I Want to Fund Nepo Babies

I want to fund nepo babies.

I’m not talking about lazy heirs waiting to inherit the corner office. I mean the children of pharmacists, sales execs, garbage collectors, and small-business owners who grew up learning the family trade through osmosis and want to translate those learnings into a startup.

Venture capital tends to habitually validate outsiders. Fresh thinkers unburdened by conventional wisdom who rebuild an industry from first principles. Often, rightly so. Exceptional founders can learn a market quickly, and sometimes it takes an outsider to recognize faulty assumptions for what they are.

But an outsider’s clarity isn’t the only way to understand an industry. Founders who have been absorbing an industry’s rhythms and unwritten rules since they drank from a sippy cup have a unique edge gained by working weekends at the family business. They heard customers’ complaints at the dinner table. There are photographs of them doing the job before they could do long division.

That kind of immersion can be very difficult to replicate, and even harder for me to resist. To be clear, I’m not looking to back people who benefited from nepotism, but those that embraced the work apprenticeships that their parental luck provided.

Isn’t this unfair? Shouldn’t we judge every founder on their individual merits? Of course. And it’s worth mentioning that the founder who absorbed an industry’s rhythms from birth may also inherit blind spots. The edge only pays off when a founder can hold both truths at once, knowing which assumptions are sustaining, and which ones the whole industry has simply stopped questioning.

However, the reality is that it’s possible to learn quite a lot when you have wide eyes and a plastic mind. Of course, the nature of the tech industry limits this kind of intergenerational transfer. There are very few multigenerational families who have focused on reinforcement learning, diffusion models, or website observability.

But when the stars align, and a founder was raised in an industry that they’re now taking on with contemporary tech tools, it’s a signal that makes me sit up and take notice.

Great founders can come from anywhere. But there’s something special about partnering with “nepo babies” who have the specific vertical business understanding as part of their DNA.