Work
Specific examples and outcomes.
Vibe Capital: Building a fund from scratch
The situation
Building a deep tech and AI infrastructure fund 18 months before ChatGPT launched, when most LPs weren't interested in the thesis.
What I did
- Developed the thesis: conviction before consensus. Back founders who manipulate matter, bend energy, or rewrite biology.
- Sourced and underwrote 40+ investments across AI infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, biotech, and space.
- Portfolio markups at 24x and 12x on positions that haven't exited. Co-investors on various deals include Sam Altman, Alex Wang, and operators from Meta and Scale AI.
- Hands-on strategic work with founders through high-stakes decisions - operational focus, capitalization structure, when to hold and when to move. The kind of calls where five investors give five different answers and only one is right.
A real portfolio with real markups, built on a thesis that's now consensus.
Example: Pipedream
2021 pre-seed on underground autonomous delivery networks when most people thought it was science fiction. Built conviction around the constraint: last-mile delivery economics break if you can eliminate surface traffic and weather. Worked closely on strategy as they moved from concept to real infrastructure, and helped position the company to land anchor tenants representing tens of billions in network demand.
First node launching in Austin with sub-2-minute fulfillment from underground RFC to surface portals. Next: 125+ mile DFW network.
Example: Shapes
2021 investment in AI companions - over a year before ChatGPT launched. Cold inbound from founders, stayed in contact, invested when AI friends sounded like a toy. Lightspeed led the seed round.
Facebook | 2007-2017
Employee #180. Ten years across product operations, from startup chaos through IPO to 2B daily queries.
I spent the bulk of my Facebook career on Search, including the Graph Search era - what Mark called Facebook's "Third Pillar," announced eight months after a rough IPO as proof the company could build beyond News Feed. It was one of the most technically ambitious projects the young company had undertaken: a privacy-aware index, NLP engine, and personalized search across 240 billion photos and 1 trillion connections, built by a team of 50+ led by the creator of Google Maps.
The product had a fundamental usability problem the team was too close to see. The design concept was a "magical page title" - no white search box, no search icon, just a clean blue line across the top of every page. It was an intentional, ambitious design thesis. But users couldn't find the search bar. We were flooded with bug reports: "my search bar is gone." I kept pushing eng, design, and product: just make it white. There was real resistance because the blue bar was the concept. We tested it. White outperformed the next best option by more than 2x.
That experience taught me something I've carried ever since: when the people building the thing can't see what's obvious to the people using it, someone has to be willing to say the simple, boring, correct thing out loud.
Founder | 2018-2020
After a decade inside a company that had everything - resources, talent, distribution - I went and built something with none of it. It didn't work, but the experience fundamentally changed how I operate. I learned what it feels like to have no leverage and no safety net. It gave me a sharper lens on what founders actually need versus what they say they need - a distinction that defined how I invested for the next four years.
How I work
I'm usually the person brought in when something important is stuck - the technology is real but the org can't agree on what to do about it. Six teams think they're right, the data is ambiguous, and someone has to figure out what's actually true and get everyone moving in the same direction.
What you get back: a clear picture of the real constraints, the two or three things that actually matter, and a plan that ships. Not a deck. A sequence of moves with owners and deadlines.