I Moved to San Francisco

11 years of investing in venture remotely, now doing it in-person

For over a decade, I built a venture portfolio from a distance. From London, from Orange County, from airport lounges in between — I sourced deals, underwrote managers, and committed family capital to some of the most consequential companies of our time without ever needing a San Francisco zip code.

So why move now?

Family capital and the case for proximity

For a family office deploying multi-generational capital, proximity matters in a particular way. We are not chasing quarterly marks. We are building relationships that will outlast any single fund cycle — with GPs, with founders, and with co-investors who share our values around family, community, and the long arc of innovation.

Those relationships are forged over years and over tables. San Francisco is where the highest concentration of those tables happens to be.

The myth of fully remote venture

Venture capital, more than almost any other asset class, sells itself on the premise of access. If you have the relationships, the reputation, and the capital, you can play from anywhere. That is largely true — and the last eleven years of my career are evidence of it. GEX Ventures was built remotely, on the back of trust earned across continents and generations.

But access is not the same as understanding.

You can read every memo Founders Fund publishes, listen to every Patrick O’Shaughnessy episode, and still miss the quiet signal that travels through a dinner or a Saturday morning coffee. The information that matters most in venture — who is actually building, who is quietly losing conviction, which thesis is about to consensus — moves through rooms, not inboxes.

What changes when you are physically present

Three things shifted for me almost immediately after spending more concentrated time in the Bay:

• The density of unplanned encounters. The best introductions come from conversations I didn’t schedule.

• The calibration of taste. Being around founders and operators daily recalibrates what “exceptional” looks like. Remotely, you grade on a curve. In person, the curve grades you.

• The speed of conviction. Deals that would have taken three weeks of diligence calls compress into a single afternoon when you can walk into the office and meet the team.

None of this invalidates remote investing. It simply adds a dimension that Zoom cannot replicate.

Eleven years taught me that you can invest in venture from anywhere. The next chapter is about understanding it from the inside.

This is an educational post about GEX Ventures investments. It is for informational purposes only and may not be relied on as legal, tax, securities or investment advice and does not constitute an offer to buy or sell interest in any products offered by us or others. Email me at mk@gex.vc or leave a comment if you’d like to exchange ideas.