We empower founders

Diego knew he'd start a company—eventually.

But first, he wanted to spend more time learning. Learning from founders, learning the ropes of a high-growth early stage startup, learning about the data analytics space. Learning what would make him a better founder. Eventually.

We connected him to Digit as employee 12 and the first data scientist. Within four years, he was running the data team and half the engineering organization.

He felt the itch to start something, but he wasn’t sure what the “something” was yet, and he didn’t want to leave his job until he knew. We knew as long as he was building something he cared about, we wanted to be behind him.

A few months later, Diego became our first Entrepreneur-in-Residence. And he’s officially found his idea: Able, an AI-driven platform that reduces the global cost of access to capital for businesses.

Nikki had gotten a little antsy. She’d grown up in the Bay Area, majored in CS at Stanford, then gone on to work as a software engineer at Airbnb in San Francisco.

All those things were great—but she was missing something.

We’d met Nikki in her senior year, before she’d decided to take the Airbnb offer. We met up with her again to see how we could help. She mentioned she was interested in an early stage fintech startup. A college internship at Affirm had apparently left her with a lingering interest that had only grown stronger in the years since. And she wanted to get in at the ground floor.

Our thoughts went right to Vise, an NYC-based investment management startup. Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra are two of the most impressive founders we’ve met or invested in. When we connected them to Nikki, they’d just closed their seed round, and they were brimming with potential.

Nikki saw that same potential, and joined Vise as a full stack engineer shortly after meeting Samir and Runik. (Vise raised their Series A and B before she hit her one-year mark—definitely a get-in-at-the-ground-floor experience.)

We met Keenan, an ambitious graduate of the Olin College of Engineering, in 2018. We put him in touch with Snowflake, the cloud-native data warehousing company. They extended him an offer, but he ultimately decided to join software startup Lever—the brainchild of another Olin grad.

A little over two years later, Keenan got back in touch. He’d learned and grown a lot at Lever, but he was looking for a new challenge at a fast-growing startup that was heavily invested in mentoring its people.

We introduced him to Agora, a construction management SaaS platform, just as the company was entering an exciting post-Series A scaling period. Founders Maria Rioumine and Ryan Gibson had seen how broken the material supply chain was—lots of pen and paper, very little software—and they wanted to make it easier for commercial construction companies to find, order and track their supplies.

Keenan instantly connected to the team. In addition to being a part of a scaling startup, he was bullish about the mentorship and sense of ownership he’d be walking into. He joined as a full stack engineer on the product engineering team, where he’s building and shipping features for the company’s web and mobile applications.