Chuck Isgar (MBA ‘25) sits down with Devon Gethers (MBA ‘25) and Karlton Haney (MBA ‘25) to hear about how they’ve used their age to their advantage in VC.
The Origin Story of Meridian Ventures
Devon Gethers (MBA ‘25) and Karlton Haney (MBA ‘25) have made 41 investments, primarily into business-to-business software companies, over the past two years. To understand what’s allowed the duo to earn their way into competitive deals, it helps to first understand the story of how Gethers and Haney started Meridian Ventures.
Like many great VC stories, it started with a cold direct message. Gethers and Haney had both been admitted to HBS as 2+2 admits in the summer of 2020. Haney sent Gethers a message, leading to an intro call, five more follow ups, and a “beautiful friendship,” as Haney called it. They began sharing deals and meeting in person when they were in the same city.
At the time, Haney was working at a family office, The Stephens Group, where he was doing private investments into growth stage companies. Gethers was an investor at growth equity fund Mercato Partners while building Early Admit, a community he founded that brought together admits to deferred admission programs at various MBA schools. He was preparing to take the platform through a sale while thinking about his vision to start a VC fund.
On one of their many calls, Gethers shared his ideas for a fund, and Haney inquired if he might be able to join since he “knew that missing out on Devon’s next big idea would be a mistake.” Gethers responded: “I’d be open to it. Put together a proposal.” The proposal satisfied Gethers’ high bar as the two quickly thereafter began working on a proof of concept for Meridian Ventures. Gethers explained that he decided to partner with Haney because of his “technical rigor as an engineer, calm temperament, unrelenting work ethic from his small-town farm upbringing, and the ‘chip on his shoulder’ born from competing for the #1 spot at a state school and teaching himself finance to break into venture capital.” Haney remarked that they decided to work together because “they believed that their diverse skill sets and low-ego approach would enable them to achieve far more together than they ever could alone.”
The fund officially started in January 2023, and the company began to earn their way into deals. At an average check size of $50,000 per investment, the firm does not lead investments, which means they not only need to find great founders, but they also need to convince those founders to allow them to invest in the company without being the lead check.
The firm’s core thesis is around people, and their speciality is in B2B software. As for people, their thesis is to back founding teams with at least one person who has earned an MBA or is in the process of pursuing one. Over 70% of their investments have a founding team member with an MBA. While they consider themselves generalists within the software space, their first fund’s portfolio has skewed more towards artificial intelligence (AI) and fintech.
Overcoming an Age Bias to Raise Fund I
Everyone spends their summer between RC and EC year at HBS in different ways. Not many spend it the way in which Gethers and Haney did: launching their first institutional fund. They held their first close in late December 2024, just a few months after beginning the daunting fundraising process. Advisor Curtis Feeny (MBA ‘81) shared that, “for almost anybody, raising your first fund is hard.” A senior advisor at Peterson Partners, who has sat on the board of companies such as CBRE, DocuSign, Staples, and Khan Lab School, Feeny added that “Devon and Karlton have a lot of stamina and a lot of grit.”
As for how the duo convinced Feeny to become an advisor to the fund, the story once again started with a cold message. Gethers sent a LinkedIn InMail to Feeny, which piqued Feeny’s interest because it was very thoughtful and highlighted common ground between the two. Moreover, Curtis appreciated how Gethers and Haney were “hustling.” The experience of recruiting Feeny as an advisor is indicative of what the duo embodies: doing all the small things right. This principle matters for any VC firm, but especially for Meridian Ventures.
Still, there’s an elephant in the room: Gethers and Haney are young. The mid-late 20’s managing partners are aware that they are likely the youngest people pitching most of their prospective limited partners (LPs), which are primarily high net worth individuals, family offices, and fund of funds. And yet, rather than hide their ages, Gethers and Haney lean into it: when meeting with LPs, they share that the average age of a unicorn founder is 28 and that their “value proposition to LPs is [they’re] in the right rooms.”
