Founder of Prist Capital, ex @Firstround, @Stripe, @mixpanel, Bain, and @CleGuardians. Bears Fan đ, amateur golfer đđŸââïž, pilot đ©.
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2010
- Tweets791
- Following1.6K
- Followers7K
- Likes2.1K
Deeply enjoyed chatting with @Erica_Wenger and sharing my journey to Solo GP at Prist Capital! I hate listening to my voice, so someone will have to let me know how it went đł.
Deep tech founders -- DMs are open and checks are ready to be written. HMU đ
Bonus Friday Episode: My conversation with Meka Asonye (@BigMekaStyle).
Meka is the founder and managing partner of Prist Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in deep tech startups. Previously, he worked at @firstround Capital, @stripe, and in baseball operations for the Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians).
We discuss how to identify the next billion-dollar startup, why the best venture capitalists think differently from everyone else, and what separates exceptional founders from the rest.
We also discuss:
- How his experience in Major League Baseball (@MLB) shaped his investment philosophy
- Why the best startup investments often look unconventional at first
- How he became an early investor in @K2SpaceCo
- Why mission-driven founders have an advantage over those motivated purely by money
- Why traditional investment committees can overlook the biggest opportunities
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:52 - What Baseball Taught Him About Venture Capital
07:36 - Overcoming Personal Challenges and Finding Balance
12:06 - From Aviation to Investing in Deep Tech
19:59 - Why Meka Left First Round to Start His Own VC Firm
25:44 - Why Deep Tech Investing Requires a Different Strategy
30:41 - The #1 Thing to Look for When Investing in Startups
32:46 - How Meka Spotted the Opportunity in K2 Space
39:36 - The Future of Deep Tech and Emerging Startup Hubs
42:49 - Building the Future of Prist Capital
The K2 team is ABSOLUTELY COOKING. đđ§âđłđ„
With a 20.6kW burn, we just shattered the record for highest Hall thruster burn ever completed on orbit â four times more powerful than any thruster that has ever flown in space.
And thatâs just the beginning. Weâre continuing to test and refine our in-house, custom-designed avionics and propulsion systems for next yearâs launches. Below, our gimbal moves our thruster while it fires in our vacuum chamber. Of course, we couldnât resist the opportunity to draw our Dyson sphere logo, which represents the abundant space future that weâre aiming for as we push the bounds of whatâs possible in space.
Yesterday, I flew to the middle of the desert in Nevada to watch a couple founders demo a product that will keep our troops safer. The founders moved to the middle of nowhere to be focused, close to a manufacturing facility, and close open space that allow live fire testing. No hype, no vaporware, no loud chest beating on X -- just rapid iteration. They're humble, hard working, and mission driven.
I've never been more bullish on early stage Physical AI investing. Excited to for the world to see what they are building đȘđŸ!
There are some founder meetings you NEVER forget â even when itâs just a couple of people and a deck. Founding teams with insane founder-market fit, huge TAM, perfect why now. @bsofman thanks for letting me be a part of this journey. Excited to see what yaâll continue to do. đ LFG.
Today weâre announcing a $600M Series C, co-led by @CapitalG and @emergencecap, to bring fully autonomous machines to more job sites across the U.S.
We want autonomous equipment to become beautifully unremarkable, as ordinary on a job site as GPS or grade control.
Keep cooking @egonredd and team!
Endurance is on a historic run. During our mission to the Axial Seamount, we successfully drilled the worldâs first subsea geothermal well and generated net-positive power a mile beneath the Pacific. This mission was the first end-to-end test of subsea geothermal, and our fifth deep-sea deployment in just over a year. For three weeks, we worked around the clock over an active underwater volcano, running the drill and generator and handling every deployment and recovery. Along the way, we:
- Landed our drill within feet of target, drilled two holes, and cased and completed the second as a geothermal well, flowing at 260°C.
- Landed Adélie, our 3-ton test plant, and ran it in real time from Seattle over subsea fiber.
- Drilled with filtered seawater, not drilling mud, and monitored the site on every dive.
- Recovered, serviced, and redeployed Adélie in about 16 hours.
- And on Sept. 27, connected to a 281°C natural vent, spun the turbine up to 26,000 rpm and ran the plant net positive for 8.7 seconds, peaking at 16.5 kW.
Net power is the threshold every new energy source has to cross. For Endurance, it proves subsea geothermal is real, and gives us the confidence to keep sprinting towards commercial scale.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn: a battery protection trip ended the run, a pump cable failed on restart, and the new well was too restrictive to run the plant. Those lessons go straight into Gentoo, our next test plant, this winter and Leopard, our 2 MW commercial generator.
