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Neman Ventures
The best bouncers I ever met weren't big guys with no necks and bad attitudes. They were curators. Psychologists. Pattern recognition machines in leather jackets. And everything they knew about building the perfect room, I now use to build the perfect portfolio.
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In the summer of 1997, I was a premed student at NYU with a secret: I was way more interested in computers than cadavers. So when I landed a research internship at NASA's biology labs at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, I told myself it was the perfect compromise. Computers AND biology. Science AND technology. Mom would be proud.
I was twenty years old, riding a Greyhound-style bus from the intern housing to the Space Center every morning, wearing my NASA badge like it was a backstage pass to the future. Which, in a way, it was. I just didn't know it yet.
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If you looked at my investment history with no context, you'd think I have the attention span of a golden retriever at a tennis ball factory. Impossible Foods. Athletic Greens. SandboxAQ. Cirkul (the flavored water bottle that Gen Z can't put down). Flexport. Canyon Bikes. Kraken. A real estate portfolio spanning Santa Monica to Brooklyn. And yes, infant nutrition.
But here's what I've learned after building two companies, exiting both, writing a book, and deploying capital across more than fifty startups: every single investment decision I make runs through the same pattern recognition engine. And that engine was built, improbably and irreversibly, in the New York City nightlife scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Let me tell you what I mean.
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