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Partner at D1
Nilam Ganenthiran left Instacart burned out after COVID. He expected to become an early-stage venture capitalist until Dan, who runs D1 Capital, a crossover hedge fund, asked whether he would consider joining. He became a partner, the only one D1 had hired without a traditional investing background, and ran the private team. It felt like wearing pants that didn't quite fit, in a great environment, and he learned about high-velocity decision making and a transparent culture with zero politics.
The regret test
D1 held minority investments in around 95 private companies, and he worked with the founders of a set of them. Each conversation brought back what had gone wrong at Instacart, and the comfort made it worse: he went to sleep wondering what he was doing with himself. Turning 40, he applied Bezos's regret-minimization framework and decided to stop re-litigating the past and build something the way he wanted from the start.
Leaving without an idea
Telling Dan was the hard part, because he cared about him deeply. Dan understood right away and told him to say what he planned to do and D1 would back him. D1 became Beacon's original investor and is still a big partner.
He had no idea in hand when he left. The idea traced back to playing with an early version of Cognition's coding agent, Devin, in the earliest days of AI copilots.
Why do hedge funds invest in private companies?
Crossover funds invest in late-stage private companies, then often keep their stake after the company goes public. The name describes the move across the boundary between private and public markets. Late-stage rounds let a fund take a position before a company's shares trade and put large sums to work. D1 Capital Partners was founded in 2018 by Daniel Sundheim, who had previously been chief investment officer of Viking Global.
How does regret minimization work?
Jeff Bezos has described the framework as the way he decided in 1994 whether to leave a secure job. He pictured himself at age 80 and asked which choice he would regret least. He expected to regret never trying far more than he would regret a failed attempt. Bezos left D. E. Shaw that year and started what became Amazon.
Why did Devin get so much attention?
Cognition announced Devin in March 2024 and called it the first AI software engineer. Unlike autocomplete tools, it planned a task and ran code in its own environment. GitHub Copilot had launched in technical preview in June 2021 and became generally available in June 2022.
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