Thinking Like A Venture Capitalist #1

It is officially the final summer before everything changes. In just a few short months, I will be trading the quiet, tree-lined streets of Poughkeepsie for the absolute chaos of downtown Manhattan. I am heading into NYU Stern in the fall as a Breakthrough Scholar, and honestly, the reality of it is still sinking in. I have spent my entire high school career at Oakwood Friends School juggling Calculus and AP Biology while trying to figure out how the real world actually operates. Now, the training wheels are coming off.

Over the last couple of years, I have always been the guy who just wanted to build things. I am definitely not some top-tier master coder or a visionary genius. I am literally just a human kid who loves to tinker and figure out how systems work. My journey started with pure hustle. I launched an online e-commerce and reselling business under the alias "flashseller" on eBay and TikTok Shop. I spent my nights navigating Alibaba, making bulk orders, setting up my thermal receipt printers and hunting down specialized vendor lists to flip inventory. It was messy, but it taught me how to sell.

Then I decided to get a little more technical. I bought the domain regretcalculator.net, hooked it up to a GitHub repo and tried to deploy it on Vercel. I cannot even tell you how many failed production deployments I stared at before things finally clicked. Through all of this, I started reaching out to people, studying founders who went through Y Combinator, and trying to absorb every piece of advice I could find about building a product. I watched countless hours of YC Startup School videos just trying to figure out how to iterate on feedback. I even managed to land a spring internship for 2026 at EXO Imaging, working under their Principal AI Scientist. I know what it feels like to grind on a project, source inventory and try to get a user to click a single button on a screen. I know the builder's hustle.

The Missing Equation

But here is the massive, glaring blind spot in my brain. I understand the mechanics of building a service. I know how to sell a physical product. But if you asked me how a company should be valued from an investor's standpoint, I would freeze. I have never understood the financial architecture that turns a cool idea into a massive, scalable enterprise. I know the ground floor, but I do not know how to look at the building from an airplane.

That exact gap in my knowledge is why I am so incredibly drawn to venture capital right now. It is also the main reason my ultimate goal for my freshman year is to break into Stern's Strategic Venture Society (SVS). From everything I have read, SVS is the room where people dissect businesses and understand their true worth. It is where you learn how to value private companies with a hands-on approach. Since I have a whole summer ahead of me, I decided I am not going to wait until orientation to start learning. I am going to teach myself.

Back to the Drawing Board

So I came back to my drawing board and wrote down what I even know about VC before doing any real research. My list was embarrassingly short. It basically consisted of Shark Tank soundbites, the concept of giving up equity for cash, and the assumption that investors just look for the smartest coder with the flashiest app. I really thought venture capital was mostly gut feelings and betting on a charismatic founder.

After doing some actual reading, I thought I was right but I was so incredibly wrong. I spent some time digging into an academic study published by Harvard Business Review called "How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions," which surveyed hundreds of institutional venture capitalists. The researchers found that while the founding team is absolutely critical, VCs are intensely focused on the business model, the structural moat and the market dynamics. They do not just care if the product works. They care if the underlying economic engine is scalable and defensible. A great product in a terrible market with bad margins is still a bad investment. That completely flipped my perspective.

My First Case Analysis: CookUnity

I wanted to test this new analytical lens, so I decided to do a mini case study. I wanted to pick a company I interact with regularly, so I chose CookUnity. If you look at my bank statements, you will see a massive trail of DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats orders. I love food delivery, but recently I have been relying on my CookUnity subscription to keep myself fed without eating garbage. I am a customer, so I thought I understood the business.

Before my research, I just viewed CookUnity as a slightly more premium version of HelloFresh. I assumed they just hired a bunch of cooks in a massive warehouse to mass-produce meals and ship them out in boxes. But when I actually sat down to look at their structure, I had a total Freakonomics moment. I started journaling and documenting the things I learned about the company that I never knew were important. I realized I had completely misread what their actual product is.

Here is the first major thing I learned. CookUnity is not a food logistics company. It is a talent platform for culinary creators. The traditional restaurant industry is famously brutal. A chef has to take on massive debt to sign a lease, hire front-of-house staff, design an expensive dining room and hope enough people walk through the door to cover overhead. It is incredibly risky. CookUnity completely flips that dynamic and bypasses the massive barrier to entry. They provide the centralized kitchen infrastructure, the packaging and the delivery network, while the independent chefs simply focus on cooking. It is the exact same model as YouTube or Shopify. YouTube gives you the hosting and the audience so you just make the videos. Shopify gives you the storefront so you just sell your products. CookUnity gives the chefs the logistics so they just make the food. I never realized how powerful it is to build a platform that enables other people's businesses, rather than just selling a single isolated product yourself.

The second thing that blew my mind was their data feedback loop. According to a 2022 industry analysis published by Forbes on the creator economy in the food industry, platforms like CookUnity utilize user engagement data to constantly refine their offerings. When I order a specific meal on the app, I am feeding their algorithm. The chefs get immediate, real-time data on what recipes are performing well and which ones are failing. In a traditional restaurant, a chef might not know a dish is unpopular until a month of bad sales goes by. On this platform, the iteration cycle is lightning fast. They are essentially applying software development principles to the culinary arts. They A/B test dinners.

By looking at the company this way, I finally understood why an investor would be excited about it. They are not just scaling a kitchen. They are scaling a highly defensible marketplace that solves a massive pain point for both the consumer and the creator. They have built a beautiful economic engine.

Moving Forward

This entire exercise has been a huge wake-up call for me. I am realizing that being a founder or a builder is only one side of the coin. To truly understand the business world, you have to be able to step back and analyze the structure. You have to think about scalability, platforms and market dynamics. You have to think like an investor.

This blog is going to be my public journal as I try to figure all of this out. I am starting from scratch, and I will probably make a lot of mistakes along the way. I am sure I will look back at this post in a few years and laugh at how basic my analysis was. But you have to start somewhere. My goal is that by the time I walk onto the NYU campus, I will have a slightly better grasp on how the business world actually turns.

For now, I am going to keep reading, keep analyzing and keep enjoying my delivered meals while I still can. Next time, I am going to try tackling a company that is a little closer to the software side of things.

Until then, keep building, but start thinking about how your building is actually valued.