Weâre incredibly proud of what we accomplished together. It took creativity, precision, an uncompromising focus on safety from everyone on board, and itâs only the beginning of what weâre capable of. We couldnât have done it without Stabbert Maritime and the crew of the Ocean Guardian, the ROPOS team, the University of Washington, WASSOC, and the National Science Foundation.
Lucky to be a small part of this epic teamâs journey since the beginning. Congrats @neelkunjur @KaranKunjur and the entire @K2SpaceCo team. đ
Our biggest round yet: @K2SpaceCo has raised a $500M Series D at a $6.8B post-money valuation. The round was led by @kleinerperkins and @ICONIQCapital, with participation from @CapitalG, @lightspeedvp, @AltimeterCap, @sparkcapital, Sands Capital, @ARKInvest, @TRowePrice, and other existing investors.
"Scalingâ is probably the word Iâve used most often the past few months in conversations with our investors, customers, and employees when talking about whatâs next for K2 Space in 2027 and beyond:Â
--Weâre going to continue to scale up mass production, to deliver against the $1B + in contracts weâve won to-date.
--Weâre going to scale up the satellite itself, from the 20kW Mega to the 100kW class Giga. Its no longer just 100kW, but weâll save that update for another day.
The capital from the Series D will turbocharge this scaling. Â
Thanks to everyone who has been on this journey with us for the last four years â let's keep building bigger.
So proud of Andrew Redd and team! Thanks for letting me be a small part of this from day 1.
Endurance is proud to announce our $54M Series A, led by @foundersfund, to develop subsea geothermal energy. We're building mass-manufacturable and mass-deployable generators to access terawatts of low cost, clean, baseload power.
Meka Asonye retweeted
Itâs official: K2 Space is operating the most powerful Hall thrusters currently flying in space. Just a few weeks after the launch of our first test mission, Gravitas, weâve successfully fired both of our 20kW Hall thruster systems to achieve a new level of electric propulsion power never before seen on orbit for this type of system. We plan to continue raising and lowering our orbit as we gather more data on the thruster performance while continuing our mission in LEO.
This milestone is yet another validation of K2âs approach to building bigger, as more powerful thrusters will enable the MEO, GEO, and deep space missions of the future.
Meka Asonye retweeted
I'm very proud to share that the team @K2SpaceCo has achieved Tier 2 Mission Success for Gravitas!
Over the past week, we've:
âą Powered on our payloads
âą Activated our high power propulsion system and fired the thruster
âą Completed testing of our software system, including a software update
With all of the satellite bus systems demonstrated and checked out, we will be transitioning to sustaining operations for the rest of the mission.
This includes continuing our payload demonstrations while pushing the satellite bus systems to the limit to learn as much as possible for future missions.
(And yes, this photo is real. Our thruster firing on orbit.)
---
Meka Asonye retweeted
Solid-state batteries are changing naval warfare. And the threats they enable are far harder to detect.
A post recently went viral claiming Iran's "Azhdar" UUV patrols at 18â25 knots with 4-day endurance and 600+ km range.
This appears to be false, but the post went viral because the narrative is true. UUVs are a growing threat and maritime, as demonstrated by this crisis, is more important than ever.
And the stakes are high. Iran has long held the Strait of Hormuz as a pressure point; roughly 20% of global oil supply flows through a 21-mile-wide chokepoint.
UUVs capable of covertly laying mines in those waters would further threaten naval assets and escalate the conflict.
UUVs are already being deployed by multiple nations. Today's lithium-powered vehicles cover hundreds of kilometers and patrol for days. Solid-state batteries at 400 Wh/kg, and climbing, mean that gets dramatically better, cheaper, and more scalable this decade.
Sensing underwater is categorically harder than any other domain.
cUAS has radars, cameras, RF, microwave. The electromagnetic spectrum works for you in air.
Water kills RF. Acoustics are the primary detection modality, and littoral environments add clutter and complexity that open-ocean legacy systems were never built for.
Those legacy systems were designed to find large submarines in deep water. Not swarms of small autonomous vehicles near ports, chokepoints, and critical infrastructure.
As UUVs get cheaper, faster, and more autonomous - sensing is the defining gap.
cUUV is going to be a massive market.
Interdiction starts with detection. And detection underwater is still largely unsolved.
Depending on which viral AI essay you agreed with on X this week, itâs already so over or weâre all playing a very expensive game of Farmville.
As with most things, the real answer is a lot more unsatisfying. Itâs all still messy and probably lies somewhere in the middle.
While it does feel like things are shifting extremely quickly in a way thatâs hard to dismiss, the hype is escalating every day. Itâs impossible to tell where exactly we are on the curve.
What has been more interesting to me than the debate over which camp folks are in is just how much traction these pieces are getting. I think weâre all kind of desperate to make sense of how uneven things are, and are all caught up in this moment of trying to process the whiplash.
