Meet Daring Ventures
Hey, I’m Joe. I’m one of the co-founders of Daring Ventures.
I grew up in a family where education was everything. On my mom’s side, Yale was a bloodline: my mom, uncle, grandfather, great-uncle all went. On my dad’s side, education was a miracle. My father wore trash bags on his feet and walked miles to school in a village that didn’t get electricity until the 21st century. He worked his way to a PhD.
I was set up for success.
I didn’t get into any of the colleges I applied to. Community college. Flunked out. Went back. Flunked out again. Washed cars at Enterprise while my friends landed banking jobs in New York. Then I went back, transferred to Columbia, and joined Lazard, where I worked on $15 billion in M&A.
I started WACC, a program to help community college students break into Wall Street. 40+ students placed at Guggenheim, TCW, Warburg Pincus, Goldman Sachs, Lazard. They outperformed.
Hey, I’m Maddi.
I was a zero-star recruit who walked on at Rice. D1 athlete while pre-med. Nearly a decade in corporate venture capital watching founder selection from the buy side. I ignored consensus on market sizing and helped unlock women’s health half a decade before the rest of the industry caught on.
Same pattern, different rooms.
The best founders we’ve met aren’t the ones who fit the template. They’re operators who already understood their industries. People who spent years inside the problem before they ever thought about starting a company. They know which features matter and which ones just demo well. When they walk into a sales meeting, the buyer recognizes them as a peer.
These founders don’t need to be discovered. They need investors who already see them.
That’s us.