Divergence Paths in life so far

At 16, someone told me to apply to a high school accelerator program and I did it because I thought building a startup would help me get into college. This is how I flew to SF, got a SAFE from a random angel who (even by pre-covid standards) embodied peak bay area angel craze, and tried to build b2b edtech saas.

During COVID, I ran over a meeting with Melissa Bell from Vox and missed an opportunity to work with the greatest video production team in the digital journalism era (while also playing way too much geoguessr).

When I was a freshman in college, after fortuitously spending some time with some scrappy solo GPs who'd just raised funds to learn what venture actually meant, I had an opportunity to drop out and join a consumer health Princeton pHD founder. Knowing nothing about CPG/consumer and preferring to stay in software, I didn't accept. He sold for a little south of 100M a couple years later. In hindsight, this was probably a formative experience for my bias to people-based investing and my strong belief in generalist investing. An 8 figure exit like that wouldn't bat your eyes (whichever year you're reading this) now, but the learning opportunity so early would have been tremendous.

When I was a sophomore, I got copious amounts of non-dilutive funding and an EIR-ship at a top vc to build. I chose to spend that opportunity to build the world's greatest tarpit idea and delay my coding education.

When I was a junior, I realized that I was falling outside of my peer group and sought to course correct as soon as possible. Investing, and access to exceptional people networks, was my way of doing that, and I was extremely lucky to get into General Catalyst's student fund program called Rough Draft Ventures at the time.

By senior year, I'd convinced myself that the most ambitious thing I could do was either build something of my own or leverage the venture advantages and networks I'd accrued while being so young to fast track an early stage investing reputation. I toed the line between the two constantly, but ultimately settled on the latter.

At any point in the past few years, changing any of the latter sentences would substantially alter my current ambition.

My current ambition is as follows: I will raise a fund within the next 2-3 years given the course my ambition has taken. I'm determined to do it as scrappily as possible, with methods that I've never seen my GPs do, with technology I build bespoke for myself that may border on extreme, and with a reputation that spans 997 workdays. If I'm not the 10x engineer who is extremely charismatic, obsessive about something, and top decile with everything I do, including my talent networks and who I choose to work with, I'll be the 10x enabler for finding, converting and enabling those people.