlasberry

instagram.com/atlasberry008

VC Uncovered’s View

Atlas Berry has one of the coolest paths to venture we've ever seen. And at M1C (Mission One Capital), he focuses on the fundamental pillars of our future economy: energy independence, industrial resilience, and frontier industries. His journey from the rural areas of South Africa to managing the VC arm for Linkin Park (yes, the band) gives him a distinct advantage that others might miss.

Atlas embodies the exact investor VC Uncovered aims to highlight, prioritizing a model that functions less like a passive board and more like a hyper-specialized technical SWAT team. To bridge the gap between lab-scale prototypes and commercialization, he has assembled a team of niche experts—including a Cambridge nuclear engineering PhD to validate deep tech and a 30-year CIA veteran to help founders unlock non-dilutive government grants. This rigorous approach extends to a "peak performance protocol" utilizing the U.S. national cycling team's coach, ensuring founders possess the physical and mental longevity required to navigate the next industrial revolution.

He is also leaning into the power of media to bridge the trust gap with founders. By sharing his thesis and process openly, he builds a relationship before the first meeting even happens. This is the new playbook for venture capital. It replaces the old guard's gatekeeping with transparency and genuine value.

Meet Atlas

Q: You can be anywhere, doing anything, eating anything, drinking anything, whatever it is. Paint that picture.

A: My happy place is really one of three spots, born from a self-described gluttony for punishment and a deep love for endurance sports. Between two kids and a wife who is a three-time entrepreneur, our household is incredibly busy; these sports provide the necessary counterweight.

My sanctuary is either swimming laps, out on the bike for a long ride, or hitting the pavement for a long run. These aren’t just physical outlets for me; they are intellectual ones. I stay informed by listening to the podcasts and books we’ve discussed while I train. I even have waterproof headphones for the pool. Whether I’m in the water or on the road, I use that movement as my dedicated time to go deep, get smart, and conduct my research. It is where I truly do my best thinking.

Key Quotes

“The world is industrializing; we want to back the founders pushing forward this next industrial era.”

“Rather than thinking about what can go wrong and all the downside risks, focus on what happens if things go right. You only have the opportunity to lose your initial investment, but the upside of 100X is really what you’re trying to solve for.”

“Make shit happen. You may be looking at one opportunity, but if you look at it opportunistically, you find doors where others see walls.”

“You are only going to be able to go as far as your health will allow. If you try to burn yourself out running a hundred-meter dash when you have a 10K to run, you will never make it.”

“We look at this as physical AI; AI going into the physical world through sensors and autonomous systems that can even extend to zero-G manufacturing in space.”

Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

When I was nine years old, I begged my parents to send me to Space Camp (see pic of me in the post thumbnail). I was a nerdy kid who lived on a steady diet of sci-fi and had an absolute conviction that I was going to be an astronaut. My parents actually agreed to it. They put me on a plane by myself from New Jersey to Huntsville, Alabama. That was my first real entry into frontier technology. Even though I was just a kid, being surrounded by simulators and the sheer scale of human engineering planted a seed. Today, when I’m looking at companies building nuclear reactors or zero-G manufacturing satellites, that nine-year-old kid is still the one doing the gut check.

I moved to South Africa while still with J.P. Morgan. I ended up doing a lot of the things that build a tolerance for risk: non-traditional frontier markets, unstructured markets, and facing real danger. I got robbed twice out there. My work involved diligence at mines and different banks in backwater areas; that was my first start for building a high tolerance for risk.

Moment Inspiring Venture Capital Career

I met Linkin Park, the rock band, and pitched them a really grand vision. They ended up asking me to join them and build out their family office to handle alternative investing and a venture-type strategy. That was my first entree into venture capital, and I found myself touring the world with the band while building businesses.

Influences on Worldview

My IB economics teacher in high school, Mr. Gilbert, shaped how I process information. He would bring newspapers and magazines like The Economist into the classroom. We would read through all the news and then back-solve them; this taught me that what I was learning in the classroom actually had practical knowledge if I applied it the right way to the real world.

Unconventional Belief

I try to strip away the traditional investment banker or consulting mindset that focuses on poking holes at a situation. My unconventional belief is to focus on what happens if things go right. You only have the opportunity to lose 1x your money, but the upside of 100X is what you are really trying to solve for.

Best Advice Received

Make shit happen. You might be looking at one opportunity, but if you look at it opportunistically, you find doors where others see walls. I once knew the head of a division was going to be in a certain elevator at a certain time. I happened to be there and was prepared to explain why I was the best candidate to go to South Africa; next thing I knew, I was on a plane.

Philosophy and Insights

Evolution From Mission One Capital to M1C

The shortening allows us to build distinction around the brand and those letters. It was an evolution in how we’ve grown as a fund. We are becoming a specialized fund, focusing on fewer verticals and going deeper into niche specific areas. Moving to three letters signals that change in our investment thesis.

The Next Industrial Era

The world is industrializing, and we want to back the founders pushing forward this next industrial era. We see this unfolding across three specific buckets. First is energy as national security. The energy demand of AI is now a major choke point, and we are looking at everything from power generation like nuclear and geothermal, to novel power storage.

The second bucket is industrial resilience. We are re-industrializing and bringing manufacturing processes back on shore. To be competitive in the U.S., we need to bring in robotics and automation.

