Before Alexander Mittal and Boris Silver started a venture capital firm together, they stood in line at a food truck. They met outside Huntsman Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, waiting at Hemo’s. Years later, they reconnected in San Francisco and found they shared a complaint: getting money into a promising young company involved a remarkable amount of friction. A sandwich queue had supplied something the investment business prizes highly - an introduction.
That small beginning fits the larger story rather neatly. Mittal, who generally goes by Alex, would spend years trying to make useful introductions less dependent on fortunate geography. He co-founded FundersClub in 2012 with Silver, taking the machinery of startup investing online. The question behind it was personal. He had already built companies and raised money for them. He knew what happened when a founder’s calendar became a fundraising calendar.
FundersClub brought him to the investor’s side of the table, while leaving him with a founder’s impatience about how the table was arranged. His career runs through enterprise software, touchscreen hardware and venture capital. Across those changes, the recurring interest is practical: how does an idea acquire the people, money and evidence needed to become a working business?
A laboratory is an unusual waiting room for venture capital
Mittal graduated from Penn’s Management & Technology program in 2007, with degrees from Wharton and Penn Engineering. Economics and engineering make a useful double education for someone who will eventually have to ask both whether a thing works and whether anyone can afford to make it.
His scientific work preceded his investment career. He published research in peer-reviewed journals, became an inventor on issued patents and presented at the 2002 Nobel Prize Ceremonies. The distinction belongs to his research background; his later business life required a different sort of proof. A laboratory result and a customer order are both encouraging, but they answer different questions.
Innova Dynamics grew from work at Penn. Mittal was its founding CEO; fellow M&T graduate Arjun Srinivas was among its co-founders. The business developed materials technology for touchscreens, carrying university work toward consumer electronics applications. It was eventually acquired by Taiwan-based TPK Holding. Srinivas later described a company that had expanded across San Francisco, Japan and Taiwan, secured major corporate customers and partners, and raised more than $30 million over three financing rounds.
This was experience with the awkward middle of invention: after an experiment has worked, before a company has settled into a dependable rhythm. Hardware has to meet the demands of manufacturing and commercial partners. A promising material still needs a place in somebody else’s product. Mittal’s earlier role as founding CTO of Crederity, an enterprise credential-verification company, gave him another kind of company-building experience. His route into investing included having to seek investment himself.
The investor with advice to postpone the pitch
In August 2013, a year after launching FundersClub, Mittal published advice for first-time founders. His opening recommendation was to consider proceeding without fundraising. It is a pleasingly inconvenient position for someone running an investment business. The customer walks into the shop, and the proprietor asks whether the purchase is necessary.
The reasoning was grounded in his own work. In the early days of one company, he had bought components, assembled servers and arranged colocation to support the computing it needed. By 2013, services delivered on demand had made initial testing much cheaper. He wanted founders to spend their attention on the product and customers before making investor meetings the center of their week.
“Before fundraising, consider not fundraising.”
Alex Mittal, 2013
There is an economics lesson tucked inside that advice. Venture money arrives with expectations about scale and returns. Taking it changes what success must look like. A business can serve its customers well without fitting those expectations. Mittal’s recommendation asks founders to choose a financing method that suits the company they are actually building.
In his 2015 discussion of crowdfunding, he applied the same attention to the promises founders make. Product pre-orders can establish demand, but an enthusiastic campaign does not finish the product. Customers expect delivery. The practical appeal of his perspective is that it keeps the unglamorous obligations in view: making the thing, explaining delays, setting expectations and continuing to run the company while money is being raised.
Putting a wider network through a narrow gate
FundersClub joined Y Combinator’s summer 2012 batch. Its founding wager was that software could help accredited investors discover and back startups, while giving founders access to a larger pool of people who could help. A platform could make participation more convenient without requiring every investor to operate a separate venture firm.
The distinction between attracting investors and selecting companies matters. A larger audience does not automatically produce better investment decisions. FundersClub’s published process includes internal diligence and feedback from a selected community panel. The investment team evaluates businesses before they are offered for funding. Its public description says fewer than 2 percent of reviewed startups make it onto the platform.
