I believe you can spot a great company first in its founders and then in its product, well before anything shows up in a spreadsheet. That’s how I decide who to work with. I’ve backed teams like Notion, Weights & Biases, Haus Analytics, Datavant, and Metronome. These are founders who led with product and earned traction by building something real.
Right out of Stanford, I started Euclid. It was a bet on machine learning and scaling data infrastructure with a small team and limited resources. We made progress, but a lot went sideways. We were handling billions of location events a day and constantly trying to keep the system from falling over. At one point, Al Franken was calling us out in Senate hearings over privacy. We had to decide whether to push forward or rethink major parts of what we had built. The most fun I had was in the early days, working with customers and getting the product right. That’s what taught me what makes a real signal.
That experience shapes how I work with founders. I’m drawn to people who are building something they can’t not build. I look for clear thinking, even if the rest isn’t figured out yet. I don’t care whether you’re technical. What matters is whether you understand the problem and are making progress. Being a partner means showing up when things are hard, not just when they’re going well.
If you’re working on infrastructure, AI, or data and want someone who will actually show up, I’d love to talk.