Finally, we focus on Earth systems. Critical minerals are essential for the energy transition, but we also need to efficiently track and aggregate resources like water, forests, and soil. These are the resources that will feed the next industrial process.

Values When Working with Founders

We look for founders operating at peak performance. You are only going to be able to go as far as your health will allow. If you try to burn yourself out running a hundred-meter dash when you actually have a 10K to run, you will never make it. We value mental and physical longevity as core components of a successful founder.

Mastering Technical Readiness

Especially when it comes to deep tech and hardware, there are some specific milestones that are pretty commonplace. They’re called the TRL scale of when a company is ready to be commercialized. TRL one through three might be in the lab; four to five is when you have a prototype and your first “commercializable” product, and five plus is broader scale, scalable commercialization.

We start tracking companies early, but around that initial prototype to when they get in their first set of pilots is where we come in. We have one company where we joined when those contracts were in the LOI stage. I saw the prototype in the lab and they were already in LOI form for first commercialization. That is the sweet spot.

Approach to Risk

The industry is splitting: one end holds the multi-stage giants, while the other (where we play) is defined by hyper-specialized niche funds. Venture capital is bifurcating into a barbell. On one side are the multi-stage firms sucking up most of the capital. The other side of the barbell, where we operate, is about going niche. We go very focused and become a specialized firm. This allows us to take on more technical and commercialization risk because we have the domain expertise to front-run those larger firms.

Lessons From the Woolly Mammoth

My favorite anti-portfolio story is hilarious to think about. A founder comes in and says they are going to bring back the woolly mammoth, release them into the Arctic to pat down the icebergs, and solve climate change. I thought the idea was so outlandish and had too much downside risk. We did not invest. That company ended up being Colossal Biosciences, which is now a 10 billion plus company. That was a huge miss in thinking about the downside without considering the upside.

Building the M1C Swat Team

I tried to build a team that already has deep expertise to complement my own skills and bridge technical gaps. We have people who have done deep tech industrial investing at scale and others focused specifically on energy. We even have someone who spent 30 years in the CIA to help with D.C. relationships and non-dilutive government grants. We also have a PhD out of Cambridge in nuclear engineering for technical expertise.

Beyond technical skills, we built a peak performance protocol. We bring in experts on leadership and longevity. One of our coaches is the national coach for the U.S. national cycling team to help with leadership. On the longevity side, we have people who can talk about sleep, recovery, and eating. If you are not thinking long term about building a company with the right state of mind and body, it leads to a bad outcome.

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Trends and Technologies

Physical AI is the future. This is AI going into the physical world through robotics and sensors. It involves taking physical IoT data to train models and autonomous systems.

Improving the VC Ecosystem

I would make it easier for emerging managers to raise capital. We are seeing a flight to safety where 60 to 70 percent of LP dollars are being gobbled up by large institutions. This concentration of capital can be a challenge for innovation.

Strategy for Modern Distribution

I realized that content is being used by VCs now as a point of getting differentiation reach and distribution for portfolio companies. It helps explain our point of view so that founders feel like they know us before we even meet. It is a new experiment on the content side that is starting to grow rapidly. I will be doubling down on it in 2026. My advice is to avoid trying to be everything to everyone. Be specifically the best thing to a small group of people. That is how you get your initial penetration.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Sheel

https://www.linkedin.com/in/smohnot/

VC Uncovered’s View

Venture capital often finds it challenging to maintain agility, frequently operating with the pace of a legacy institution. Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) represents a departure from that traditional bureaucracy. Founded by Jake Gibson and Sheel Mohnot, BTV operates with the speed and conviction of the founders it backs. The firm focuses on the earliest stages of fintech, often engaging before a company even has a name through its incubation program, The Mint.

Sheel Mohnot embodies the shift toward a more empathetic and specialized era of investing. He brings a deep operator’s perspective to the table, having exited multiple companies, including FeeFighters and Innovative Auctions. Rather than focusing on legacy playbooks, BTV prioritizes being the firm the founders wish they had when they were starting out. They provide hands-on support that extends beyond a check, assisting with everything from recruiting to go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

In this week’s VC Uncovered, we see why specialization matters. Sheel’s focus on fintech allows him to see opportunities where others see noise. He views software not just as a tool, but as a vehicle for financial services. This nimble approach allows BTV to move quickly on emerging shifts, from AI-driven consumer apps to the rise of prediction markets. This level of immersion suggests that the next generation of great investors will be those who build alongside founders during their toughest moments.

Meet Sheel

Q: If you could be anywhere, eating, drinking, and reading whatever you like most, where would you be and what would those things be? Paint the picture.

A: I love traveling, especially with friends. Recently, for my wife’s 40th birthday, we went on a trip with 40 of our friends. We were on a boat in the Caribbean; it was an amazing time. I was tired by the end of it, but I felt fulfilled. I’d love to do that again.

Six Weddings and a Metaverse

Most people have an easy answer for where they got married, but mine is a bit more complex. Our legal wedding was sponsored by Taco Bell in the metaverse. While we think of our ceremony near Mexico City as our main wedding, we also held celebrations in India, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Burning Man. To clarify a common question, every single one of those weddings was to the same person.

From Zoom Bachelor to Justin Bieber

I have a very small cameo in the “Stuck with U” music video by Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. This happened because I was on a pandemic-era dating show called the Zoom Bachelor. Scooter Braun happened to be watching, and through a series of events, I ended up in the video for a few seconds. If you look up the song on Wikipedia, I am fairly certain I am the only person listed who does not have his own page.

