Meet Daring Ventures
We’re the co-founders of Daring Ventures. Get to know us in our own words:
As the youngest child, I had to figure things out on my own. That made me curious. I asked “why” about everything.
Somewhere along the way, curiosity turned into ambition. By middle school, I was chasing a 4.0 GPA. Not because anyone asked me to, but because I wanted to see if I could. That same energy took me from picking up volleyball in 5th grade to playing D1 at Rice. It’s what pushed me to break into VC without a finance background.
I’ve spent nearly a decade in corporate VC, working across funds at T-Mobile, Allegion, Olympus, and Cigna.
But all that forward motion came with a tradeoff I didn’t notice at first. I’d stopped asking “why.” The curiosity that defined me as a kid had gone quiet.
Recognizing that changed how I work. Now I’m drawn to what others overlook. The unconventional ideas. The founders still flying under the radar. The opportunities that take a little digging to find. Three of those hunches have turned into investments.
Call me the startup PI.
Joe:
I come from a family of contradictions. On my mom’s side, Yale was practically a birthright—my mother, uncle, grandfather, and great-uncle all walked those halls. On my dad’s side, education was a different story entirely. My father grew up in a village without electricity, walking miles to school with trash bags on his feet. He worked his way to a PhD.
With that pedigree, you’d think I was destined for greatness. Instead, I got rejected from every college I applied to. All of them. So I enrolled in community college—and promptly flunked out. Went back. Flunked out again.
While my friends were landing banking jobs in New York, I was washing cars at Enterprise.
But I wasn’t done. I went back one more time, transferred to Columbia, and joined Lazard, where I worked on $15 billion in M&A transactions.
That journey taught me something: talent doesn’t always come with a perfect transcript. So I started WACC, a program designed to help community college students break into Wall Street. Since then, we’ve placed over 40 students at firms like Goldman Sachs, Lazard, Guggenheim, TCW, and Warburg Pincus.
They didn’t just get in. They outperformed.