Month: October 2025

• Erin Harkless Moore leads investments at Pivotal Ventures, focusing on social progress.
• Moore values work-life balance, exercise, and aligning personal values with professional work.
• Working with Melinda French Gates has taught her to invest in and nurture her relationships.

I became the managing director of investments for Pivotal Ventures in August 2020 after more than a decade of working in finance and investing at Cambridge Associates, Goldman Sachs, and Summit Rock Advisors.

As part of Melinda French Gates‘ company focused on accelerating social progress, my work centers on getting more resources and capital to those who need it most, especially women.

I start my day by setting goals and catching up on the news

I’m up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. I take a few quiet moments to reflect, review my calendar, set goals, and plan what I need to accomplish. I exercise three to four times a week.

I usually have about an hour to myself before my two kids get up, so I read the news, catch up on the headlines of the day, and go through my inbox.

I’m subscribed to way too many newsletters — tech and venture investment news and mailing lists from prominent fund managers — just to get a sense of the macro environment. I tee up a bunch of emails so when I do get to the office, I can schedule or fire those off and head straight into meetings.

When my kids and spouse get up, we have breakfast together, and I hear about what they’re looking forward to in their day. I walk them to school, which gives me a nice bridge from morning into work mode.

No two days are the same, but they typically involve meetings

I travel a lot for work, so I don’t always spend time in D.C., but I typically arrive at the office around 9 a.m. and take the first 30 minutes to get my coffee, check in with my team, and feel the energy of the office.

My day often includes internal meetings with the team of over 150 people, where we might review our pipeline of deals, companies we’re tracking, fund managers in the market, and portfolio construction.

I also meet with fund managers and founders, hearing about their visions for their firms and businesses. I have a lot of conversations with peers, other investors sharing notes and intel on what they’re seeing in the market, what funds they’re tracking, and how they’re thinking about the current environment.

Melinda’s taught me a lot about the value of trusting your team and building and nurturing relationships

Melinda is busy, so we don’t get to work together every day, but she sets and is very much involved in setting the strategic frame for our work and the strategy. I really respect that she puts a lot of trust in her team. Once we’ve landed on where we want to go, she gives us a lot of trust to execute.

She wants to understand who the founders are that Pivotal is working with, what the fund managers are building, and what they’re doing. We’re updating her monthly and quarterly with insights from the portfolio and what we’re hearing and seeing. She’s really collaborative.

I’ve learned valuable leadership lessons from Melinda, particularly how much she invests in relationships. We were recently at the Upfront Summit for investors, entrepreneurs, and leading technology voices, where she spoke. Melinda carved out time to meet with some of our partners. She could’ve easily given her remarks and headed out to the next thing, but she made space and time to ask questions and get to know the fund managers deploying capital for Pivotal.

This approach strengthens our bonds, and I’ve taken something from how she shows up in the world — the importance of relationships and listening to understand what motivates people.

I wrap up my day at 5 p.m. to be present for my kids and personal relationships

I’m intentional about locking the ‘work’ and ‘home’ puzzle pieces together as best as I can. I’ve found that if you don’t do that, then you’ll look up at the end of the year and say, “Wow, I didn’t take a trip for myself, or with my family, or to go see friends.”

I try to wrap up my day by blocking my calendar from 5 p.m. for transition time to close out emails. I’ll sometimes check emails when the kids are in bed.

When traveling for work, staying connected with my children is a priority. I’m intentional about making time to call them.

Exercise and fitness are important to me

Through exercise, I built a community. I would go to Solid Core and see the same people, who would become friends.

I also like to carve out time to go for a walk. I have some very good friends from both college and other parts of life who live in D.C., so we’ll go for walks together.

Reading is also important to me. I read both fiction and nonfiction. I carve out time for that in the evenings or on the weekends when I’m traveling.

My husband and I try to host a dinner party every other month. I’m also known as the brunch captain among some of my girlfriends, as I just love food, too. It’s equal parts about the food as well as the fellowship. I get a lot of joy from being in community, so even if it means I have to plan it, I’m happy to plan.

I’m always on a journey to harmonize my values with my work

After nearly 20 years in finance and investing, I’ve been on a journey to harmonize my values with my work.

At one of my first jobs, a pretty senior person told me, “That’s great, but you can do the impact later.” That just never resonated with me.

It’s important to be authentic to yourself. If you really know what you’re good at and what you like, try to get to that overlap in the Venn diagram; that’s when you’ll accelerate and really have success and meaning in your career.

• AWS struggles to identify early stage AI startups led by solo founders or with unusual funding.
• Generative AI has sparked rapid growth of single-person startups with little or no outside funding.
• AWS plans to add a more data-based prediction model to its VC-driven approach to address this issue.

The generative AI boom has fueled the growth of single-person startups and companies operating without external funding.

For Amazon Web Services, these “solopreneurs” and bootstrapped startups have emerged as a “blind spot” in its customer discovery process, which heavily relies on connections with venture capital firms, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.

This has caused AWS to miss out on several high-growth startups as early customers, including SurgeAI and Base44. SurgeAI grew to $1 billion in revenue without outside funding, while Base44, once solely owned by its founder, was acquired by Wix for $80 million.

“This blind spot poses increasing risk to cloud market share,” Amazon employees warned in the internal document.

Amazon became the dominant cloud provider by working with early startups. Some of these nascent businesses grew into huge tech companies that spent heavily on compute, which drove demand for Amazon Web Services.

The rise of generative AI is messing with this successful formula. This new technology helps some startups get going with fewer employees. That means they sometimes need to raise less money. These smaller, often self-funded, businesses look from the outside like less interesting cloud customers, when in fact they may retain the ability to grow into substantial enterprises.