Key Quotes

“Our tagline is ‘everything is fintech.’ Many vertical SaaS companies ultimately are fintech companies and derive the majority of their revenue from fintech at scale.”

“Especially early in a career, optimize for learning: be open, be more reflective, and be willing to change your mind. The same is true in venture. Avoid being stubborn about a mistaken belief.”

“In private markets investing, you win the deal by being the best partner. I believe the asset chooses the investor in venture, and that is unique to our asset class.”

“We need to see more empathy in this industry. It helps to realize that people are putting their hearts and souls into this and trying their best.”

“I have seen founders post on X saying, ‘I met Jake and he passed on my company, but I got so much out of the interaction.’ It makes me proud that someone said that about our team.”

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

When I was an operator, I was raising money on the other side of the table. I first got into investing by writing small checks and trying to help founders avoid the mistakes I made. Being an operator gives you a level of respect for what it takes to build a company. I always believed venture capital was a compelling field and something I might be good at. Over time, I have learned more about this craft and am increasingly happy to do it.

Philosophy and Insights

Investment Philosophy: Everything is Fintech

Our tagline is that everything is fintech. I believe many vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies function as fintech companies and derive the majority of their revenue from financial services at scale. This stems from observing how massive software companies like Shopify and Toast eventually derive the majority of their revenue from financial services rather than just software subscriptions. Because I am a fintech investor, everything looks like a fintech opportunity to me. This perspective influences how I assess every software opportunity.

If you are building the primary software product that a small business uses to manage their operations, they are naturally going to want to manage their finances through that platform as well.

The Power of Embedded Financial Services

When companies look to implement these services, we believe it makes the most sense to link up with specialized players. We have invested in several companies that facilitate this infrastructure. This includes Unit for embedded banking, Salsa for payroll, Layer for accounting, and Sticker for procurement. Partnering with these providers makes life much easier for the end customer by offering more essential services within a single ecosystem.

Trends and Future Vision

Scaling Internal Operations with AI

We use AI a lot internally. Personally, I use Granola for meeting notes and research. It is a fantastic tool that allows us to conduct research quickly and stay updated on what is happening with our portfolio and new investments. Since we are actively investing in AI companies, it makes perfect sense for us to understand and utilize the technology at every level of our own business.

Emerging Technologies & Risk

I have evolved my view on risk through missed opportunities and technological shifts. I initially missed the potential of prediction markets. I have since realized they are going to be a massive sector; they are already much larger today than I anticipated a year ago.

We have invested heavily in AI because we see the implications in our portfolio so aggressively. I am also increasingly interested in consumer technology. Ad targeting is improving significantly with the help of AI, and prediction markets continue to be a major area of interest.

Improving the Ecosystem

We strive to be materially supportive for founders raising their next round of funding by actively introducing them to next-round investors. Beyond that, we want every founder to gain value from their interaction with us, regardless of our investment decision. We provide clear advice or a specific reason why we decided to pass.

I would love to see more empathy in the venture capital ecosystem. It is important to realize that founders are putting their hearts and souls into their work. There needs to be a greater realization of that human element across the industry.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Tanvi

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlal/

VC Uncovered’s View

The future of venture capital is defined by optimizing (not just identifying) risk. Tanvi Lal, an investor at Intuit Ventures, exemplifies this philosophy by building a bridge between the classic discipline of a structured career and the bold, often chaotic world of early-stage startups.

Launched in 2021, Intuit Ventures operates with a clear mission: to “power prosperity around the world” by accelerating innovation for small businesses and consumers. Their focus on early-to-mid-stage startups in areas like fintech, AI-enabled services, and omni-channel commerce requires deep conviction paired with calculated rigor. Tanvi’s approach is perfectly suited for this mandate. She seeks out “real businesses” that exist just outside the current VC bubble; specifically, she targets those solving “mission-critical and hair-on-fire problems” for the small business backbone of the US economy.

What makes Tanvi part of the new wave of investors we highlight at VC Uncovered is her advocacy for a more sustainable, balanced work culture than what often permeates the industry. She rejects the trope of the perpetually working founder. Instead, she believes “the best businesses are built by balanced founders” and actively encourages taking time off for major life events. This realistic take recognizes that high performance and high returns are tied to founder sustainability: exactly the kind of systemic improvement the VC ecosystem needs. 

Meet Tanvi

Q: You can be anywhere, eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.

A: I’m sitting at a sidewalk café in NYC sipping a cappuccino with my future doggo curled up next to me; either digging into a new book or re-reading an old favorite.

Key Quotes

“The best businesses are built by balanced founders.”

“My investment philosophy is quite simple: invest around the VC bubble and look for real businesses.”

“Risk, nerve, and scrappy hustle are what drive successful investing returns.”

“Being ‘founder-first’ requires looking after the entire founder, not just the part of the person who makes you money.”

“The bubble is where the consensus bets are and where FOMO drives investment decisions.”

Background and Personal Journey

Formative Experiences

I grew up in a classic immigrant Indian household. My parents valued hard work, stability, and an honest living; structure and focus were key elements drilled into me as a child and reinforced by five years of boarding school.