Software connects the stages. People make the judgments.
In that design, the network is useful at several moments. Someone may discover a company, recognize a technical issue or know a potential hire. The founder’s need for help continues after the financing closes. FundersClub describes support for recruiting, customer introductions and subsequent fundraising alongside the investment itself.
For Mittal, this makes the platform an ongoing operating project. Its usefulness depends on what members and founders can do through it. A completed transaction is one event in a much longer relationship. The product has to accommodate the stretch between writing a check and finding out what that check helped build.
A strange idea still needs a serious business
By January 2019, Mittal was discussing lessons from nearly 300 early-stage investments with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best. Their connection went back further than their professional lives: O’Shaughnessy introduced him as an elementary-school friend. The conversation’s topics ranged from data and founder evaluation to electronics, logistics and ideas that initially sound unpromising.
That last category is where early-stage investing becomes interesting. A company that looks odd at first can contain a useful insight about how people might behave differently. The difficulty is deciding which unfamiliar assumptions deserve attention. Mere strangeness is plentiful. A team capable of turning an unfamiliar idea into something people use is harder to find.
Mittal’s history with electronics gives those questions some texture. The practical hurdles of physical products remain present in his conversations even when the subject is software or finance. In a 2017 interview with Harry Stebbings, his interests included APIs, on-demand businesses, artificial intelligence and hard-science startups. He also named The Art of War as a favorite book. The range suggests an investor comfortable moving between technical questions and questions about strategy.
FundersClub’s portfolio includes Coinbase, Instacart, Webflow, GitLab, Flexport and Rippling. Those names now offer a convenient shorthand for its work. Yet the investment decision precedes the familiar name. In the early stages, the eventual company is still obscured by unresolved questions about demand, execution and the market.
The useful introduction survives the software
In March 2017, Shippo co-founder Laura Behrens Wu interviewed Mittal for a live question-and-answer session. Usually he hosted the conversations. This time he took the guest seat. Asked about his move into venture capital, he insisted that he still considered himself a founder.
His frustration with Silicon Valley’s dependence on connections had survived the move. He wanted FundersClub to help entrepreneurs enter networks they did not already know. Behrens Wu supplied a concrete example: Shippo had received introductions to other startups from FundersClub before it invested. The help preceded the check, which is a useful test of what an investor relationship actually contains.
Mittal described the challenge as harder than he had expected. His candor gives the ambition some weight. Building an online product does not instantly rearrange a social system. People still hire people they trust, exchange information through relationships and make decisions with incomplete evidence. A platform must earn its usefulness inside that human traffic.
He has also spent time making those conversations public. FC Live put him opposite investors including Megan Quinn, Garry Tan and Mike Abbott. The format allowed questions from viewers and offered a way to hear how people in venture capital reason about their work. An introduction can help one founder; a public conversation can give many more people a little context before their own meeting.
After the seed round, the story keeps moving
The continuing work is visible in a portfolio update Mittal published in August 2022. It tracked follow-on rounds at companies including Webflow, Rippling and Chainalysis. For Webflow, FundersClub listed participation from seed through Series C. For Chainalysis, it listed seed, Series A, Series B and Series F. Those sequences describe relationships carried across several stages of company development.
Later financing is a different chapter from an early check. Teams grow, products change and other investors enter. Following a company across those transitions gives the original investment thesis repeated encounters with reality. The milestones are worth recording because they show the passage of time, which a list of portfolio logos tends to conceal.
Mittal remains listed as FundersClub’s co-founder and CEO, and as managing director of FCVC. The work has widened from his own ventures to a collection of founders whose problems he can help address. His most interesting habit may be his willingness to question the incentives of the profession he joined. He can run a venture firm and still ask a founder whether venture money belongs in the plan.
The food-truck meeting makes a fitting last detail. His own partnership began with proximity and chance, then developed through shared work. FundersClub tries to make more useful encounters possible for other people. For all the software in the story, its recurring unit of progress is recognizably human: somebody with a problem meets somebody who can help.