This is part of a broader challenge for AWS, which is seeing a “fundamental” shift in how AI startups spend on cloud computing, Business Insider previously reported.

An Amazon spokesperson said it’s “not true” that the company is missing early signals of fast-growth startups, adding that the company continues to “engage founders as early as we can, in collaboration with VCs, via programs like AWS GenAI Accelerator and AWS Activate.”

Being ‘out-hustled’

To tackle the issue, AWS intends to adjust its VC-driven discovery approach to add a more data-driven prediction model designed to spot promising startups at an earlier stage, according to the internal Amazon document obtained by Business Insider.

AWS can’t risk losing this market. A growing number of startups are run by a single employee, driven by AI’s efficiency gains. Replit’s CEO Amjad Masad previously said the era of solo software creation has arrived, saying anyone can build an app in a few hours with the right AI prompt. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted last year that a “one-person billion-dollar company” would emerge because of AI.

David Levy, a former manager on AWS’ startup business development team, wrote in a blog post this week that AWS intentionally focused on founders early in their journeys to secure them as long-term customers. That approach accelerated AWS growth and led to roughly 70% adoption among startups backed by top-tier venture capital firms, he noted.

But that’s beginning to shift. Levy wrote that AI startups are now directing their initial spending toward GPUs, AI models, and inference tools, rather than traditional cloud compute or storage services, citing Business Insider’s earlier report. Those are areas where no single cloud provider holds dominance, creating fresh challenges for vendors such as AWS.

“AWS built an empire by chasing startups everyone else ignored,” Levy wrote. “Now they’re the ones being out-hustled by the next wave of builders.”

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• Slow Ventures keeps a small team and doesn’t promote from within.
• The early-stage venture firm made an exception by elevating Yoni Rechtman to partner.
• Rechtman is a generalist investor who’s helped source deals like SuperDial and Heave.

In 2022, when Yoni Rechtman’s boss asked where he wanted to be in five years, the newly hired venture capitalist told him, “Not here.”

What might have sounded like defiance was exactly what Kevin Colleran, managing director of Slow Ventures, wanted to hear. The firm doesn’t promote from within. It keeps funds small — “easier to return many multiples of success,” Colleran said — and so the firm needs fewer investors.

This month, Slow made an exception to its rule, giving Rechtman, 30, a seat at the partners’ table.

The firm, now nearing $1 billion in investor capital, has four partners investing out of its core seed funds. Colleran says Rechtman is the first principal to be promoted to partner for those funds in 10 years; Megan Lightcap made partner in 2024 to co-lead the firm’s creator-focused fund.

It’s a precarious time for junior venture capitalists. Many came of age during the frothy post-pandemic boom, when deal flow was brisk, valuations soared, and portfolio companies seemed to double in value every few months. Then the market cooled and funds pulled back.

Suddenly, midlevel investors had fewer chances to prove themselves, and some of their once-glittering deals now looked painfully overpriced. The path to partnership, already murky, became even narrower. Some disillusioned investors left the industry altogether.

Back in 2022, Rechtman assumed he’d eventually leave Slow to raise his own fund. Plans changed, and not, he says, because the market soured. Through September, 68 debut funds closed, versus 183 in all of last year, per PitchBook. Emerging managers are also taking twice as long to raise their next funds — a headwind that would give any investor pause.

Rechtman says he’s staying for a simpler reason. The job’s not finished.

Early on, Slow general partner and early Facebook executive Sam Lessin gave Rechtman this advice: “Fish in waters where other firms aren’t fishing.” Rechtman took it somewhat literally.

This year, he grabbed a last-minute flight to Tampa to reconnect with a startup billing itself as “Uber for heavy-equipment repair.” Founded in 2020, Heave has quietly assembled a network that it claims covers nearly a third of the country’s heavy-machinery mechanics.

Rechtman closed a handshake deal with the founder over smoked fish, and Slow joined its $7 million seed round, which was announced in August. It’s the kind of off-beat, unsexy bet that has become Rechtman’s calling card.

That approach has nudged Slow into areas it might have otherwise overlooked, such as healthcare, growth buyouts, and what Rechtman calls “real-world businesses.” This spring, Slow backed SuperDial, which builds voice agents for healthcare organizations and has already handled more than 1 million calls. Colleran said Rechtman also worked with him to close Journey, a travel rewards platform created by Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy.

Slow doesn’t vote by unanimity. It runs on a simple rule: any two partners can greenlight a deal. Decision-making power is flat. “Because we are small and we trust each other, if two people like an idea, that’s good enough,” Colleran said.

Colleran, now in his forties, calls Rechtman a “younger and hungrier” network-builder. Rechtman hosts a twice-yearly mini-conference for young partners, principals, and emerging managers, and says a meaningful share of his deals now come through that circle.

He’s also built an audience by publishing. He’s written a weekly Substack for more than a year and says he has roughly 15,000 subscribers. Rechtman said if investors want credibility with founders on weird, non-consensus ideas, they have to put their thinking in public. “Frankly, I have a style that either attracts or repels founders,” he said.

Instead of leaving Slow to raise a debut fund, Rechtman says he now sees a path to help build a differentiated franchise from inside a partnership.

As a Brooklyn native, he wants to do it from New York. The city is awash in seed checks, he says, but starved for growth capital to scale the most promising hometown companies.

Slow has raised three opportunity funds, totaling $295 million, to join later rounds for its top performers. This gives Rechtman a way to keep backing breakouts rather than watching them migrate to out-of-town investment firms.

“When something takes off in New York, other people make the money,” Rechtman said. “I see an opportunity to change that.”

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