Julien Bek

I learned from my parents, a recruiter and an astrologist, a lot about reading people. I also come from a family of entrepreneurs, so it was almost a default for me to become an entrepreneur myself. I had a successful startup while I was in high school and a less successful one while I was in a graduate program at Cambridge. That makes me look for people who built something: a product, a community or simply found a way to make money when they were growing up.

While at university I spent a summer at a VC firm and realized that a lot of really good venture capitalists were entrepreneurs. I remember seeing early pitches for UiPath and Revolut. That’s when the people filter tuned in. At the time I thought, wow, those are real entrepreneurs! What was I thinking? I wasn’t ready to play in the same league. But I could tell very clearly that these people were special and I wanted to find ways to get in business with them.

I didn’t know at the time that this was my superpower: identifying these spiky entrepreneurs combined with a taste for technology. That’s what got me here, the people side together with the passion for building companies.