About
I'm a Partner at OVO Fund, a pre-seed firm in Menlo Park. I write the first check into companies before they have a product, revenue, or consensus.
OVO wrote one of the first checks into Palantir - and then into five companies founded by Palantir alumni: Wish, Sourcegraph, Addepar, Everlaw, and Signifyd. Over the last decade, we've invested $100M at the pre-seed stage. That capital has produced $32B in aggregate value and companies that now employ more than 12,500 people.
At the idea stage, I wrote the first checks into Haize Labs (General Catalyst), Tilde Labs (Bain Capital), Context AI (Lux Capital), Accordance (Khosla, Altimeter), and Human Behavior (Paul Graham, General Catalyst).
Before OVO, I worked in TMT investment banking at Barclays and growth equity at Realization Capital. I studied Economics at Stanford ('20). I'm a first-generation American and the first in my family to attend college.
My Scary-Early Approach to Investing
Fundraising feels like a detour from building. A deck delivered on repeat—same slides, same questions, same performance. But what if fundraising could be part of building? This experience exists. But it requires intention. You'll choose co-founders carefully, vet every engineer, yet rush through fundraising—as if the people who'll shape your hardest decisions deserve less care than your first hire. You deserve an investor who matches the rigor you applied to founding your company. I make this process real by starting where others end.
Discovery, not prescription
To build clearly, think clearly. Founders think investors hold the key to their success. This is false. The insight that builds your company lives inside you. My job is to help you find it. So we won't begin with scripts. We won't rehearse how you should pitch, how you should hire, what growth path you should take. These are patterns. Patterns don't build companies. Clear thinking does. I listen for how you think—because what you think becomes what you build. Everything communicates. If your thinking is muddled, your execution will be too. Clarity demands the right questions—properly dosed:
- What's obvious to you that others miss?
- Why you, why now?
- How do you know—not guess—there's real demand?
These questions bypass rehearsed answers. They demand discovery.
Your life's work is an n=1 experiment. Your insights can't be extracted from a template. They emerge through exploration—mutual and unrelenting.
Integration, not segmentation
You build the business; the business builds you. Every founder discovers the same mirror: their company can only expand as far as they do. When you tell me "I need to prove I can build something"—I hear the real question: Am I who I think I am? Your startup will answer that. When another admits "I've been sleepwalking through life"—their company becomes the alarm clock. Customer interactions, hard decisions, pivots—all demand presence. This is the work. I partner with founders who see the business and the builder as one system:
- Every difficult conversation you avoid creates a ceiling for your company
- Every time you check X instead of shipping, you're choosing performance over progress
- Every user who churns knows something about your product you're avoiding
This approach isn't for everyone. And that's how it should be. When you choose this path, I walk it beside you. Because I'm walking my own version of this as an investor.
On paper, we're playing for exits and valuations. In truth, we're playing for who we become in the pursuit.
Craft, not transaction
The first check is a covenant—the investor who shows up before the metrics do, and stays long after the round closes. I don't separate the human from the business, the builder from the building, the truth from the strategy. They are one, integrated whole. This makes my economics simple: I make money when you make money, in proportion to the value we create together.
And value doesn't always show up on cap tables. It shows up in the mistakes you didn't make, the clarity you found when you needed it most, the person you became through the work.
So our first meeting won't feel like a pitch, because it isn't. There's no seller and no buyer. You aren't selling me on your business, and I am not selling you on my value. I earn a place on your cap table through mutual discovery, not persuasion.
Some founders just want capital. That's fine—we're not a fit. I can only serve founders who want depth over distance, discovery over directives. I invest in six companies a year. Not because capital is scarce, but because this depth can't scale.
Fundraising doesn't have to be a detour from building. It can be where building starts.
Shelf Life
On pricing, permission, and the beliefs that outlive their phase.
Both Were True
On loyalty, duty, and the space between
Work Has No Mouth
On the surface area of luck
A Borrowed Tongue
On the words that find us
General Intelligence
What a German general knew about today’s founders
Which Wolf Do You Feed?
The path demands authenticity over optics
The Most Dangerous Words in Venture Capital
Loose money, uncapped notes, and misaligned incentives
Dry Castles, Digital Moats
Defensibility in Generative AI - Part I
The Never-Ending Nexus
Life's Three Constants: Pain, Uncertainty, and Work
Siri Gets an MBA: Autonomous Agents and The 1-Person Unicorn
The Power of AI: Questioning Assumptions in Startup Dynamics
What's worth your attention — and why does it matter?
Essays on mastery over ego, alpha through constraints, and frameworks for leverage — informed by the work of a first-check investor and three hours of daily reading.
Each piece sharpens a thesis, challenges a prior, or opens a new line of inquiry.
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