Lo Toney.

There's a move in chess called controlling the center. Lo Toney has been playing that move in venture capital since 2018, when he spun Plexo Capital out of GV and landed a first institutional check from Alphabet itself. Most VCs try to pick the best startups. Toney picks the best people who pick startups - and then takes a stake in their management companies too. Three layers, one firm, one man.

Toney grew up in Oakland, the son of a UC Berkeley PhD student who died when Lo was three. His mother worked, his community shaped him, Bishop O'Dowd High School educated him in majority-white classrooms, and then Hampton University - an HBCU in Virginia - did something else entirely. He went in as a kid who'd always been the minority in the room. He came out with a fraternity network (Kappa Alpha Psi) that would eventually put a university endowment on his LP cap table decades later.

The Berkeley MBA came next - Haas, class of 1997, Management of Technology, joint curriculum with the College of Engineering. Then PwC as a consultant, Nike.com as VP of experience management, eBay as employee #2,340 watching the company scale to 15,000, art.com as VP of marketplace operations. He was building operating muscle with discipline and patience, collecting evidence that what he was told about VC entry was true: get real experience first. He got it.

The Zynga chapter is the one that opened the door. As General Manager of Zynga Poker - the crown jewel franchise of a company then riding the peak of social gaming - Toney turned web bookings from flat to $250 million a year. Not marketing. Not luck. Full P&L responsibility, growth mechanics, and a platform migration from web to mobile that could have killed the product. He ran it. It didn't die. It scaled. That's the kind of operational credibility that makes skeptical LPs stop asking entry-level questions.

Comcast Ventures took him in 2014 and put him to work on the Catalyst Fund - $20 million specifically aimed at minority-led startups. It was the first explicitly dedicated institutional fund of its kind from a major corporate VC. Then GV called, and Toney joined as the only Black partner on the investment team. His focus: marketplaces, mobile consumer apps, digital media, gaming. His side project: incubating a new thesis about how venture capital was being allocated wrong.

Google's famous 20% time - the policy that produced Gmail and Google Maps - gave Toney the runway to develop Plexo's model while at GV. He spent two years researching, testing, and building the framework before spinning out in March 2018. The first institutional check from his former employer was both a validation and a signal. When Alphabet writes a check to the fund you're starting after you leave Alphabet, the market notices.

Fund I closed at $42.5 million with 20 LP commitments. The roster reads like the index of who matters in institutional capital: Alphabet, Intel Capital, Cisco Investments, Royal Bank of Canada, Ford Foundation, Mass Mutual, The Home Depot, Hearst, Kapor Capital, Hampton University Endowment. His undergraduate fraternity connection led directly to that last check. Networks built at 18 years old pay returns at 50.

By late 2024, OpenAI had become Plexo's single largest direct investment - the subject of multiple follow-on rounds at expanding check sizes. The GP network, 25+ emerging managers deep, collectively reviews tens of thousands of companies per year and touches more than 900 portfolio companies. The unicorn count across that network has crossed 50. Toney watches it from the position he designed: top of the stack, with information flowing up from every layer.