October 16, 2026
A year ago I left Northeastern and moved to the Bay Area. You can read my full journey here. I came with two beliefs. The first was that the next 24 months of AI would matter more than any other period of my working life. The second was that this moment belonged to the young.
Both have proven true. Over the past year I watched friends leave school to join startups, and others leave to start their own. Many of them are now among the most sought-after people in the Bay.
Venture, as it exists today, is not built for this. A startup needs three things: talent, compute, and data. The best companies of this generation were built by young people. Ramp, Cursor, Etched, Cognition. At xAI, the most consequential contributors were young, and nearly all came from unconventional backgrounds. Elon’s companies operate on a simple principle: find the hidden gems before anyone else sees them.
We believe there is room for a different kind of firm. One that starts with talent, the hardest problem a founder faces, and works alongside the best founders to solve it. One that incubates exceptional young people and holds to the idea that ordinary people can choose to be extraordinary.
Bo Le was a horse judge in ancient China. He was known for finding thousand-li horses, the ones that could run a thousand miles in a day, in places no one else thought to look. Often they were pulling salt carts, dismissed as ordinary. The Tang poet Han Yu wrote that the world has never lacked great horses. It has only lacked a Bo Le to recognize them.
That is how we think about talent. The exceptional are always there. Most firms are not built to see them.
Today I am proud to announce Bo Le Capital and a talent agency, two entities under Rich & Co. Our goal is simple: to help founders building the technologies of the next century.
We start with hiring. For early-stage companies and incubations, we build the founding team. For growth-stage companies, we help them scale.
We are also happy to share that the fund is backed by every founder in it. Guodong Zhang (xAI cofounder), Kole Lee (Vigil), Calix Huang and Jannik Schilling (Pantheon), Kyler Wang (stealth), and many more are investors in Bo Le Capital. We do not think there is a stronger signal than founders choosing to put their own money behind the people who backed them, and we are grateful for their partnership.
None of this happens alone. I owe a great deal to our LPs, who trusted a 21 year old with their capital before there was much of a track record to point to. To our talent, thank you for trusting us with your careers. To my friends, thank you for being here. To my founders, thank you for letting us into your companies at the earliest and hardest moments, and for having me along on this journey. To my mentors, thank you for all the advice. I will continue to compound on it. To my mom and my family, thank you for letting me drop out and chase my life’s work. I do not take any of it for granted. A year ago I had no money, no network, and no reason for anyone to return my call. Everything since has been people choosing to bet on me before they had to.
I intend to pay that forward. Our ambition is to build the next great firm. The one the most important founders of this century call first, not for capital, but for the people who will build alongside them. And more than that, to help as many founders and engineers as we can become the most ambitious version of themselves. That will take decades. We will not back out. We will fight for it every day.
We are at the beginning.