The dispatch
Mid-stride.
On a Tuesday in San Francisco, Cecily Mak is on a call about a Series A in a mental-health platform she met through a meditation teacher. By Thursday she will be in Brooklyn at a bookstore reading from a manuscript she sold to Flatiron. Friday is her once-a-semester guest lecture for the Digital Media Law class she has been teaching, at the same law school, since 2006.
This is not the resume of someone who picked a lane. It is the resume of someone who kept noticing where the road was supposed to end and then driving past the sign. Mak is a co-founding general partner of Wisdom Ventures, the San Francisco-based fund she launched with Bradley Horowitz (long-time Google executive) and Soren Gordhamer (founder of the Wisdom 2.0 conference series). The thesis is not subtle: they will write checks into companies that make humans more present, more connected, and less numb. They closed a first close of $16M on Fund II in June 2025. The fund's stated AUM, on its own site, is north of $90M.
A reasonable question: how does a former general counsel at a digital music company end up with a thesis about conscious AI? The answer is that she stopped pretending the two questions were separate. Mak spent the first half of her career as the person companies hire to make problems go away quietly. She spent the second half learning that not every problem can, or should, be made quiet.
The book makes that obvious. Undimmed: The Eight Awarenesses for Freedom from Unwanted Habits, out from Flatiron Books on January 6, 2026, with an introduction by Yung Pueblo, is the public version of something she drafted privately at her kitchen counter in 2018. She had taken what was supposed to be a 30-day break from drinking. It became permanent. While she was at it, she sat down and rewrote the Twelve Steps for people who, like her, did not feel the Twelve Steps were written for them. She called the result the Eight Awarenesses. The framework now anchors a community of more than 130,000 readers and listeners she calls ClearLife.
