Manish Patel joins XYZ as General Partner to find and double down on the non-obvious
The next decade is going to change almost everything. Software that acts instead of waits. Money that moves faster than ever before. Defense directed by autonomous systems and the industrial base behind them. Factories where robots build the robots. Biology that changes what a billion people eat. Each of these alone would define an era; they're arriving together. Very little of what exists today was built for that world.
Finding the people building for it (before the market has a neat category for them) is our goal here at XYZ. Today we are adding one of the best people I know with a long track record at exactly that. Excited to announce that Manish Patel has joined us as a General Partner!
A compounding data set
His résumé is simple to state. Early Google, teaching at Stanford, 15 years in venture.
But it belies exactly how much Manish has tackled net new problems before the world even recognized them. He spent his 20s building a new type of an ads platform before “programmatic” was a word, Maps that endeavored to photograph every road and building on earth, tech that evolved television into what we have now - constantly shipping products at scale the rest of the industry wouldn’t encounter for years.
All of this had one thing in common: It started off as revolutionary and weird before invisibly becoming the fabric of our lives and the ground truth for now-huge industries. He developed an instinct he’s carried since: the important things will always seem strange at first.
When Manish became an investor, he honed this hunch into a discipline. He partnered with Scopely when consensus dismissed mobile gaming as a business of arbitrary hits that could not be systematically built. A few years later, it had the largest mobile game launch in history, surpassing $15 billion in lifetime revenue. He decided to back Hydrolix based on a twist in architectural standards: separate storage from compute, keep petabytes queryable in real time and a unique go-to-market motion. Revenue grew 27x in just two years. He also spotted and he backed GrowthBook betting that when AI made code cheap to write, the bottleneck would move to knowing what to ship. Today the largest AI labs use it to test their own products. Every bet looked early. That was the point.
And for over a decade, while making those bets, Stanford has asked Manish back to teach product design in the School of Engineering. Universities don't hand that role to investors as a courtesy; they hand it to people who can make judgment explicit. Teaching young engineers is a fantastic way to find truth. The authentic ideas, challenges, and opportunities of young people speak volumes relative to the abstract discussion of industry market trends.
Bringing more conviction muscle
There’s something we’ve been observing lately as a firm. Venture is consolidating into generalized platforms on one side and focused, high-conviction firms on the other. Here at XYZ, we chose focus deliberately: we concentrate capital in breakout companies, deeply engage with all teams throughout their arcs, and have the agility to make the commitment that’s right for founders.
This structure matters because the opportunities coming up these days don't adhere to any traditional stages — the line between seed and Series A has effectively disappeared. More and more, founders need a partner who stays with them on the journey.
Ross and Manish have known each other for fifteen years — co-investors, sparring partners, friends. That kind of history compounds: a shared vocabulary makes the debates faster, an earned trust makes them honest, and the decisions get smarter because of both. Most partnerships spend years building that. This one arrived with it.
As we build this firm over the next decade, we know the future will come at us faster than we expect and slower than the demos we see everyday suggest. The founders and investors who win will be the ones looking in the right places years before the names, definitions, and industries exist. There’s no more ideal partner for this reality than Manish.
Let’s get to work!
