Betting on the Real Economy
There is a restaurant software company called Popmenu - valued at over half a billion dollars - that runs on the conviction that the food industry, not the latest B2B SaaS darling, is where fortunes are made. Rexhep "Rexhi" Dollaku backed it. He was, by most accounts, more useful to the CEO during the fundraising sprint than anyone else in the room. A founder once told colleagues that Dollaku had been "basically my employee for the last three months." In venture capital, that kind of reputation is harder to earn than a term sheet.
Dollaku is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, the San Francisco firm that has quietly become one of the most watched names in venture capital - not because of the companies it backs, though those are impressive enough, but because of what the firm represents. In 2022, Base10 became the first Black-led venture capital firm to cross $1 billion in assets under management. The firm manages $1.3 billion across multiple funds. Dollaku has been there almost from the beginning, and much of what makes Base10 work - its research methodology, its outreach process, its investment conviction - runs through him.
From Ulcinj to Sand Hill Road
Dollaku was born in Ulcinj, a coastal city that sits on the border where Montenegro meets Albania. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - a city that has sent more than its share of people out into the world with a chip on their shoulder and an unusually clear sense of how industries actually run. He is fluent in Spanish and Albanian, and graduated from Harvard University with honors in Economics, Global Health, and Health Policy. At Harvard, he did not wait for a desk job. He ran GPS, a student-run intercollegiate hedge fund, giving real investment exposure to peers before most of them had their first internship lined up.
After Harvard, he went to Insight Venture Partners, one of the most prominent software and internet-focused private equity and venture firms on the planet. He moved fast. He became the youngest person ever to join Insight's Board of Directors - a fact noted without fanfare in the kind of way that people who accomplish things quietly tend to note them.
Rexhi is crazy smart, legit funny, and genuinely humble - the rare trifecta in an industry that tends to produce exactly one of the three.- Colleagues at Base10 Partners
Building the Machine
In 2018, Dollaku joined Base10 Partners as a principal when the firm was, in his own words, a lot like a seed-stage company itself. What he built there is worth understanding. He architected the firm's systematic outreach process for early-stage companies - the infrastructure that helps Base10 find founders before other VCs have even heard of them. He helped build Base11, the firm's internal software platform. Most critically, he developed the thematic research methodology that now drives 90% of Base10's investments. That number is not marketing. It is operational discipline made visible.
In June 2021, he was promoted from Principal to Partner. By then, the engine he had built was already running at scale. Base10's thesis is specific: invest in founders who are automating the traditional sectors of the real economy - food, logistics, retail, finance, healthcare. Industries that employ the most people. Industries that have been chronically underserved by Silicon Valley's appetite for the next social app.
The Garbage Man
Internally at Base10, Dollaku has a nickname. They call him "The Garbage Man." Not as an insult - as a badge. He knows the waste and recycling industry the way most people know their favorite sports team's statistics. This is what good sector-focused venture investing looks like up close: you find a vertical that the market has undervalued, you go deeper than anyone else, and you become the person that founders in that space want on their cap table.
His investment style is defined by a specific approach to pitching that runs against convention. He leads with customer pain points, not financial models. He tells the story of the person with the problem before he talks about the size of the market. Portfolio company CEOs and colleagues have noted that he spots non-obvious market opportunities with a consistency that suggests method over luck - and then makes compelling cases for them when others are still skeptical.
He leads with customer pain points, not numbers - finding non-obvious market opportunities and building stories around them before the market catches up.- Base10 Partners, on Rexhi's approach
Sectors That Silicon Valley Forgot
The Base10 investment thesis, which Dollaku has helped define and execute, starts from an uncomfortable observation: the sectors that employ the most Americans - food service, logistics, retail, healthcare, financial services - are dramatically underautomated compared to the tech industry itself. A warehouse management system used by a mid-size logistics company is probably less sophisticated than the software managing the lunch orders at a major tech firm. That gap is the opportunity.
Over 60% of Base10's capital is deployed across four sectors: food, retail, logistics, and global fintech. The firm's portfolio includes Notion, Figma, Nubank, Stripe, Popmenu, Aurora Solar, and dozens of companies working at the intersection of traditional industry and technology. The investment range runs from $500K to $5M, with a sweet spot around $2.5M - seed and Series A, where conviction must substitute for data.
Portfolio companies where Dollaku serves on the board include Popmenu, Shelf, WeTravel, and Boardable. Recent investments include Lexroom.ai (Series A, $19M), Predoc (Series A, $30M), and Slide (Series B, $70M). The pattern holds: companies solving real problems for people running real businesses.
The 99 Percent
There is a phrase Base10 uses: "solving for the 99%." It is not a marketing line. It is the load-bearing concept beneath everything the firm does. Technology has gotten extraordinarily good at solving problems for tech-savvy, English-speaking, urban consumers with smartphones and credit cards. The other 99% of humanity - and most of the global economy - has been largely left to manage with older tools.
The Advancement Initiative, Base10's growth-stage fund that closed at $250 million, puts the firm's money where its philosophy is. The Initiative donates 50% of its carried interest - the profits that flow to the fund managers - to HBCUs: Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The scholarships are named after portfolio companies. There is a Plaid Scholarship. A Brex Scholarship. The Initiative is active on more than 13 HBCU campuses, including Florida A&M, Morehouse, Spelman, Howard, Hampton, North Carolina A&T, and Tuskegee. Context: all 107 HBCU endowments combined represent just 7% of Stanford University's endowment. The Advancement Initiative was built to start changing that equation.