Years pass not like turning pages, but like software updates running silently in the background. You don’t notice the incremental changes until one morning you wake up and the entire operating system of your life is different.
Three years after we launched A&V Capital, the air in my office on the 54th floor of a Palo Alto spire didn’t smell like money; it smelled like data. It was the crisp, cool scent of server rooms, the faint hum of processing power that was the true heartbeat of the modern world. My view was no longer the gray, vertical prison of Manhattan, but a sprawling panorama of the California coast, where the Pacific Ocean met the continent in a hazy, optimistic line.
A&V Capital was no longer a scrappy upstart. We were a kingmaker. Our name on a term sheet could turn a garage