Entering the VC world was a complete culture shock in many ways. Working hard here does not guarantee success; a strong focus on structure and following the book will not often get you where you need to go. Risk, nerve, and scrappy hustle are what drive successful investing returns.

At the same time, I think in VC we tend to over-index on the “classic” founder who bends the rules just a bit to get where they need to go. For every blockbuster success, there is a fraudulent crook. There is not enough acknowledgment of this fact; furthermore, there seems to be a pardoning of such founders even after they are caught. This is often rationalized by statements like: “But they did build a great business,” or “They were a visionary.”

My approach to investing takes root in my structured upbringing and tempers risk, nerve, and scrappiness with a healthy dash of process. I believe in comprehensive due diligence. While an over-reliance on structure will hold you back as an investor, using it in the right way is hugely additive to my role, especially given my focus on early growth-stage startups.

Shaping Your Worldview

I was a voracious reader as a child. You would always find me with my nose stuck in a book wherever I went, whether it was a road trip, dinner at a family friend’s house, or in bed. Growing up with books showed me how to weave stories and learn from the ones I liked.

This continued through college, where I majored in English Literature. In college, I wrote a 100-plus-page English Literature thesis where I analyzed over 50 sources, crafted a comprehensive argument, and defended it to a panel of professors. This is exactly what we do in venture; I credit my love for reading and my English Literature major as core drivers of my critical analysis skills.

An Unconventional Belief

I believe that the best businesses are built by balanced founders. While I expect to see strong subject matter expertise and a fanatic dedication to the business, I do not expect founders to be on 24/7. I actively encourage founders to take time off for big life milestones like weddings, honeymoons, and special occasions with family. I have met many other VCs and founders who disagree with me; they think I am not expecting enough from people or that I am soft. To me, if you want the best from a person, you must help them become the best versions of themselves. Having balance at key moments is integral to this.

Balancing Intuition and Data

There is an important role both intuition and cold hard analysis play in investment decisions; however, they must be used together. I treat my intuition as an antenna that flags important considerations for me to then dive into with my analysis. Generally, I find that my intuition is spot on when it comes to the “sniff test” of founder vibes and identifying weak spots to investigate. Learning to pay attention to that internal flag has helped me reach the right investment decision many times. I do not believe in wholly basing decisions on just intuition, nor do I believe in wholly basing decisions on data; you need both to make a well-informed decision.

Philosophy and Insights

Your Philosophy in a Sentence

My investment philosophy is quite simple: invest around the VC bubble and look for real businesses. The bubble is where the consensus bets are and where FOMO drives investment decisions. The bubble is where you have a forgiving balance sheet and strong track record; you can afford the losses. The bubble is not where you want to be as a young investor trying to make your mark.

I am interested in businesses solving mission-critical and hair-on-fire problems rather than building nice-to-have platforms. Through my role at Intuit, I have learned a lot about what makes the SMB backbone of the US work, and I am always excited about businesses solving those needs.

Approach to Risk

All VC investments come with risk, so my approach focuses on how to make the most de-risked or risk-adjusted bet. De-risking a bet comes in many ways: from confidence in the team’s execution ability to ensuring the business has ample runway. Risk adjustment is primarily based on the vision and upside I see for the business, as well as the proper negotiation of terms.

Measuring Success

Success in venture capital is a holistic concept. On one hand, you certainly need strong financial returns; the goal is to return capital to your LPs. On the other hand, capital is an increasing commodity in today’s VC landscape. Without a strong brand, you do not get very far in meeting the best companies. Your reputation and social capital are also huge measures of success. I often think of the VC space as a social barter system; you use your social capital to help your portfolio companies. But this capital is limited, so it is important to be judicious about how you use it.

Trends and Future Vision

Emerging Trends

A couple of areas I am spending a lot of time in include:

Next-gen ERPs: while there have been flashy funding rounds from companies in this space, I am fundamentally looking for a different style of ERP that solves the needs of non-SaaS businesses. I want to see a better and more modular/flexible ERP for construction, manufacturing, product-based businesses, etc., rather than better revenue recognition capabilities.

AI-enabled CFO tools: there are a host of platform layer companies using AI to automate finance workflows. There is a lot of promise here as well as a lot of risks/difficulties. Specifically, I am interested in AI accounting platforms (both for accounting firms and businesses), AI tax automation (for tax research as well as preparation), and AR automation. I break down the AI Accounting landscape in more depth in “AI x Accounting: A Deep Dive on the Startup Landscape.”

Vertical-specific marketing: as we have seen through e-commerce, access to vertical-specific data points (e.g., purchase behavior, offer behavior, review data, etc.) can often lead to revenue-generating marketing campaigns such as abandoned cart emails, personalized discounts, etc. However, this same line of thinking can be applied across the board, from restaurant orders to law firms to home services companies. Today’s tools are largely horizontal or require manual setup to be automated, but platforms like Owner, Topline Pro, and FirmPilot are doing the marketing work for their customers by using a vertical-first approach. I break this down in more detail in “The New Vertical SaaS Playbook: From Marketing to Monetization.”

Improving the Ecosystem

I have two things I wish I could improve:

The grind for the sake of the grind: I find many investors and entrepreneurs work hard for the wrong reasons. Rather than burning the midnight oil when needed, they constantly burn the midnight oil even when it is not needed. Many folks in this space seem to be into the grind for the sake of the grind. Startups advertise mattresses in their office for employees and proudly boast they are in the office seven days a week. Investors often love this; they encourage such behavior and even seek out founders with such a mentality. This to me is absurd. Work seven days a week when you need, but not as a modus operandi.

