Jon Soberg likes the numbers. He loves the start.

At the Computer History Museum, Jon Soberg watched a seventh grader pitch a company to a room of roughly 200 people. There were venture capitalists on the panel, products to explain and months of work to defend. He knew the ritual well. This time, the founder was his daughter. He wrote about the evening with a father’s pride and an investor’s interest.

The evening belonged to Girls Middle School. The students had tested ideas with surveys and focus groups, thought about manufacturing, worked through their numbers and, in some cases, sold goods online. Writing about it in March 2016, Soberg admired the substance as much as the composure. A year earlier, he had sat on the judging panel himself. Now he was watching from the parental side of the transaction.

The scene offers a useful way into his career. Soberg is CEO and managing partner at MS&AD Ventures, a firm he helped establish in 2018. Yet the pleasure he takes in a beginning appears well before that title. A young team discovers it can make something, explain it and persuade other people to care. He wants to be there while that is happening.

A robotics geek learns to read a business

His own preparation involved several different ways of looking at a problem. He studied engineering at Harvey Mudd College, then mechanical engineering at Northwestern, with a focus on robotics. Wharton followed: an MBA in entrepreneurial management and marketing, graduating in the class of 2009. He earned Palmer Scholar recognition and became a CFA charterholder. The qualifications would make a respectable alphabet soup; fortunately, his interests have more flavor.

On his personal site, he calls himself a “robotics geek.” He also lists time spent as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, consultant and financial analyst. Those changes of direction gave him exposure to different businesses and cultures. His professional history includes Adforce and technology and operations work at Ditech.com and GMAC Mortgage. Before assessing someone else’s operating plan, he had spent time on the operating side himself.

There is a telling sentence in his account of what attracts him to a company: “Ideas don’t capture my attention, people do.” He wants teams that understand their markets and care deeply about building. Geography, he writes, has little claim on his loyalty. For an investor whose work would extend far beyond Silicon Valley, that is a practical preference.

“Ideas don’t capture my attention, people do.”

Jon Soberg · on choosing teams

The spreadsheet has its limits

A taste for people did not diminish his taste for numbers. In an essay published on his blog in February 2013, Soberg examined the appeal of applying Moneyball methods to venture capital. He liked models and statistical analysis. He also knew how little information a very young company might supply: no revenue, an unreleased product and important hires still to come.

His objection concerned the quality and quantity of evidence. A market could look promising while the question of which team could serve it remained stubbornly open. He saw possible uses for algorithms in comparing more mature businesses, examining markets and adding to due diligence. At the seed stage, a polished calculation could still be leaning on remarkably little.

His separate essay about passing on attractive deals makes the uncertainty personal. At Blumberg Capital, investment decisions were collective, and enthusiasm was rarely unanimous. Capital and the team’s available time both imposed limits. A company could look good and still lose out to another opportunity. Soberg allowed himself to sound unhappy about that. The investor’s yes or no arrives neatly; the reasoning seldom does.

Forty-six investments, then another beginning

In May 2014, Soberg wrote about leaving Blumberg Capital to build something new. In less than four years, he had participated in 46 investments with the team and sat on 21 boards, alongside observer roles in several countries. He sounded grateful for the experience and ready to return to the untidy business of starting.

“I simply love the start,” he wrote. The attraction was the figuring-out: what needed doing, how the work could move faster, how a new venture might take shape. His later career included Expansive Ventures, an operating stint at ParkJockey, now REEF Technology, and Early Impact Ventures. The movement between investing and operating kept him close to both sides of a founder’s conversation.

His teaching provided another way to examine the machinery. At Wharton, he has discussed go-to-market strategy, pricing, financial analysis and operations. In a 2012 entrepreneurs workshop with Anu Nigam, he addressed the changing startup landscape. The audience was different from a boardroom, but the questions still concerned how a business gets built and finds its customers.

The paperwork is the opportunity

Financial technology gave that curiosity a particularly concrete object. In April 2013, Soberg wrote about payment startups and the work of simplifying an awkward process. He disclosed his position as Blumberg Capital’s lead investor in Paymill, then looked past the attractive front end to the institutions and procedures underneath.

