How a Venture Founder’s Aesthetics Obsession Influences How She Picks Companies
Sarah Kunst on growing up in small-town Michigan, working at Chanel, and starting her own venture fund, Cleo Capital.
This is My Life’s Work, a column about the unique life experiences that influenced the careers of tech founders and executives. Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sarah Kunst’s venture fund, Cleo Capital, which she founded in 2018, has invested in culture-shifting media companies like Cameo and MasterClass, cryptocurrency exchange platform Gemini and digital asset manager FalconX. But her professional background—which ranges from working on a farm in Michigan to joining the marketing department at Chanel in New York to founding her own fitness media brand—is not the classic path to venture capital. As she tells it, everything that got her where she is began with values her parents taught her. “I like work that is quantifiable,” she said. “I like work where at the end of the day what you’re judged on is your output.” Here she charts her own course from picking strawberries as a pre-teen to picking the next big things in tech.