David Booth’s London experiment began with 16 people coming out for a drink before Christmas. It was late 2017. They gathered at Balderton Capital, and the group included a quantum physicist, a former ASOS data-science leader and engineers from Facebook and Google. Each was considering a new venture. Getting them through the same door was the first piece of work.
Booth had met Erik Torenberg the previous year. London had plenty of talented people and money, he thought, but its separate hubs needed more connections between them. By July 2018, he was announcing a dinner series with roughly 25 places per evening. Guests would change tables between courses. Even the seating plan had a job to do.
There is something pleasingly modest about this origin. Before the fellowships, the venture funding and the ambition to build an institution, there was the problem of persuading interesting people to spend an evening together. A dinner does impose one useful discipline on a grand theory of networks: someone has to find it worth leaving the house.
Booth would become On Deck’s co-founder and CEO, later return to New Zealand to work at Blackbird, and then join Andreessen Horowitz. Across those changes, the question of who belongs in the room has stayed remarkably consistent. The rooms, and the organisations paying for them, have changed.
An iPod shipment with an expensive lesson
Long before London, Booth tried importing iPods into New Zealand. In his account of the venture, small batches bought through Amazon sold successfully. Then he and a friend pooled money from their parents for a larger order through Alibaba. They sent the cash via Western Union. The shipment never arrived.
His parents encouraged another attempt at business. The experience helps explain why Booth pays attention to the people surrounding a would-be founder. The same failed transaction can become a reason to stop, or an invitation to try again. Neither response changes the lost money. It changes what happens afterwards.
At university, he started clothing and events businesses rather than concentrating entirely on finding his place in the existing social scene. That gave him a wider circle of friends. The sequence is revealing: he made something, and the relationships followed. Organising offered him a way to find people with whom he had something to do.
For a career later spent helping founders meet, this is a useful beginning. There is no need to retrofit a childhood business into a master plan. It is enough to notice that making an opportunity, and finding company while doing it, were already linked.
MeatMail, snow and the machinery behind startups
Booth studied law and finance at the University of Otago. His student ventures included MeatMail, a subscription business supplying meat to Dunedin student flats, and snowsports events in the city centre. The prospective lawyer had given himself rather more to organise than a reading list.
He joined Lightning Lab as an entrepreneur in residence in 2013, interned at Movac and worked at Sparkbox/GD1. In 2014, he left New Zealand for San Francisco and an operations role at AngelList. He subsequently worked at Carta, opening its London office and leading international product, before joining CoinList as its first hire in 2018.
The connecting thread is the infrastructure around a startup: money, ownership, people and access. These are tasks every founder encounters, however original the product. The founder may have an unusual idea; the paperwork, hiring needs and search for backers are familiar enough to deserve shared tools.
Booth’s later description of AngelList makes the attraction clearer. Software could make relationships useful beyond a single introduction. A network could support hiring or raising capital repeatedly. For someone already interested in bringing people together, this offered a larger canvas than another event invitation.
A fellowship for the awkward interval
By December 2019, Booth was explaining On Deck as a place for people thinking about starting or joining their next technology company. That interval is awkward to describe on a résumé. You have left one chapter, or are quietly preparing to leave it, but the next company may not have a name.
A programme organised around that moment could welcome people before they had a finished pitch. Its usefulness would depend on whether they found collaborators, information and a direction. An acceptance letter might help explain the career transition. It would still have to be followed by something worth doing.
In a 2020 conversation with Torenberg, Booth treated On Deck’s expansion as a question of supply and demand. Founders needed capital; an angel-investor fellowship could bring people who wanted to invest. Separate groups were supposed to make each other more useful. The logic was practical enough to draw on a napkin.
He also pointed out an entertaining flaw in treating membership mainly as a badge of prestige: some participants deliberately kept it quiet, including from their bosses. A credential nobody knows you possess has limited social glamour. Its value must lie elsewhere. For those members, On Deck had to help them decide what came next.
“Every program we launch should bootstrap supply for an existing program’s demand.”David Booth, 2020
Need capital↔ANGELS
Seek companies
An illustration of the fellowship logic Booth described in 2020.
The institution gets bigger, then smaller
On Deck grew beyond its original founder community. By 2023, more than 1,000 companies had started through its programmes and collectively raised upwards of $2 billion. Those are outcomes across a network of founders, each building their own business. They show how far the fellowship idea travelled.
They also invite a careful question. A company launched by a participant is a participant’s achievement. A useful institution can help make that achievement possible without becoming its sole author. Booth’s work sits in that middle ground, where influence matters and attribution is less tidy than a fundraising announcement.
