Who you'd be working with.
An investor who writes software, and an engineer who manages a venture portfolio. That overlap is rare, and it's the one this work needs: the person building your tooling sits through IC meetings, LP updates and data rooms every week too.
The investor
Eight years on your side of the table.
I've spent eight years in venture capital and deployed over £40m of it in the last four years, into AI, quantum, education tech, logistics and other deep tech. I hold board and advisory roles across the portfolio. A data room, an IC memo and an LP update don't need explaining to me, because I'm on the other side of them most days.
Every workflow on the home page came off my own week before it went on the page.
The engineer
I write the software myself.
My original background is aerospace engineering, and specifically applying machine learning to hard engineering problems. At Rolls-Royce that meant supplier defects on one engine programme down 38%, about £1m a year saved. That was 2017, before it was fashionable.
The public evidence is Nojoin, an open-source, self-hosted AI meeting assistant I built because I wanted one and didn't want another subscription. Nearly 3,000 downloads, over a year of continuous development, and the code is there to read. Vorkane is built the same way: it ran my own working week before anyone was asked to pay for it, and like Nojoin it's maintained for the long haul.
How this started
Fast, and occasionally on fire.
I grew up in my family's grocery store: evenings on the tills and the deliveries rather than homework. The work ethic stuck.
I taught myself network security as a teenager, thoroughly enough to get noticed by people whose job is noticing. At sixteen I mixed my own solid rocket fuel in the school science lab, and a cheap hot plate taught me about thermal runaway in front of the whole science block. Nobody was hurt. The benches were not so lucky.
I broke things early, often and cheaply, which is the right time to do it. The point of everything since is that nothing breaks now: software that can't delete anything for good, a record of every action it takes, and a habit of telling you the limits before you find them.
How I work
Quick answers, long hours.
You'll get answers fast, and at more hours of the day than you'd think to expect, because I put a lot of them in. You'll notice it in the first week.
I also publish. The Margin of Work is where I set out, under my own name, why selling connector count isn't a business and why the value is in work getting finished. Vorkane is that argument, built.