His description of opening an older merchant account involved a stone tablet and a chisel. The joke was at the expense of paperwork, a resilient adversary. He recounted an entrepreneur’s long passage through forms, rejection, resubmission and banking questions before receiving a costly account. Technical integration had yet to begin. The customer had completed an obstacle course and been rewarded with another obstacle course.

The opportunity, as Soberg saw it, lay in making those systems work better throughout the chain. Easier onboarding mattered. So did the less visible work around processing and risk. His interest in fintech had an operator’s impatience behind it: look closely at an ordinary task, count the unnecessary steps, then ask whether someone can remove them.

A corporate fund with a startup clock

In October 2018, Soberg joined Tak Sato in establishing MS&AD Ventures, the Japanese insurance group’s overseas venture unit. Its investing interests included artificial intelligence, data, insurance and cybersecurity. The corporate connection brought an additional question to the work: could a young company’s technology become useful inside an established business?

The firm’s public operating promises are unusually plain. Most investment decisions, it says, are made within two weeks. Relationships matter more than collecting a particular ownership percentage. Its outlook is global. For a founder juggling product decisions and financing, the first promise has a special attraction. Two weeks is at least a unit of time one can put on a calendar.

Soberg has described the approach as “VC+C”: venture support combined with the corporation’s capabilities. In 2024, he said he wanted his firm to be the call a portfolio company made when it needed help. That ambition carries an everyday test. A founder must find the relationship useful after the funding announcement has stopped attracting attention.

By December 2024, MS&AD had added $100 million to the venture fund, taking the announced total to $400 million.

Old friendships, more room to work

The European side of that platform became more closely connected in February 2025, when MS&AD Ventures expanded its partnership with Redstone. Soberg’s response was personal: he had known Samuli Sirén and Michael Brehm since before either of the venture firms existed. The arrangement brought the Redstone team further into deal sourcing and portfolio work.

In June 2025, he counted 40 funding rounds in about six months following Fund V’s launch. Twenty-six involved existing portfolio companies; fourteen were new investments. He was careful about what that activity could tell him. One fund’s busy calendar, he observed, was insufficient evidence for a conclusion about the entire market. Even his own numbers received a little cross-examination.

In 2026, his work again brought GCV Powerlist recognition. The June profile described continuing leadership through changes in the team and a wider role for the venture unit across the parent group. Behind the expanding platform sits a familiar operating problem: how to keep decisions moving while relationships, responsibilities and opportunities multiply.

The family gets a backstage pass

His personal writing gives the clock a second job. Soberg grew up in a small Minnesota town, and wanted his daughters to encounter people and ideas he could scarcely have imagined there. He also admitted that loving his work made allocating time difficult. His practical experiment was to be more attentive at home and bring his children into parts of his working life.

One day in 2013, he spoke both to a fourth-grade class and on an M&A panel. The children asked why he chose one company over another, whether he had fired people and how he dealt with annoying colleagues. He preferred the classroom hour. A child can strip the upholstery off a business question with admirable efficiency.

That March, he took his daughters to the CookTasteEat set. They enjoyed calling for filming to begin, met the team and tried the food. Soberg noticed the care in the production and recipes. His daughters supplied family stories and an appetite. It was a working company made tangible through people doing their jobs, with crème brûlée among the available explanations.

Maker Faire supplied a different demonstration. After meeting the founder of a flying-motorcycle company, one daughter wrote a school essay arguing that her father should invest. Both girls later took rides in the vehicle, firmly on the ground. An investment committee rarely receives a proposal with such a clear understanding of its audience.

Room to take the next run

Soberg has also written about encouraging his daughters on the ski slopes. After lessons introduced more difficult runs, a steep section could still look daunting the next day. He asked one daughter to look back at the slope she had already descended. By lunchtime, their confidence had grown and they were looking for fresh challenges.

In his professional life, he describes a similar preference for giving people room to act. He wants colleagues to take responsibility and make use of their opportunities. Beginning requires someone to do more than admire the plan from a safe distance. The early company, the young team and the next unfamiliar task all eventually demand participation.

The seventh-grade pitch at the Computer History Museum belongs in that picture. Soberg watched students research, calculate, make and sell. His pleasure was recognizably professional and recognizably paternal. A room full of people had gathered to hear what the girls could build. For an investor who loves the start, that was an evening well spent.