The power of venture capital communities

Using venture to align values and engage the next generation

When a family has already won the game of business, the focus inevitably shifts from accumulating capital to defining its deeper purpose. Wealth, once a unifying force in the early days of building the enterprise, can gradually become a source of complexity, different branches, geographies, generations, and perspectives pulling in separate directions.​

In such moments, capital allocation alone is no longer enough. Business (and now venture capital investing) has to evolve into something more: not just a vehicle for financial returns, but an organizing force that reconnects the family around shared meaning, decision-making, and entrepreneurial mission.

This has played out in my own family. I routinely connect with uncles and cousins from different branches; we lead separate lives and follow different rhythms, yet venture, due to its entrepreneurial nature, quietly became our common ground.

Venture for a Higher Purpose

The moment an uncle mentioned a “higher purpose” for our family’s investing practices, it stopped being a lofty concept. When we evaluated an investment in a promising technology, the same questions surfaced naturally: Is this the kind of future we want to support? Does it match who we are as a family? That simple, shared act of evaluation did what years of standard family conversations never could.

We have explored many asset classes (art, real estate, small businesses, even digital assets) but venture remains distinct. It holds a much deeper capacity for what we believe is worth achieving over generations.

Venture is the most fundamental way to practice delayed gratification, values-aligned investing, and relationship-driven sourcing. What makes it unique is that it forces us to articulate what we actually believe in. Every investment is a small declaration. Over time, those declarations add up to a portfolio that reflects who the family is, not just what it owns.​

I was pleasantly surprised to see the J.P. Morgan 2025 Principal Discussions report capture this sentiment so well: many of the world’s wealthiest families now describe their goal not as “beating a benchmark,” but as backing founders and technologies they would be proud to tell their grandchildren about.​

I have also been actively seeking venture-focused family office communities, like Family VC, that reinforce this pattern. When family offices come together around venture, the conversation naturally moves beyond deal terms to something deeper: How do we support entrepreneurs beyond capital? How do we invest with patient, flexible capital that reflects our values? How do we navigate family dynamics while building a portfolio we’re proud of?​

At the outset of 2026, I wanted to write a post that is deeply meaningful to me. I have used venture for more than a decade as a way to bring my own family together, and I am now at the cusp of expanding that circle to include friends and other values-aligned investors. It is a big step, and one I take very seriously.

The fact that I am motivated by duty and love beyond just reward, is the reason I am doing it. I truly believe I can help families and investors, especially the next generation, find a reason to talk regularly about something that is both financially real and emotionally safe. I draw from my own experience with my uncles and cousins to say that this regular cadence—reviewing a deal, debating a thesis, celebrating a milestone, or learning from a loss—creates the connective tissue that keeps families and communities aligned across generations.​

Ultimately, venture capital and financing entrepreneurs gives us a concrete way to live out a higher purpose together. Instead of measuring success only by IRR, we can measure it by the quality of our conversations, the founders and technologies we choose to stand behind, and the stories our grandchildren will one day tell about what we did with the advantages we were given.​

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.