Building a Track Record
As they scale up, Gethers and Haney know they have to demonstrate through different means that they belong in this space. Gethers shared that they were near-obsessed with ensuring that their LP fundraising deck was “perfect.” They “took humility in sharing it with [their] network, taking constructive criticism, iterating and iterating until LPs said this is one of the best pitch decks [they’ve] ever seen.” Gethers explained that it was not merely about creating a great deck, but rather the symbolism that “if [they] bring this level of precision to [their] materials, [LPs] can trust [them] to be just as meticulous in [their] organizational decision-making process.”
The commitment to professionalizing every part of the process has allowed the fund to close more than 50% of its $25 million target. The firm has achieved a significant milestone: welcoming a publicly traded bank as an anchor investor, an impressive feat for any first fund. As Gethers and Haney continue to build their portfolio and relationships with founders, they can now begin to lean into their track record. More and more, they can share with prospective LP’s and founders the sentiment of “don’t take it from us, take it from our work.” In other words, they pride themselves on providing as much help to their founders from the beginning as possible, even “providing introductions before the first call with a founder.”
Resonating with Founders
The duo believes that at the end of the day, “founders are just people. People want to work with other people who they enjoy working with.” Haney and Gethers want to be the people who are there through the ups and downs. Haney remarked that the “number one thing founders look for is someone who believes in them. [They want to] see someone they want to work with for the next 10 years.”
It usually takes several years to know how well a fund is doing and often in excess of a decade to know if the fund is going to provide serious returns to its LPs. Gethers and Haney are proud to share that they are falling into the top quartile on TVPI and graduation rates from Seed to Series A, which are metrics that both indicate how a portfolio of startups is doing with respect to being able to raise future funds.
They’ve been proud to back companies such as Atlanta-based Transend, which is a “buy now pay later for B2B applications.” They invested in the company at Investing in Transend at a pre-product, pre-seed round proved to be a fruitful decision, as it was Meridian’s first customer to become a Fortune 100 company. They’ve also backed Aipotheosis Labs, an AI infrastructure company that serves as a “yellow pages for AI agents.” CAST, a Kubernetes automation software that helps tech companies optimize cloud spend, is another member of the Meridian portfolio. Haney and Gethers backed the company at the Seed stage, and it has since gone on to raise a Series B at a $300 million valuation.
For each of these firms, the core principle holds: backing MBA founders, with founders in these three companies having attended Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Columbia’s Master’s program, and Wharton, respectively.
Meridian’s Pitch for the Future
As Gethers and Haney look ahead, they have much propelling them forward: 41 investments to date, a major institution as an investor, and a clearly differentiated firm thesis. The humble duo is aware that, despite all the progress they’ve made, they are still in the early innings of the journey. As such, they’ve surrounded themselves with great advisors to help them along the way, including Feeny, Sierra Ventures Managing Partner Mark Fernandes (MBA ‘98), and former Yahoo! and Fortinet CFO Ken Goldman (MBA ‘74).
Given that Gethers and Haney have spent the past few years endlessly pitching themselves to LPs and listening to founders pitch, I thought it would only be fair to allow them to have the final word, and there’s no more appropriate way to do it than a pitch. Said Gethers: “Meridian Ventures is different. Different is scary. Different is where alpha is found.” Haney emphasized a fitting pitch to founders: “Two upstarts that you enjoy working with, hustling alongside you to help you scale your business.”
Chuck Isgar (MBA ’25) loves all things startups. He created and runs Above Board, a weekly newsletter which features Q&A's with investors and founders about startup investment, board management, and corporate governance. Most recently, he served as the Chief of Staff at Scenery, a Series A-stage startup backed by investors such as Greylock. Previously, he was a Schwarzman Scholar where he earned a Master in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Chuck co-founded and was the CEO of Intern From Home, a recruiting technology startup that served students from over 600 colleges and was featured in publications such as The New York Times. Chuck earned his bachelor’s from Brown University, where he served as the Co-President of the Brown Entrepreneurship Program. He loves to golf, cook, and go on long walks.