The Western Hills

Westward then to Berkeley, to the hills above the bay, to learn the language of capital. He had spent a decade as a maker of things, and now he set out to learn how the other side of the table thinks: those who decide which makers get to build at all. At Haas he led the Venture Capital Club and served as an investment principal for a student-run fund, placing real money on real companies before his schooling was done.

He arrived as a new power woke in the world. Machines learned to speak, to see and to reason, and a fever swept the hills, the same hills that had drawn prospectors with picks and pans nearly two centuries before. Every week new banners rose: models that wrote, chips that thought, robots that walked. Fortunes were staked in a season and lost in a season. He stood at the heart of it, close enough to tell which claims held real ore and which held only glitter.

On Capital Ridge, the high ground of those hills, he spent three years in the work of capital. At Autotech Ventures he met founders at the earliest gate, when they had little more than a prototype and a promise. He weighed thirty-five young companies in mobility and robotics, carried eighteen through full diligence, and joined a venture studio’s founding team to test a new kind of repair for connected vehicles.

His deepest work came at GroundForce over two full years, where he helped build the firm’s technology practice from the ground up. He wrote its thesis on supply-chain intelligence and built an engine that searched more than nine hundred sources and surfaced five hundred qualified companies. He carried seven deals to the investment committee, two of them to exclusive letters of intent, and modeled the returns, cap tables and terms behind them. As the firm’s in-house CIO, he sat with the leaders of six portfolio companies, shaped their technology roadmaps alongside them, and cut what they spent on technology by more than a sixth.

Then he went to AIC, at the frontier where science is still becoming product. There he weighed more than a hundred AI companies, among them chips built on reversible computing, enclaves that keep data secret even while it is in use, models of the physical world, and intelligence small enough to live on a device. He helped close three investments.

Hundreds of companies of the new age passed before him in those years. What he carried down from the ridge was a translation. He learned to hear a founder’s architecture and speak it back as risk and return, and to hear a board’s question and turn it into a roadmap. He saw the same handful of choices decide the fate of company after company: what to build first, what to leave unbuilt, when to sell, and to whom. All the while he built engines of his own to find companies, weigh them and serve those already chosen, a maker’s work even in the house of capital.