Ashli Jain

I look for two things before anything else: a market big enough that winning it actually matters, and a founder who sees that market differently than everyone else already looking at it. In practice, that founder is almost always technically brilliant and customer-obsessed at the same time.

What I bring to that partnership is an engineer's instinct: before I believe a founder's story about why they'll win, I want to understand how the product is actually built. That instinct started at Stanford, where I studied computer science and philosophy and spent my time outside class helping run TreeHacks, the school's hackathon — watching hundreds of students build real products in 36 hours taught me to spot technical talent fast. I started my career writing code on Uber's infrastructure team, then traded writing code for evaluating it: investing in technology companies at Citadel, Silver Lake, and KKR. My goal is to be the investor a founder can go deep with on the technology and still trust in the room when the decisions get hard.