The lack of diversity: This is something I have long noticed and been involved in trying to rectify. The funding stats for women and URMs speak for themselves; however, what they do not show are the absolutely absurd day-to-day occasions, from comments like “can’t invest if she’s pregnant,” to realizing it has been days since you have seen or spoken to a Black or Latino individual. It is disheartening to show up as the “only” in a room and feel the weight and pressure of representing an entire demographic. Every time I bring this up to another woman or a person of color, I hear more stories about how this has shown up for them or their founders. Somehow, this continues to be something that endures; it constantly touches and bothers a large portion of this ecosystem.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Vikas

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikasraj1/

VC Uncovered’s View

The future of venture capital belongs to the focused, mission-driven funds that identify massive and systemic market failures and build businesses to solve them. Vikas Raj, Managing Partner at ResilienceVC, is a prime example of this new wave, dedicating his career to financial resilience. A theme that has evolved through the three distinct waves of innovation in financial services he has witnessed.

From micro-lending in India to co-founding ResilienceVC, Raj’s journey is a powerful counter-narrative to the legacy funds that often prioritize abstract financial models over measurable real-world impact. His firm is lean, specialized, and focused on the tens of millions of underserved US consumers and small businesses that are “deemed too small and too risky” by the mainstream system. This aligns perfectly with the VC Uncovered manifesto: celebrating investors who are not afraid to take bold risks on emerging ideas and who are actively searching for what might work tomorrow, instead of clinging to proven narratives from the past.

ResilienceVC has a clear, measurable goal: build financial resilience for its portfolio companies. This isn’t just a mission; it’s their core investment strategy. They back founders using embedded, frictionless, AI-driven fintech to reach people where they already are - an approach that delivers real scale, superior unit economics and meaningful customer impact. This hands-on, product- and insight-led style, following the company’s value proposition all the way to the end customer, is the essential mentorship seed-stage VCs can offer. Raj’s vision for an AI-driven “real-time resilience engine” demonstrates a strong commitment to solving a major societal problem, highlighting the forward-thinking pace VC Uncovered champions.

Meet Vikas

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.

A: Nothing beats my Sunday morning ritual with my sons. Since they were babies, we’ve walked to our local spot, picked up bagels and a celebratory donut, and brought them home for breakfast. Sunday mornings on the couch, reading the paper, having my first sip of coffee, a toasted sesame bagel with cream cheese, and my kids at my side, are about as good as it gets.

Key Quotes

“We try to avoid abstraction. We try to follow the throughline of what the company is offering all the way to how it generates real value for an end customer. We call that value “resilience.”

“I knew that if I wanted to have maximum leverage - on returns and impact - I needed to be a part of supporting companies when core decisions about product and business model and long term economics were being formed.”

“The perfect pitch is ultimately the story of why this founder has an earned insight that makes them the right person to build this business at this moment.”

“AI will lead us toward a real-time resilience engine. The power of an always-on, incredibly smart, and effectively free financial advisor is that people should ultimately be more financially resilient because that technology can constantly optimize for them.”

“The most important role VCs play is being a low-ego, calm, long-view partner who absorbs founder stress and does not amplify it.”

Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

I have been lucky in my career to have a front row seat to three major waves of innovation in financial services for all. Each wave taught me a lot, and ultimately created opportunities to include more people in the financial system and build truly big and profitable businesses. We have moved from analog financial services to a first wave of digital fintech, and now to what I view a third, embedded and AI-driven opportunity that reduces friction and expands who can be served efficiently.

The first wave, and one of my formative professional experience, began when I left my job at a hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut, to move to India to join an early stage micro-lending business in Bangalore. I saw clearly that this was a business-model innovation; a new, more efficient way of serving a massive underserved population previously untapped by conventional incumbent institutions, led by a business-minded person. In raising money for it, I also saw the power of private capital markets to drive both outcomes and returns, and how distribution and underwriting innovation can unlock meaningful new customer segments.

Several years later, after a handful of years doing M&A on Wall St, I became an early team-member, and ultimately ran, a global seed-stage fintech fund called Accion Ventures (previously Accion Venture Lab). This was the second wave. At Accion, we were focused on reaching and serving billions more in the financial system: people microfinance had not reached but could now be accessed due to the ubiquity of the internet and the smartphone. My biggest learning there was how critical investing at the earliest stages is. I knew that if I wanted to have maximum leverage - on returns and impact - I needed to be a part of supporting companies when core decisions about product and business model and long term economics were being formed.

The third wave aligns with co-founding and now being the Managing Partner of ResilienceVC. This is the opportunity in embedded, frictionless, and now AI-driven fintech. We focus on US businesses that serve the massive pool of underserved US consumers and small businesses by situating their products where customers already are, allowing them to build great unit economics and scale for critical fintech products.

Best Advice Received

Not sure I’d call it advice, but a value I try to live by is actively appreciating the stability in my life, while staying focused on ambitious long-term work. It’s something I talk to my kids about a lot too. Having stability and strong networks has made me more comfortable taking meaningful risk when my conviction in someone and a big idea is real, and I hope it’s made me the kind of investor who shows up early with trust and support, and stays steady even when things get noisy or uncertain. I really try to be steady and drama-free when things get inevitably messy, and part of that comes from having a very long view and staying grounded in feeling lucky today.

