venture-investor
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Nick Cromydas Bet the Future of Hiring on a Warm Introduction
A former college tennis captain discovered that the shortest route to a hard-to-reach candidate was not another cold message. It was trust - organized, measured and made useful at scale.
Maria Davidson Learned to Build by Asking Who Was Still Using Paper
She arrived in construction with no construction résumé, a box of doughnuts and an impertinent question. Eight years and $5 billion in annual materials orders later, Maria Davidson is taking the same outsider's method into investing, cities and California politics.
Oleg Shardin Put a Whiteboard on the Internet. Then He Went Looking for a Story.
Before remote work made the digital canvas feel inevitable, Shardin helped build one from a practical annoyance in Perm. His second act trades sticky notes for screenplays, while keeping the same fascination with how people understand one another.
Desiree Gruber Made the Backstage Into a Business
Before brand storytelling became a boardroom phrase, Desiree Gruber was turning publicity into television, television into careers, and a wider point of view into Full Picture's operating system.
Jim Plante Keeps Changing Industries. The Operating System Stays the Same.
Across radios, road safety, genomics, biotechnology, and financial markets, Jim Plante has kept returning to the same difficult question: how do you turn complicated science into something people can actually use?
Mark Hurley
Mark Hurley is the co-founder and CEO of Caruso, an AI-native fund administration and registry platform for private markets that spun out of a property fund business in 2023 and now administers roughly $80 billion in assets across 900-plus funds. A serial New Zealand entrepreneur, he earlier built the digital agency Little Giant (sold to Dentsu Aegis Network in 2017) and co-founded the fractional commercial real estate firm Jasper in 2019. He splits his time between Auckland and Dallas and is an active early-stage investor in companies including Tracksuit, Sharesies and First AML.