Youâll be scrolling through crazy OpenClaw workflows and mishaps that truly feel like scenes out of the future, but then skepticism starts to creep in about whatâs true and whatâs overengineered.
And then anytime you step outside the tech bubble you can get an instant reality check on how much wood there still is to chop to get to widespread adoption. (Even if itâs just seeing how differently the ChatGPT vs. Anthropic vs. Google Super Bowl AI ads landed for tech folks vs. normies.)
The gap between what people are posting about and whatâs actually making a difference has never felt harder to figure out.
The main thing Iâve found to be helpful as a counterweight is trying to stay diligent on spending my time as an investor where I think it matters most vs. getting caught up in the wild swings. For the past few years now, thatâs meant meeting with builders who are focused on solving hard, real-world problems.
To me that means taking on the biggest, most technically and operationally challenging issues in the physical world (aerospace, defense, robotics), or figuring out how to usefully inject AI into the painful, manual workflows in industries that actually make and move things.
Not only because this is what personally gets me more fired up but also because it feels like this is the general direction our world is headed in. More and more of the founders Iâm meeting are reorienting their approach to problem hunting and building in this way.
@DideroAI is a great example here and is top of mind because they just shared their $30M Series A news today from @chemistry and @HeadlineVC.
They found a problem space most of us know virtually nothing about. Procurement teams at manufacturers and distributors are managing thousands of supplier interactions across email, spreadsheets and ERPs. The bulk of this stuff is still done manually, even though itâs only getting more and more complicated as companies try to diversify their supply chains across more countries.
When I led their seed in 2024, @tspencer15, @tcpetit, and @LPallhuber immediately felt like a team that was well-configured to the shape of the challenge here. Theyâve been those people stuck in the mud of these workflows. (Between the 3 of them theyâve built companies, run procurement operations across countries, and dealt with the pain of trying to coordinate 100s of suppliers.)
Spaces like these, where the team has the deep domain context and the agents are correctly applied, are where AI can and already is making a near-term, not-theoretical difference.
In took less than a couple years, and Dideroâs agents are now doing things like following up on 2K+ past due order line items that were sitting neglected, automating PO creation, and pulling info off physical bills of lading and getting it into the ERP so production doesnât stall out waiting on someone to manually type it in.
None of those are paradigm-shifting on their own, but stack up these small, boring, concrete wins week after week, company to company (and assume they continue to improve in capability at an explosive rate), and pretty soon weâll all be surprised by just how much wood has been chopped.
Working at @stripe with Jeanne was one of the highlights of my professional career. So fun to see it come full circle as she drops truth bombs on the @firstround pod
Today weâre launching our newest podcast, Executive Function. The question weâre trying to answer is: what is the difference between good and truly great scale up executives?
Weâre beginning this journey by sitting down with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, whoâs currently the COO @vercel and previously spent almost 10 years @stripe, where her final role was Chief Business Officer.
So much of her perspective can be summed up in this observation: âMost executives have a playbook and wonât contextualize it. They over pattern match and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure out whatâs different. They donât actually get their hands dirty.â
Hope founders, execs, and future execs find as much value in this conversation as I did.
Timestamps:
(5:04) What keeps star talent from ascending to the top spot in a company
(19:59) How to balance being demanding and supportive as an executive
(22:47) Jeanneâs interview process for hiring executives
(29:04) The thread that ties together failed executives
(34:57) How Jeanne uses âdriver treesâ to determine metrics
(43:24) Why your executive peer set needs to be your first team
(57:16) How Stripe got 30 execs to operate as one team
(1:02:43) Why execs should be working themselves out of a job
(1:09:26) The performance review from @collision that sticks out in Jeanneâs mind
Meka Asonye retweeted
As the founder of a space company, I like to think Iâm pretty optimistic - but even I underestimated the rate of acceleration weâve seen over the last few months.
Almost four years ago, Neel and I started a company because we were excited about Starship. We saw the opportunity to build much bigger, much higher power satellites that could start humanity down the path towards being a Type 2 Kardashev civilization. We decided to call the company K2, we made our logo a Dyson sphere.
Four years later, the Kardashev scale is a mainstream concept - with the ambition to make humanity a K2 civilization being broadcast by one of the greatest engineers in the world. Concepts that I thought were 5 to 10 years out, like orbital data centers - are now foundational capabilities for what could be one of the most significant IPOs ever.
Weâve gone from people asking us âwhy would anyone need a 100kW satellite?â to people taking that number, asking their AI to put it into their orbital data center excel and having the lightbulbs go off.
Itâs honestly the best time ever to be building in space, we are truly fortunate to be building K2 today.
