Our story
We started RBV because we've spent our careers on both sides of the startup table - as founders and investors - and we want to improve how startups raise capital.
Three beliefs anchor everything we do:
Founders are the heart and soul of the economy, and they deserve better. We know what it feels like to pitch people who don't understand your business, to chase intros that go nowhere, to walk out of a meeting that felt less like a conversation and more like a hazing. Founders are doing some of the hardest work in the economy. The least we can do is to make the process faster, more useful, and a lot less humiliating.
Expertise is everywhere - and it's about to matter more, not less. The smartest person about a given industry is almost never sitting in a venture office on Sand Hill Road. They're running a hospital system in Cleveland, or a logistics company in Memphis, or a farm in upstate New York. We've spent decades learning that the best investment signal isn't a fund manager's instinct - it's the quiet nod from someone who has actually done the thing. And as AI proliferates, we think that kind of hard-won, tacit knowledge becomes the real edge. It's what's left when everything else is commoditized.
The chance to back great private companies shouldn't be reserved for a lucky few. For all of our careers, the opportunity to invest in promising early-stage companies has been gated - by geography and by relationships. We don't think that's right, especially as companies stay private longer. We're building toward something more open: a network where expertise sends a signal and everyone can participate.
What we're building
RBV is a network where expertise is the organizing principle and capital follows conviction. We connect founders to operators who actually understand their market, and we give those operators a way to invest alongside the companies they help.
We started with Cornell because it's our alma mater and because its community spans every industry and every geography at a scale few institutions can match - 150+ fields of study and 350,000 alumni. It's the first network we're building, but it won't be the last.
- Dan & Gus
Dan has spent his career at the intersection of emerging technology and market development – as a co-founder and operating executive, and as a corporate strategist. He was a co-founder or early employee at four technology companies, including Bindle Systems, a self-sovereign identity platform whose technology was acquired by Iden2 in 2024, and Gridmetrics, an energy grid intelligence company that spun out of CableLabs and now operates as GridVisibility. Earlier in his career, Dan helped define the earliest days of the online advertising industry, holding executive roles at SiteSpecific (acquired by CKS Group) and developing marketing strategies for Microsoft’s first internet properties. After more than a decade in a series of strategy and business development roles across Time Warner, Dan culminated his corporate career as Group Vice President, Corporate Strategy at Time Warner Cable.
Gus has spent his career working with early-stage technology companies – as a founder and operating executive, and as an investor. He was an early employee or co-founder at five technology companies: NetMarket (acquired by CUC International), Internet Profiles (acquired by Engage Technologies), Spot Runner (acquired by Harris Media), Disconnect, and Bindle Systems (acquired by IDEN2). He began investing in parallel, starting at Hambrecht and Quist in San Francisco, and has since managed venture funds for British Telecom, Samsung, Time Warner, and Texas Instruments, and served as a Venture Partner at FirstMark Capital. His investments have included InfoGear (acquired by Cisco), Digital Fountain (acquired by Qualcomm), XtremeSpectrum (acquired by Motorola), Speakeasy (acquired by Best Buy), BigBand Networks (IPO), Entropic Communications (IPO), and Visible World (acquired by Comcast).