The venture industry is filled with localized celebrities. These are figures probably known by every startup and investor within 5,000 miles of Menlo Park, but who don’t have the name recognition of the VCs that have broken through into the (relative) mainstream, like Marc Andreessen or Tim Draper.
David Haber is one of those venture celebrities, though the term would probably make him cringe. He’s the type of person who comes up every time I ask about the top VCs operating in New York—someone who has been described to me as a “connector,” whose superpower is knowing and linking the right people, and ideas, together. (That he also happens to work as a general partner helping oversee enterprise software at arguably the most powerful venture firm of the moment, a16z, doesn’t hurt.)
I met with David last week in a16z’s New York offices, which he helped open in 2022. The venture juggernaut has two floors of a SoHo office building, with books written by partners, like Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own, lining the walls. It’s soon expanding to two more floors, perhaps spurred by an expected influx of employees following the close of the firm’s London office, announced on Friday.
Haber is clean-cut with a calm, measured demeanor. Though he only graduated from Harvard 15 years ago, it seems like he’s already had four careers, working as an investor at the Boston-based Spark Capital (where he helped source a seed round into Plaid) before starting a fintech venture of his own, the financing startup Bond Street, which he sold to Goldman Sachs. He then worked to help the bank build out its more tech-focused offerings, including the online platform Marcus. (He described his time in banking after running a startup as “recovery,” which is probably the only time a stint at Goldman has been characterized that way.)
While Haber’s 360-degree profile is enviable for any VC, his trajectory is more common to New York, especially for those in fintech, with Wall Street right around the corner. He was interested in finance at a time when the financial crisis pushed young graduates out of traditional paths, trawling New York tech meetups for interesting people back when you could come across the Plaid founder or the Venmo head of engineering at a random happy hour.
When he began working at Goldman, that skill helped him stand out to the new chief strategy officer, Stephanie Cohen, who asked Haber to help her get connected to the tech ecosystem. At the same time, he learned how an organization of 45,000 employees operates, watching how division heads work together. “It was an interesting bird’s eye view into a big company from within the inner sanctum,” he told me.
It also helped inform his view of financial technology, specifically B2B software. The line between fintech and traditional finance is increasingly blurred, especially as institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan create, or adopt, software first championed by their challengers. On the consumer fintech front, Haber said that we already have our scaled winners—companies like Robinhood, Ramp, and Brex—that will be difficult to challenge.
Now, Haber said, he’s biased toward companies that lead with software (as opposed to a financial product) that can help businesses solve workflow challenges. As he transitioned into his role at a16z, which he joined in 2021, he also leaned into his connecter role between the startup ecosystem and large, incumbent institutions. “That was a unique way to add value from New York City,” he told me.
At Andreessen, Haber’s portfolio has expanded beyond fintech to other types of software (powered, of course, by AI) that help solve those workflow issues, which he describes as a “massive kind of opportunity” to go after. Haber has championed the idea of the “messy inbox problem,” where AI can sit at the top of the funnel for work to capture and organize unstructured data—and eventually displace existing legacy software (or people). One example, which Allie wrote about last week, is Eve, the legal software platform that announced a $47 million Series A led by a16z and helps replace paralegal functions like client intake.
Throughout our conversation, I was curious how Haber has adapted to a16z’s new role in the VC-supercharged Washington, where his boss has ascended from venture celebrity to president whisperer. Everything Haber talked about was so determinedly apolitical and technical, it seemed easy to forget that Andreessen recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast to decry Biden-era debanking.
“It’s not a huge topic of conversation,” Haber told me, adding that board meetings with portfolio companies instead focus on questions like team size and customer happiness. “People obviously value the brand and the megaphone that the firm has.”
Ask Andy...“Ask Andy” is back! In this week’s column, Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn tackles the age-old conundrum: Should I bootstrap my startup? He advises that if founders decide to take on backers, they should ask two crucial questions about their potential investors, including whether entrepreneurs love working with them. Read the whole column here.
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Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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