For a big satellite company, weâre a small fish in a big big pond. We may end up being NPCs in a much bigger game - time will tell. All I know is Iâm going to have the time of my life building alongside people I admire and respect.
So up next, launching the 20kW satellite in two months, learning a ton, continuing designs on the 100kW satellite, scaling up the factory and doing our small part to help progress humanity up the curve.
âK2 or youâre not even trying.â
Happy last closing day of the Fiscal Year SaaS sellers (to those who celebrate)! Good luck getting those commits across the finish line.
I've recently seen one too many examples where VCs forget that we WORK for the founders, not the other way around. We are in a client services business. Your reputation is all you have. One damning founder reference could kill your career. đ
Come work with one of the best in the biz!
In 20+ years of building @firstround, Iâve never hired for this specific role before.
Iâm kicking off a search to hire an Investor who will work directly alongside me. They will share my obsession to meet with the highest potential founders as early as possible, often before they even have a clear âimagine ifâ yet.
Although the role itself is still being defined, my commitment is to work closely with this person to help them build the foundation of their investing career.
Hereâs whatâs probably true about you if youâre the right fit:
- Youâre enthusiastic and obsessive. Following your curiosity has taken you down often weird and winding paths.
- You already know a lot of brilliant builders â and more importantly, they enjoy spending time with you. You have a unique ability to generate followership, likely because you give more than you take.
- You actually enjoy the work of building relationships from scratch: the cold emails, the endless events, the persistent follow-ups, the months of coffee chats. It requires relentless execution, and that excites you. You go about this work in an authentic way that isnât conventional ânetworking.â If youâre looking for a role where the title does all the heavy lifting for you, this isnât it.
- You donât find it difficult to put unreasonable hours into your work because it doesnât feel like work to you. Youâd call yourself a âwork enthusiast.â
- Youâve been immersed in the startup world long enough to have real context. What matters most is youâve been close enough to startups to understand how they actually work and what great looks like.
- You obsess over markets, customers, and why some businesses work while others donât, but you can also hang when a conversation goes deep into technical choices.
- Youâre an exceptional communicator who tends to be more of a âsimplifierâ than a âcomplexifier.â
- Weâll work together incredibly closely, but you arenât someone who needs to be managed. You learn best by watching, by doing, by asking well-calibrated questions â preferring to âtake the wheelâ instead of being a passenger. Youâd rather shape a role than fill one.
If you want to spend your time with builders at the very beginning â and learn this craft of early-stage investing alongside someone whoâs been at it for two decades and still thinks itâs the best job in the world â Iâd love to meet you.
SF or NYC only, with long days and lots of travel in both directions. Apply below.
jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstround/âŠ
Meka Asonye retweeted
Once in a while, it is important to take a step back and appreciate how ridiculous life sometimes is. Seeing K2 show up in Times Square is one of those moments.
A big thanks to @Nasdaq and everyone who else who supported us @K2SpaceCo over the last week - the feedback has been incredible.
Now, back to work.
Meka Asonye retweeted
Three and a half years ago, @neelkunjur and I decided to go from being Brothers, to being Co-Founders. Today, weâre excited to announce that @K2SpaceCo has raised a $250M Series C at a $3B valuation. This round comes on the heels of $500M in signed contracts across commercial and US Government customers.
Our Series C is being led by @Redpoint, with participation from @TRowePrice, Hedosophia, @AltimeterCap, @lightspeedvp, Alpine Space Ventures and many others.
Weâre fortunate to be building at a unique time - launch vehicles are getting larger and the frequency of launch is increasing. When it comes to satellites, itâs now possible to Build Bigger, and we intend to be on the vanguard of doing just that.
Building Bigger allows us to deliver a step change in power (20kW today, 100kW tomorrow), reliability, and redundancy. Our satellites are designed to deliver the maximum amount of capability wherever that capability is needed (LEO, MEO, GEO, cislunar space and beyond).
Coming up next - 20kW satellite launch early 2026, three satellites launched early 2027, and many more to come after that as we scale up production in our 180k sq ft factory in Torrance, CA. Weâre looking forward to sharing more on our progress over the coming months and years.
-
Three years ago, @KaranKunjur and @NeelKunjur pitched me on the idea of building bigger. Today, @k2spaceco has a new $3B valuation (with a $250M Series C round), a business thatâs humming (with over $500M in contracts this year), a huge factory where 80% of each satellite is built in-house (right here in the USA), and a massive upcoming Gravitas launch (T-080d as the countdown clock on their slick new website shows).
Couldnât be more proud of all that this team pulled off in 2025. One of the highlights of my year was going down in person to watch the launch of their first mission flying hardware on SpaceX's Transporter-12.
2026 is going to be even bigger. LFG. đ
Great write up on all their progress today in Forbes below.
