The High Risk, High Reward Model of Backing Immigrant Founders | Tech Crunch Build Mode

Our founding partner, Manan Mehta, recently joined Isabelle Johannesen on TechCrunch’s Build Mode to talk about something we’ve spent over a decade thinking about at Unshackled: how do you find and back exceptional founders before the rest of the market sees what makes them exceptional?

For immigrant founders, the obstacles are rarely about ability. They’re structural. Work authorization, no friends-and-family capital, thin networks, and an industry that runs on pattern recognition. We think that’s exactly where the outliers are hiding.

The conversation covers a lot of ground:

• Why traditional VC pattern-matching causes investors to miss great founders.

• How we evaluate before there’s a product or traction.

• The IQ/AQ/EQ/SQ framework we use to pressure-test our own instincts.

• And why we believe investors should be maximizing the value of risk rather than simply minimizing it.

If there’s a structural gap, that’s probably where the outliers are playing.

Thanks to Isabelle and the Tech Crunch Build Mode team for the conversation.

🎥 Watch the full episode here.

About Unshackled Ventures: Unshackled Ventures is the only venture capital firm built to back immigrant founders from Day 0 — before they have an entity, a network, or an alternative. By solving immigration first, we are the only capital available at that moment, which gives us access others don’t: before consensus, before capital, before competition.

Since 2014, that structural advantage has proven to be a winning investment strategy across 110 investments in the industries that will define the next decade — healthcare AI, supply chain automation, enterprise infrastructure, space, and cancer therapeutics.