Scout stories
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- Alexia Bonatsos asked what would have happened if she had been writing checks instead of articles
- Andrew Chen wrote hundreds of essays on growth, then went from Uber straight to general partner
- Arlan Hamilton taught herself fundraising from books while homeless, and it took five years to the first check
- Charles Hudson ran a startup and moonlighted as a venture partner at the same time
- Eghosa Omoigui left Intel Capital to cover the market nobody else was covering
- Elizabeth Yin and Eric Bahn used the accelerator that funded them as the door into investing
- Erik Torenberg kept building the machinery around venture until a firm bought one and made him a partner
- Harry Stebbings started a podcast at 18 and raised his first fund from the founders he interviewed
- Henri Pierre-Jacques and Jarrid Tingle took roughly 400 limited partner meetings to build Harlem Capital
- Jason Calacanis was recruited as a scout because his media reputation was the access a firm wanted to buy
- Jenny Fielding mentored founders for free until the institution hired her to do it full time
- Julia Lipton backed friends with no strategy until outside money asked to come along
- Justine and Olivia Moore ran a 5,000 dollar student incubator and the investors came to them
- Lachy Groom skipped college, joined Stripe at 30 employees, and angel invested his way to a 250 million dollar fund
- Li Jin cold applied to a16z with no introduction and closed the gap with six months of written work
- Lolita Taub built a free matchmaking tool that made 2,000 introductions before she had any capital
- Mac Conwell took 1,128 meetings in four months and raised a 10 million dollar fund from Twitter
- Maya Horgan Famodu built a profitable consultancy first, and its clients became her limited partners
- Nichole Wischoff raised her first fund off an email, on four documented angel checks
- Packy McCormick merged a dead events business into a newsletter and had a fund 15 months later
- Rex Woodbury built an audience while employed at Index, then left to run his own firm
- Ryan Hoover already owned the site where every new product launched, so he started the smallest fund he could
- Sarah Kunst says plan for 300 meetings and 18 months without a paycheck
- Turner Novak posted investment theses from Michigan until a fund let him intern remotely
- Zach Coelius was already making the introductions, so he turned them into a syndicate