Let’s begin - A reintroduction. My focus has been resetting my algorithm. I’ve mostly laid low publicly the last few years because building and telling the world about it at the same time can be exhausting. In short, I’ve been building Kinship Ventures and investing in over 80+ companies across high-tech growth, the future of CPG, wellness, and the future of work.
I’ve also been extremely focused on parenting my boys and settling into the alchemy of family as an adult with Roya.
AI adoption and transformation has been at the center of my work for the last 3 years. I can’t think of anything else that is as revolutionary right now for entrepreneurs and leaders.
I’ve also been traveling to the Gulf States, learning and thinking about the future of the Middle East and the prospects of a Free Iran.
From the Dome.
Welcome to my Substack, where I get to learn, explore, and share what I’m stewing on along the way.
If you’re expecting polished hot takes and LinkedIn-perfect positioning, this isn’t that. If you’re not sure what to expect — it’s probably the things I can’t fit into a tweet, an Instagram caption, or a polite dinner conversation.
Real-time reflections. I’ll use this space to go fully into the things I care about.
I am an Iranian-American. Founder. Investor. Operator. Boy Dada.
I’ve built companies, backed over 80+ startups — from OpenAI and MoonPay to Olipop and Lovable — and sat at tables where most people like me aren’t invited. I’ve never really fit into a box and I’m not trying to start now. I think it’s fair to say I’m 1/1 and self-generated.
I grew up between cultures: Iranian at home, American everywhere else. When you grow up between worlds, you develop an operating system for ambiguity. You learn how to read rooms, how to translate, and how to hold contradiction without collapsing under it. That instinct shaped everything I’ve built.
The diaspora dysphoria has been real — and if your parents are from another country, you know what I mean.
Maybe you found me during the Beautycon years, when I took a small YouTube creators gathering and turned it into what The New York Times called “the Super Bowl of the beauty industry,” where we helped reinvent product, retail, and the future of consumer goods across both indie and major companies.
Then 2020 happened.
COVID shut everything down. Beautycon was rocked by the pandemic and a terrible cap table. What I had spent a decade building unraveled in months. It was a full wipeout — professional, personal, physical.
We’ll talk more about that. There’s more to share and a lot of learning I want to pay forward.
So I took time to decompress and re-evaluate. I co-founded BeautyUnited during COVID, became a Partner at Intuition Capital, and in 2023 co-founded Kinship Ventures with Gwyneth Paltrow — backing high-agency founders building what’s next.
Over the past few years, I’ve been building off-camera — reworking systems, rethinking scale, and sharpening how I lead.
I’ve rebuilt my team. I’ve gone through my relationships — friends, family, collaborators — with real intention. I can say there’s not one person in my life today who isn’t there by choice. Everything I work on now is because I want to and I get to.
High agency isn’t a vibe. It’s a requirement. It’s about being 100% accountable to yourself.
This shift didn’t come from theory. It came from growth, from falling short, from getting back up, and from learning to read the room more carefully. I have to say rebuilding and reorienting has not just been humbling but also deeply gratifying.
The number one contributor to this shift has been six years of therapy, twice a week, and using every modality possible to strengthen my mental fortitude.
There’s a difference between building fast and building right. I’ve done both. Now I care more about building right.
While the world feels louder and more chaotic than ever — politically, economically, culturally — I’ve been deep in systems, integrations, and rebuilding the operating core of how I run.
I’m focused on building a system that isn’t people-dependent, but system-dependent.
At Kinship Ventures, we’ve been doing our own internal strengthening too — tightening structure, building better systems, and improving how we support founders not just with capital, but with alignment, discipline, and long-term leverage.
We’re partnering with founders who are reshaping how people live, work, and care, supporting companies like Lovable, OpenAI, and others as they scale.
There’s a lot happening, and I’m moving with it. Some days I’m a strategist, some days I’m debugging myself. I test, I fail, I reset so you don’t have to.
I’ve been very vocal about Iran because it’s personal and it’s about my family.
There’s an always-on desire for me to go home, to be united with my relatives, and to visit the places where my grandparents are buried.
You may have seen me on Fox News, CNN, NewsNation, Morning Joe — speaking about what’s happening and why it matters. It’s complicated to stand for something that divisive, but for me the choice has always been clear.
Free Iran, and we won't stop until it happens.
I’ve been going deep on ChatGPT, Lovable, and Claude — these are tools that have fundamentally changed my life. The way I think, the way I produce, the way I make decisions.
More broadly, I’ve been thinking about AI as an operating layer. There’s a lot of opportunity right now in building founder suites and dashboards — next-generation entrepreneurial tools — and rethinking how we communicate, market, brand, and build operations, both for the fund and across our companies; for me, these tools are freedom.
At the same time, I’ve been going deep into systems like Notion, ClickUp, and Slack, learning how these integrations actually work with AI in practice. Not just layering AI on top, but understanding how everything connects — where things break, where they compound, and how to structure it so it actually works.
Meeting Audits That Tell the Truth: I ran my own behavioral audit using AI transcripts and didn’t love what I saw — where I interrupt, where I over-explain, where I jump in too fast. Patterns don’t lie.
Now I run my meetings through “Coach Matt” a system that analyzes them and gives me direct feedback. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s useful.
AI as an Operating Layer: AI is becoming an operating layer across everything — not just a tool I open, but something that sits across how I work. I’m starting to ingest communication across text messages, email, Slack, project management tools, Google Drive — and using LLMs to actually understand it.
Seeing myself through that lens has been fascinating.
ClickUp/Notion, Slack and Granola as Early Warning Systems: ClickUp/Notion, Slack and Granola are starting to function as early warning systems. Once you can ingest all that communication and run it through AI, you start to see patterns, gaps, and breakdowns much earlier.
It’s still a work in progress. It misses things. It creates duplicates. But the shift is real.
What This Made Clear: Garbage in, garbage out.
AI tools are only as good as the system underneath them. ClickUp’s flexibility is also its weakness — too much customization creates inconsistency, and that’s where automation breaks down.
Standardization isn’t optional. It’s the foundation.
AI doesn’t fix the business for you. It reflects it.
What you do with that clarity is still on you.
This is the season I’m in. Less noise, more structure.
I’m rebuilding how I think, how I operate, and how I lead — and I’ll be sharing what works, what fails, and what actually scales.
I’ll change my mind. I’ll get things wrong. I’ll course-correct.
I think a lot about failure as a utility and a blueprint.
If you’re here for that, you’re in the right place.
Let’s get to work.
More soon.
— Moj
Share this newsletter with someone who’s ready to move differently.
I’m curious to know: What are you unlearning right now?
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