His January 2024 leadership update described a period of rapid expansion into online education, followed by repeated changes across education, recruiting and other products. The latter half of 2023 brought a return to ODF, the founder fellowship. Julian Weisser took over as CEO, while Booth said he would become chairman.
The change gives the story some necessary friction. An organisation built to help people choose their next move had to choose its own. Booth described the experience as a “rollercoaster”. The return to founders made a smaller set of needs central again: finding collaborators, testing a direction and beginning a company.
Back home, the invitation stays private
In February 2023, Booth was already discussing a return to in-person programming and a San Francisco community space. He argued for founders’ connection to the Bay Area. After years of online expansion, physical proximity was back on the agenda. The dinner table had survived the journey through software.
His own next move took him home. Blackbird announced his appointment as an entrepreneur in residence in Auckland in March 2024. There, he would make investments and develop initiatives for the New Zealand startup community. The geography changed; finding people near the beginning of a venture remained part of the work.
A public invitation for the first Auckland “Something New” dinner set out unusually concrete rules. Attendees could be openly or privately considering a new company. Discussions would stay off the record, with no recording or documentation once guests arrived. The invitation asked people to come ready to help someone else.
Those details matter more than a cheerful promise of networking. Someone considering leaving a job needs discretion. Someone seeking a co-founder needs room for an unfinished thought. A gathering can be carefully selected and still be unhelpful if everyone arrives performing certainty. Booth’s invitation made space for the less polished stage.
A country can keep its people in conversation
Diaspora.nz grew from another observation Booth made while overseas: talented New Zealand expatriates were doing interesting work, often with little visibility back home. He first explored the idea in 2017. A later pilot included 16 interviews, and the project became a podcast profiling Kiwi founders, innovators and leaders abroad.
Booth’s own route had taken him from New Zealand to San Francisco, then London, then back to San Francisco and eventually home. Diaspora offered a way to keep those journeys in conversation. A person could leave the country without disappearing from the country’s view of what its people might do.
The format also changes the purpose of an introduction. At a dinner, two people meet. In an interview, someone’s experience becomes available to people who were never in the room. An unfamiliar career becomes a little easier to picture. The listener can hear the decisions between the job titles.
This is one of the quieter attractions of Booth’s work. He is interested in the period before an outcome becomes obvious. A finished success story can be admired from a distance. A conversation about how someone got there may give another person something to try on Monday.
The pit crew returns to San Francisco
In October 2025, Booth joined a16z as Partner and Head of Ecosystem, returning to the Bay Area after his Blackbird chapter. The role reunited him with Torenberg. His remit included communities, emerging-talent pipelines, customer networks and experiences that connect founders, operators and investors.
He framed the work around “preferential attachment”: a startup’s ability to attract the next people and resources that help it move forward. He used motor racing to describe the organisation behind a visible winner. A driver is easy to recognise. The engineers and pit crew make the performance possible.
That metaphor suits an operator whose career has often involved arranging the conditions for someone else’s company. The introduction, the well-chosen gathering and the useful product rarely receive the attention given to a financing round. Their test is whether the founder can do something afterwards that was harder before.
Working inside a venture firm gives Booth a different setting for that test. The network already exists at substantial scale. His stated ambition is to make its parts reinforce each other, so additional relationships improve its usefulness. Success requires more than a busy events calendar. A full room can still be the wrong room.
“Ecosystem is the hidden operating system of venture.”David Booth, 2025
Who gets to be seen before everyone agrees?
In February 2026, Booth published The Lighthouse Playbook, arguing that companies can attract talent and customers by helping credible people become more visible. A technical leader might share their thinking publicly. A customer might tell their own story. The company helps create opportunities for those people to be heard.
The idea has a welcome constraint: the person needs something worthwhile to say. Visibility alone cannot supply it. Giving a respected colleague a platform can help others understand why they might want to work together. Turning that colleague into a walking advertisement would defeat much of the purpose.
By September 2026, Booth was discussing Cosign with Torenberg, Josh Elman and Olivia Moore. The product centres on professional reputation and public endorsements. It seeks to preserve signals that otherwise live in private conversations or fleeting posts: who shaped a career, who someone would work with again, and who deserves attention early.
There is a question worth keeping beside that project. Public endorsements can help an overlooked person become legible. They can also favour people who already know visible endorsers. The usefulness of the system will depend partly on whose judgment enters it, and which unfamiliar people that judgment helps others discover.
Booth’s work has moved from small gatherings to programmes, investments and products, but it keeps circling the moment before two people know they have a reason to meet. Someone must notice the possibility. Someone must make the introduction worth accepting. In London, he once began with 16 people and a drink. There are worse places to start.