“I consider my writing a success if I’m able to produce words I can both stand behind/formally weave into my worldview.” Five Questions with Moth Fund’s Molly Mielke
I knew I had to meet Molly. That’s what I felt when several friends separately mentioned her to me. It was either a very well coordinated inception or independent validation. Frankly, either would have piqued my interest (I’m pretty sure it was the latter). It only took a few Blue Bottle coffees for me to become an evangelist for her too. Molly is thoughtful, always evolving and an incredible believer in people, whom she backs via Moth Fund. And I recently asked her Five Questions.
Hunter Walk: Moth Fund says it “aims to increase the agency of exceptional individuals.” Say more about what that means (you cover some in your manifesto) and how it influences your investment decision framework?
Molly Mielke: My approach to investing is singularly focused on finding and developing relationships with outlier people. I do this by being weird myself and making myself findable in the right places — namely word-of-mouth from people whose taste I respect and by sharing how I see the world online. This approach was designed around my edge; I have an innate interest in understanding human beings and as a result, have different kinds of relationships with founders than most VCs.
I talk about my investment decision-making framework in detail here — I focus on gaining an understanding of a person’s motivation, spike, commercial aptitude, and how magnetic they are.
I try to think rigorously about people and their potential, in part drawing from my experiences working with top founders over the past five years and the deep relationships I have with entrepreneurs in my cohort class.
HW: You write wonderful essays each quarter — what’s the process which goes into those? And what does ‘success’ look like for you with this energy?
MM: Each quarter I pick a (usually qualitative) “research” topic that I discuss with many of the brilliant investors, founders, and operators I meet with in the context of my investing role. I collect data points in conversation and start building my own theory of the topic, which I then write up and share with the world in the form of my quarterly essays.
I consider my writing a success if I’m able to produce words I can both stand behind/formally weave into my worldview and think are decently original/worth sharing with the world. Success also looks like having better conversations with the people I’m meeting — I find the process of truth-seeking together one that builds a lot of trust and understanding of each other. I am at my most honest and concentrated on the page, so sharing that version of myself online helps me put a stake in the ground about what I believe in and find others who resonate or disagree in interesting ways.
HW: I find you to be a thinker who uses other’s opinions to inform your own. As someone new’ish to venture capital, what’s a piece of advice you received early on that really shaped the way you think about Moth?
MM: While not an answer to your question, I want to first say that learning to relate to others’ opinions in a way that is constructive as opposed to confusing is something that took me a while to figure out for myself. I received a decent amount of advice from people more powerful than me in my first few years in Silicon Valley (mostly because of my Twitter) and while I was lucky to get the attention, it definitely made my head spin. I gradually learned to see advice as merely potent information about how the other person sees the world, which helped me take it much less personally. My goal in asking for advice now is usually in order to refine my internal model of the other person’s brain — the goal being that I could guess how they’d think through a given person/place/scenario without asking them. I like simulating other people’s perspectives in my mind and putting them in conversation with each other as a way of identifying blind spots in my own thinking.
A memorable piece of advice I received from my first LP was that: “the ideal investor is a finance bro with a dash of Engelbart.” While I didn’t change myself to become this, what I did take from this framing was that investors need to be commercially-minded no matter their stage, and that a dash of weirdness can be particularly beneficial at early-stage in order to attract other strange outlier people (hopefully some of them great founders).
Another piece of advice I received from an early LP was to find a great coach who pulls from enneagram in order to better understand your own motivation and become more cognizant of your failure modes. I highly recommend doing this, especially if you’re embarking on anything solo and want to stick to something for a long time.
HW: How has your model changed between your first fund and Fund II (which I’m fortunate enough to be investing in)?
MM: My main learning from Fund I was that the area where I had the unique advantage was pre-seed rounds where I was one of the first checks in and investing with a deep understanding of the person’s potential to be venture-scale founder. The strategy of Fund II was designed around my spending as much time serving founders at this stage as possible, meaning I now write slightly larger checks and devote the majority of my investing time to building relationships with exceptional people who I think might one day start an interesting company.
More qualitatively, I’ve become much more shameless about Moth not being for everyone, while a perfect fit for the right founders (and LPs, you being one I feel especially fortunate to have on board!)
HW: Ok, something outside of work. Give me two places in San Francisco which you find delightful.
MM: I really like the Fort Mason area — strolling around the Sunday farmer’s market, getting a lemon ginger tea at The Interval, and eating sushi in the park as the sun sets.
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Originally published at https://hunterwalk.com on March 24, 2025.