Philosophy and Insights

Approach to Investing

Our goal at ResilienceVC is to support visionary entrepreneurs who are using new technologies and new business models to build financial resilience for all Americans. This means the tens of millions of Americans who own micro and small businesses, who are employed or unemployed, but have been historically underserved by the mainstream financial system for a simple reason: they are deemed too small and too risky to make the numbers work. We believe that startups that understand technology have something powerful to say about this, so we back those companies that are building big, transformative businesses in financial services for all.

Values When Working with Founders

One of the great things I have seen in VC is how founders and investors seem to ultimately find each other. A lot of the best deals we have ever done have been with founders where there was a natural alignment of values and yes, vibe. For me, that means shared values around the mission, common values around ambition, and a desire to do something truly big. Ultimately, it is a desire to solve a very real problem.

We try to avoid abstraction. We try to follow the through line of what the company is offering all the way to how it generates real value for an end customer. We call that value “resilience.”

The Perfect Founder Pitch

The perfect pitch is ultimately the story of why this founder has an earned insight that makes them the right person to build this business at this moment. Now. The pitch is really about two things: who is the founder, and what is the insight? That is what I am trying to understand: what is this insight that no one else has really figured out, and how does it overlap with your experience?

Success Beyond Returns

We name the value we want for financial resilience. It is key to ensuring we invest in the best companies that are building for the long term. If we cannot look at the product or service and see that it is building financial resilience, we will not invest. While we will invest in B2B businesses that sell to large enterprises, we must be able to follow the value all the way to how it builds financial resilience for a small business or a consumer. To me that means you have a business here - something that people will pay for and build a relationship around over time.

We measure this very directly, by asking: is it driving new sources of net income, meaning higher revenue or lower expense? Is it building long-term net worth? Or, is it lowering risk?

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Trends and Technologies

AI is going to be a critical part of how any business builds from now on. If done right, AI will lead us toward a real-time resilience engine. The power of an always-on, incredibly smart, and effectively free financial advisor is that people should ultimately be more financially resilient because that technology can constantly optimize for them. This includes accessing benefits, smoothing income, optimizing assets, and planning for the long term and short term. The intersection of AI and financial services for all is incredibly powerful and could be the key to unlocking significant new brands in fintech.

Improving the VC Ecosystem

My frustration with venture is that it often operates in a kind of nebulous abstraction, where broad narratives around valuation or innovation can overshadow a clear-eyed analysis of what customers are willing and able to pay for, what truly earns engagement and retention over the long haul. I wish our industry spent more time grounded in how products behave in the hands of real customers and how they affect their lives. Following the product all the way to its endpoint, seeing how value shows up in daily use, and whether it holds up, is what ultimately builds durable companies.

Challenge for Early-Stage Founders

The most important role VCs play is being a low-ego, calm, long-view partner who absorbs founder stress and does not amplify it. As VCs, we end up playing many roles - friend, coach, occasional tough voice when needed - but we are never the main character. After investing, it’s about being a consistent partner, a source of calm and perspective through the noise, especially during cycles like today when everyone’s deep into the hype. When investors provide that steadiness, founders can stay centered on what matters instead of chasing the next shiny object.

More from Uncovered Media

Connect with Peter

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-day/

VC Uncovered’s View

Peter Day, a general partner at super{set}, is the kind of investor that reminds you that venture capital doesn’t have to be passive or performative. He embodies the type of investor VC Uncovered aims to highlight. One who provides more than capital to founders. Super{set} operates not just as a fund but as a co-builder, defining itself as the OG of AI-native ventures that rolls up its sleeves, providing capital and deep operational experience to build companies from the ground up. This hands-on, builder-first approach is the opposite of the box-checking practices that often slow larger funds.

Day’s insights are particularly relevant now because he tackles two of the biggest challenges facing technical founders: the go-to-market struggle and the current chaos of AI adoption. He believes a great way to reduce startup risk is to find founders who have both a “paranoia” about failure and an “obsession with adoption.” Day recognizes that because writing software is easier than ever, the real advantage is understanding customer problems and knowing how to sell.

His conviction that “getting your sales motion right is harder than building super complicated software” is a crucial message for technical founders and a great example of the fresh thinking we seek to spotlight.

Meet Peter

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.

A: Hanging out with my family on an island off of Cambodia eating a local dish called Lok Lak and drinking a cold local beer on the beach.

Key Quotes

“At the moment there’s this unwritten belief that AI is a chatbot. And I think that in the not too distant future, that will be seen as the dumbest integration of AI for most use cases.”

“Spotting the capacity to have conviction that you can change the world, but also paranoia that it might fail and holding those two things in equal regard and being able to handle that, I think is something that I had to learn the hard way.”

“Getting your sales motion right is harder than building super complicated software.”

“We’re obsessed with adoption. We believe adoption stats over pretty much any other number.”

“Things work because people make them work, so we always look for evidence of founders running through brick walls. ”

Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

I learned a lot from launching new products that missed their revenue goals. It reminds me of the brutality of competition and the crucial challenge of go-to-market execution. These experiences, where new products struggled, instilled humility and spurred an aggressive focus on validation, tempered by the knowledge that things might not work. I now look for founders who demonstrate the capacity to hold two essential qualities in equal regard: conviction that they can change the world, and a healthy paranoia that it might fail. This ability to handle that creative tension is a critical insight I learned the hard way and now use to identify potential in a team.

