About Nicole

Hi! I’m a VC turned homemaker.

I’m raising one little boy in New York and writing about urban homemaking, community building, and education. If you are interested in homeschooling in NY, please reach out to me.

I came from investing in early stage, frontier technology startups, such as Spaero Bio, at the venture capital firm Compound after an atypical background of doing marketing and SaaS market research at a startup, studying data science, and a little bit of everything at a startup focused on creating experimental educational initiatives for cutting edge STEM fields (think computational neuroscience for the NIH, or aerospace for NASA). The common thread through all of this has been a lot of self-directed learning. I also dropped out of university, community college, and a bootcamp. This site hosts some of my older investment theses and will soon host newer science-driven homemaking writing as well.

Past investment theses include: near-term quantum computing and hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, trucking and logistics, edtech, game engines and infrastructure, personalized medicine and healthcare (especially women’s health & food as medicine) privacy-preserving machine learning (federated learning, for example), and lab automation.

I also angel invest with Audrey Capital! You can find my shorter form thoughts here on Substack.

Dr. Gena Gorlin kindly wrote up this profile of me, and Ivana Greco and I chatted here about what ambitious homemaking means.

PROJECTS

One time I helped raise $47M, in 5 days, to try to buy the US Constitution with 30 other core contributors and ConsitutitionDAO. We participated in a Sotheby’s auction and lost to Ken Griffin, who won with the highest bid ever recorded for a historical document.

Press:
– The New Yorker, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post
– Ethereum Stories also made a short video about the day of the auction.

PODCASTS

The Bidding War (July, 2024)
A story about a strange auction for perhaps the most valuable piece of paper in America.

This Week in Startups (May, 2022)
How I got into VC, we approach frontier tech and research driven investing, our investment in Pear Bio (organ-on-a-chip + CV for better chemotherapy recommendation).

What’s Happening in Fintech Today (December, 2021)
Buying the US Constitution, DAOs, and what I’d do differently next time.

The Vance Crowe Podcast (May, 2020)
Some thoughts on ritual, AI, how I got into venture capital, fashion, and how I use Twitter.

The Other Life Podcast (August, 2020)
On joining VC, my experience with Lambda School and atypical education paths, being a Christian in tech, and using Twitter to learn.

Hope in Source Podcast (May, 2020)
What does flourishing look like? I joined Henry to chat about faith in a less reductive way (than many of us may of grown up with). On rationality, the Church as a body, education, liturgy, family, being productive, and simply doing things for its own sake – all tying back to a picture of shalom!

Housekeeping

You can find some of my older writing on my Medium, here.