If you’re interested in being an investor, or want to understand what it means to be an investor, specifically at our firm, read this.

I just turned 26. Reflecting on the last year, I think it’s the most accelerated period of change I’ve experienced so far in my life. Elements of this shift have been personal, others professional, but to me they are so intertwined that it’s hard to separate one from the other (I like it that way). I feel more grounded, confident, and energized by my work and by the world around me, than I potentially ever have. It hasn’t only been an upward trajectory. If life moves in waves, this year the frequency of those waves has been higher, some intense moments in both positive and negative directions, but those cycles are beginning to slow and the waves are growing in amplitude as a result. Right now it feels I’m climbing an infinitely growing positive slope, and with it comes a sense of gratitude and a crazy motivation only to do more and to do better. Some notes from friends and peers make me think that this energy is emanating.

I mean it when I say that the most significant input to this change has been Jordan, Chris, our entire team and the environment that exists here at Pace. It is an environment of excellence, precision, high expectations and independent thinking. It is also one that emphasizes freedom and autonomy with underlying guidance and partnership. A position that enables both learning and execution simultaneously is rare, usually you have to trade one for the other. This has unleashed something new in me where I feel I can achieve in ways that are natural to how I am driven – yet I practice this motion with the hand of two individuals who take great pride in cultivating that potential in me. As a young person, the opportunity to be molded by some of the smartest people in the world is unparalleled. I strive to embody aspects of each of them. When I started at Pace in January, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I have learned to understand companies at a mechanical level, I am building my own perspective on the traits of a fundamentally great business, my technical articulation is detailed, deal structure is something I can consider with nuance, and I have developed my own universe of peers / founders that I derive significant meaning from interacting with. I feel like I’m framing the kind of investor I want to be for several decades moving forward. On a personal level, I feel like I am expressing all parts of myself.

It’s an exciting time for us as a fund. There are 3 of us right now, managing $400M across 2 funds, and we’re just beginning to deploy capital out of our second $250M fund. We want to move faster, explore new edges of the internet and the economy, and with this we’re looking to add another person to our investing team, adjacent to me. We have no specific profile in mind, other than we are looking for an exceptional individual who has an intense drive to come here and fight tooth and nail to find amazing founders and build this firm together. You might be an investing junkie who follows Buffett religiously and spikes on deals, tracking activity across every point in the ecosystem. You might come from a technical or research background, have a github repo with 50k+ stars and win hackathons on the side. Whatever form you take, I can essentially guarantee that you will experience this same sort of growth – however you’d characterize what I wrote above.

While you will inevitably form your own style within the firm, some people have asked about my work structure. I’d expect yours to look at least somewhat similar. I research and explore ideas that I think are interesting and spend time with companies and individuals who are thinking along those same lines, with the intent to invest in them. I usually do a solid amount of work to get to conviction on my own, then bring a subset of these opportunities for broader discussion with Jordan and Chris. I spend individual time with both of them, sometimes in structured conversation and sometimes free flowing. I also have the freedom to independently form the way I engage with the broader startup ecosystem. For me this has been a mix of forming personal relationships with founders, researchers, and students I think are deviant or expert in their own right, product demos + open source developer engagements, political philosophy seminars, and writing. In my focus on the AI / ML stack, work on the West Coast has proven to be valuable. I spend time with our portfolio companies when I am there too.

There are other elements I could touch on — why it’s important to be a generalist investor focused on frameworks rather than domain specificity, intellectual rigor, honesty… many things that make our firm special. This is a high fidelity style of investing that is personal – every interaction, investment, is an extension of self. Our taste is distinct. We make ~4 investments each year, lead every financing, target high ownership and make a deep commitment to serve each company at a board level, over its entire lifetime. I think if you have a dream of being a founder and want to learn what it means to be an investor first, this would also be a viable path toward that goal.

Pace is an extension of me and our team I see as an extension of family. If any of this speaks to you and you want to play a major role in the growth of this firm, reach out to me (grace@pacecapital.com) or Jordan (jordan@pacecapital.com) directly.