Lani Adedoyin

I have a soft spot for founders building something the market does not believe in yet. I come by it honestly. I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, a long way from the rooms I work in now. At fourteen I left for Taft, a boarding school in Connecticut, where I learned a new set of rules without dropping the ones I came with. At Columbia I studied history, the Civil War mostly, because I love stories and the discipline of pulling a thesis out of messy evidence. That discipline carried me to Morgan Stanley’s technology group in Menlo Park, and eventually to this seat. The whole path taught me to see a room from an angle nobody else may, and that perspective is my most valuable asset.

I look for founders wired the same way. They bring a perspective the market has not priced in, and their conviction usually comes from experience, so it holds even when people disagree. The best infrastructure companies usually start as something easy to overlook, an academic project, a tool that seems too narrow, or an idea that sounds too abstract to be a business. The stretch when a founder is early in public and the consensus has not moved yet is where I want to meet people. The founders who can sit in discomfort calmly, because they did the work and trust what they saw, end up setting the standard.