Unconventional Belief

I don’t know if it’s unconventional, but I think one of the hardest things in the world for any company is go-to-market sales, and it is underrated by most technical founders. It is close to impossible to build a company unless your founder can sell, because selling to your first customers is an insanely hard thing to do. The things you learn in your first six to twelve months in that regard are going to be the hardest to change five years down the line. Getting your sales motion right is harder than building super complicated software.

Philosophy and Insights

Values When Working with Founders

Tenacity has to be one of them. Things work because people make them work, so we always look for evidence of founders running through brick walls. We look for tenacity, self-belief, and paranoia all together, the chip on the shoulder that really gives them that drive and need to succeed. We care a lot about clock speed. To build a company now, you need to context switch 400 times a day, so that rate of learning is more essential than ever. Specifically, can you context switch and have a conversation right now about how GPUs work and then pivot to what a good balance sheet looks like. Being able to navigate that is insanely valuable.

The Perfect Founder Pitch

We have one undisclosed portfolio company whose founders were able to explain the customer pain so intimately we felt it, and they told us stuff we didn’t know. They were able to paint a picture of the future that made us want to buy the product even though we weren’t even in the industry. You could just see they’d lived it. Then they showed us a demo of the product, and you could see that the product had been built with deep empathy for customers and users by all of the design choices made. It turns out they had actually done the job for ten years before they decided to be a tech company founder. The way the whole problem was framed and the solution was built was so compelling, we felt we either needed to invest in this or we should just not enter that space for the next ten years.

Approach to Risk

We are obsessed with product adoption. We believe adoption stats over pretty much any other number. When we think about risk, it is all about quickly validating: do people want this, are they willing to pay for it, is it technically feasible, and can we make money doing it. We get super aggressive about adoption. An idea is great, a demo is better, a customer using it is the best. We really try and encourage all of our portfolio companies to get it out there and to onboard those customers as quickly as possible to create that feedback loop. If you do that, your risks go down massively. The biggest failures we see are where they overbuild without actually validating anything, and they paint themselves into a product corner that can be very difficult to get out of.

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Trends and Technologies

I think at the moment there’s this unwritten belief that AI is a chatbot. I think that in the not too distant future, that will be seen as the dumbest integration of AI for most use cases. There’s a whole bunch of work to do to reimagine what taking advantage of this wave and the next wave of foundation model innovations can bring to bear, certainly in terms of user interaction and system integration. When we see really good startups right now, they’re often doing some interesting things around UX. Building software is now way easier, but validating its output is correct is orders of magnitude harder than it’s ever been. We’ve got these amazing LLM things; they’re a little bit like toddlers, and wrestling them and telling them what to do via increasingly long prompts that they occasionally ignore is a really hard problem to solve. Research around the controllability and the evaluation of these technologies is super exciting.

Misconception About VCs

There are a number of operating models, and they don’t neatly fit into one box. In our model, we want to co-build with people because we all love building. The misconception is that all venture looks the same. I think there is also a misconception that valuation is everything at every stage, and maximizing your valuation is a smart play. Picking the right venture partner for you, for your business, for your team, is more important than percentage points.

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Connect with Marell

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marell-evans/

VC Uncovered’s View

Marell Evans of Exceptional Capital represents a new archetype of venture capital leader that we strive to profile on VC Uncovered: one who merges a disciplined, data-driven background in enterprise technology sales (IBM, Okta) with an elevated, macro-level sense of fiduciary duty. His firm manages the Exceptional 100 list and views venture capital as more than just making deals. They focus on being active partners to founders, investors, and the economy.

Evans’s investment style is notably unconventional. He professes a tactical neutrality to avoid ‘hype cycles,’ prioritizing skepticism and open-mindedness over blind optimism. He demands ‘obsession and paranoia’ from founders, seeing those traits as essential indicators of tenacity. Crucially, he champions the notion of ‘unmarginalized ambition,’ encouraging founders to dream big enough to achieve a profound, long-term impact. This piece is essential reading for founders seeking a capital partner who can provide not just money, but also the confidence, credibility, and a critical, enduring perspective in a market obsessed with ephemeral velocity.

Meet Marell

Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.

A: I’m on a beach, having just wrapped up a run, with a strong cold brew in hand. I’d be catching up on a mix of favorite newsletters and podcasts, fueled by a salad with extra, extra protein.

Key Quotes

“One of the most valuable things I’ve learned professionally and personally is to avoid marginalizing my ambition.”

“At Exceptional Capital we want to give high-ambition, high-tenacity founders the confidence, capital, and credibility to execute on their vision and bring something transformative to market.”

“I’m generally trying to get a sense of the level of their obsession and paranoia about what it is that they want to build.”

“Success in venture to me means that the culture of your firm is synonymous with understanding and being obsessed with these responsibilities, to LPs, to founders, to the world.”

“Prioritizing exclusivity over fostering a genuine environment of intellectual curiosity is a mistake.”

Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach

My time as a linebacker at the University of Michigan shaped my analytical approach and allowed me to understand the value of transferrable skills and talents. The way sports organizations scout players mirrors how Exceptional Capital thinks about cultivating our own talent network. Instead of waiting for pitches, we proactively scrape and sift through a variety of data sources, iterating on internal tooling to improve our lens on talent - for future founders and to help support our portfolio with recruitment. We also track “talent diaspora,” monitoring when high-impact employees leave hyper-growth companies. Our team is continually refining our methods, as showcased in exercises like our Exceptional 100. We want to cultivate and create deal flow pre-inception as much as possible, rather than exhaustively chase deal flow.

Moment Inspiring Venture Capital Career

My career started with technology sales and sales leadership at IBM and Okta. I was rewarded by seeing the impact these solutions had on customers. This led to an interest in witnessing a variety of software implementations across enterprises, which eventually guided me to investing. I was fortunate to transition into an investing role at Softbank, investing out of multiple vehicles across software and hardware. I always aspired to start my own fund with a clear vision and culture. Our earliest supporters solidified my confidence in building something new. We apply this lesson to our portfolio companies: empowering the confidence a founding team has in its vision is the starting point.

Unconventional Belief

I don’t know if this is unconventional, but I think I am not the most naturally optimistic person. Approaching things with neutrality helps me avoid getting caught up in hype cycles. Strong conviction is important, but it can sometimes be confused with having strong opinions. Being more neutral helps me stay open-minded, even if at times a bit skeptical, which is important for investing. I never want to be closed off from listening intently and without judgement to new ideas or hypotheses. I am not negative, but I give myself space to learn and build conviction without being overloaded with bias.

Best Advice Received

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned professionally and personally is to avoid marginalizing my ambition. This is true for myself, what we are building at Exceptional, and how I engage with founders. To build a big business and have a profound impact on the world, it is imperative to dream big. Confining ambition to set parameters jeopardizes what can actually be created in the long term. I encourage founders to maintain a creative, expansive outlook and not put themselves or their ambitions in a box.

Philosophy and Insights

Values When Working with Founders

I can give you my philosophy on what I think is required of being a good investor and partner to founders. At Exceptional Capital we want to give high-ambition, high-tenacity founders the confidence, capital, and credibility to execute on their vision and bring something transformative to market. It is a mistake to dilute investing down to just making bets. For General Partners especially, it is an active partnership, both with founders and with Limited Partners.

When getting to know founders, I generally try to get a sense of their level of obsession and paranoia about what they want to build. I want to understand how intensely focused they are, how paranoid they are to miss out on opportunities, and their dedication to deeply studying user needs and competition. Coachability is also important: founders must absorb new information and be agile if needed to keep things moving in the right direction.

Measure of Success

If founders and LPs are referring you to others, that is a powerful indicator of long-term success. Ultimately, venture is about returns. I highlight in a recent piece, ‘The $100B+ Responsibility of Emerging Managers,’ that we are not in business without our LPs; we have a fiduciary duty to them and need to make money for them. The impact of the returns we generate has broader implications: endowments that fund universities and scholarships, organizations that fund labs or medical research, hospitals with specialized care centers, and foundations with key initiatives. We owe it to them to perform. Venture fuels innovation, and we have a responsibility at a macro level to impact US GDP and global GDP. There is an economic and human impact that is far reaching. We also have a responsibility to founders who put their trust in us by our being on the cap table. Success in venture to me means that the culture of your firm is synonymous with understanding and being obsessed with these responsibilities: to LPs, to founders, and to the world.

Trends and Future Vision

Exciting Trends and Technologies

I am excited about what is beyond code-gen and task-based agentic work: the potential for self-corrective, self-healing software that is more sophisticated in its predictive capabilities. For example, software with the ability to be self-reflective of its own codebase, optimize performance, detect anomalies, and proactively recover from failures without human intervention. Improvements to foundation models and Reinforcement Learning (RL) enable this future where software may be able to understand and modify code at a semantic level. In tandem with the adoption of autonomous software, there are significant challenges around access, management, and trust. Enterprises and individuals will need reassurance that self-modifying systems will not expose security vulnerabilities, making this a critical time for the security layer as well.

Improving the VC Ecosystem

One thing I hope continues to improve is mentorship. Generationally, a lot of Gen Z and Millennials have been under-mentored due to access, the culture of work, and perhaps certain hierarchies in finance and investing. Venture has at times been needlessly or unproductively exclusive. Students and aspiring entrepreneurs interested in startups and innovation should have easier access to engage with the ecosystem because their curiosity and contributions can only strengthen it. The team and I, being former athletes, are passionate about providing opportunities to student-athletes, especially through our internship program. There is a strong correlation between characteristics and attributes athletes develop and the successful transition of those to roles in management, sales, and leadership. Prioritizing exclusivity over fostering a genuine environment of intellectual curiosity is a mistake.

Challenges for Early-Stage Founders

A significant challenge is velocity. Companies are building faster than we have ever witnessed and achieving revenue milestones at a rapid pace. There is dialogue around whether ‘momentum is a moat,’ but I look at this almost linguistically. Words like ‘fast,’ ‘speed,’ and ‘rapid’ are adjectives. They may be superficial in the long run; these descriptors do not relay anything about the quality, long-term adoption, or excellence of a product. The priority is building something that can compete into the future, a brand that continues to build community and loyalty, and will be able to compete because competition is incredibly fierce. Finding a balance of moving at the right velocity while also building something enduring has no precise answer, and we are all learning in real time. It will be another few years before we have historical data from which we can abstract takeaways and broader learnings.

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