the practice of peopling
Q1.26 LP update excerpt
My career is a story of being drawn to studying people who were doing the thing they were meant to do. I wanted to know why it worked so well for them, and found through practice that I’m good at helping them become even better at it. Over time, I uncovered what that thing was for me: finding and understanding these quiet, quirky, mission-driven founders I call moths. In doing so, I’ve come to understand myself much better as one too.
I started taking psychology classes at my local community college in my freshman year of high school. I loved them, but found it frustrating how much focus was put on our dysfunction when my interest was with how people — especially outliers — can become great. So I went looking in the real world, studying people I respected up close across 20 jobs before I found investing as the container where I could act on what I see.
What I do today looks a lot like studying how people become great, with feedback loops attached. My goal is to find the most competent weirdos and build relationships with them. I generally meet them through the network of “mothy” people I’ve cultivated over the past five years. I want to have already built trust with them and shown how I can be helpful by the time a select few of these moths start to take off and metamorphose into exactly what their business needs to grow.
My aim is to provide what I’ve found founders find most useful at the idea stage: coaching, money (grants and/or investment dollars), and help on storytelling. The founders who make the most sense for my model are often building in spaces with a higher burden of proof to raise capital at the earliest stages (aka not enterprise AI). Because of this, they live or die by storytelling in the interstitial period between pre-seed and seed. I can help with that.
Two misconceptions can arise here. Either that I find people in the middle of nowhere and teach them how to storytell or that I back founders who need me. Neither are true. To get conviction on a founder, I need to see a path to them winning with or without me. If we decide to work together, my aim is to accelerate their inevitable growth.
I started Moth to create the kind of partner I wished I’d had when I was just out of college. As a moth, I’ve experienced firsthand that our mystery starts to melt away as moths achieve legible success, making us appear sparkly and obviously talented to newcomers. That doesn’t mean we feel like butterflies inside, though. At the core of being a moth is feeling misunderstood, an experience that only tends to intensify from spending time in the spotlight.
Which is why the most valuable thing I can offer isn’t money or coaching — it’s recognition and belief in this certain kind of person. My work is to discern which of the ambitions of these founders genuinely make sense for venture capital, and to resist comparing them to examples set forth by more obvious butterflies. I strive to be specific in my articulations of what makes my founders special and help them learn to trust themselves.