A Bridge From the Midwest to the Bay

The Midwest produces world-class technical breakthroughs, yet venture deployment has rarely matched that reality. I spent years in Indiana completing degrees at both Purdue University and Indiana University. Often, across the region has leaned toward generalist investors writing small checks across high volumes of deals.

When founders are building deep tech, novel therapeutics, or complex hardware, spray-and-pray capital falls short. You need partners who understand how to underwrite technical risk from day zero and back ambitious science with real conviction.

We had founders, university leaders, and investors gathered around a massive spinning lazy Susan, passing dim sum while celebrating the launch of the Third Coast Foundry.

The initiative, led by the Polsky Center at the University of Chicago alongside powerhouse Midwest research institutions like Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington University in St. Louis and others are building a direct bridge into the Bay Area ecosystem.

The research coming out of the Big Ten and Midwest institutions has always been world-class. You have labs producing foundational breakthroughs in deep tech, life sciences, and novel compute architectures.

Historically, the friction was always the distance. Founders had the technical depth, but translating that into venture-scale companies required tapping into the speed, capital concentration, and risk appetite of the Bay Area.

If you are a technical founder in the Midwest building in deep tech, therapeutics, or compute, you don't need to dilute your cap table across dozens of micro-checks just to get off the ground.

High-conviction lead capital is ready to underwrite the hard science from day zero. Will be exciting to track this initiative.

Huge thank you to ARTIS and the Polsky Center at the University of Chicago for bringing this group together, and shoutout to Western Alliance Bank for sponsoring such a fun evening.

Great spending time around the table with Ruchita Sinha, Heather Walsh, Alex Bahram, Jake Smith, Phil Ho, Ron Chiarello, KT Moortgat, Lucy Chong, Armen Vidian, Philipp N. Sander, Vikram Chaudhery, Dana Watt, Brom Rector, Samantha Rector, Enrico Carbone, Singari Seshadri, Miraj Sanghvi, Stasia Obremskey, Cristina Stoyanov and others.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.