VC Sheel Mohnot talks about Twitter fame, fintech, and the truth about AI startups

If you happen to observe fintech on X, it’s very possible that you’ve come throughout the account of Sheel Mohnot, co-founder and common companion of Better Tomorrow Ventures.

With over 150,000 followers, Mohnot has constructed a formidable presence on the social media website. Apparently, lots of his posts don’t have anything to do with enterprise capital.

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Mohnot began Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) after co-founding just a few corporations, together with FeeFighters, which sold to Groupon in 2012.

BTV, which has $300 million beneath administration, focuses on investing primarily on the pre-seed and seed stage in fintech startups. It additionally operates an accelerator, The Mint.

Since its November 2019 inception, BTV has backed the likes of AngelList, Charlie, Coast, and Unit. Mohnot personally has additionally invested as an angel for over a decade, writing checks into corporations akin to Flexport, Ironclad, Ethos Insurance coverage, and Residence Listing.

I hopped on the mic to interview Mohnot to file an episode of Fairness Podcast, and we mentioned subjects like how he constructed such a big following on X with viral posts, how he ended up showing in a Justin Bieber video, what areas of fintech he’s most enthusiastic about, and his ideas on the place synthetic intelligence is de facto working within the fintech world.

This interview has been edited for readability and brevity.

In addition to being considerably of an influencer on social media, your foremost job is investing in fintech startups out of Higher Tomorrow Ventures. Let’s discuss briefly about what BTV considers to be a fintech firm.

We expect much more issues are fintech than different folks do. So for example, we take into consideration vertical SaaS as being fintech. And if you concentrate on the Toasts and Shopifys of the world, over 80% of their revenues are monetary providers. So we consider these as fintech corporations. After which additionally B2B marketplaces, we consider as fintech corporations too.

OK, we’re going to come back again to fintech. However first, I’d like to speak about your social media technique. You could have over 151,000 followers on X. How did you change into a social media star?

I don’t know if I’m a star, however I do take pleasure in it. I first signed up for Twitter a very long time in the past, however I actually was not very energetic till the pandemic. Within the early days of the pandemic, I used to be energetic on Clubhouse — as I used to be so bored at residence. I grew to become tremendous energetic there and collected a loopy variety of followers. I feel like 3.3 million. However in fact that’s probably not related anymore. The one solution to write to folks on Clubhouse was by way of Twitter. In order that naturally led to doing stuff on Twitter and extra followers there. I simply began to write down, and located that I actually appreciated it. I like sharing concepts and getting suggestions from folks.

What have been your most viral posts through the years?

My spouse truly posted about herself being in a meme on the Folsom Road Truthful with an expression on her face the place she’s like, “Why? How did I find yourself right here?” That received 250,000 likes. However the one from my account was within the midst of me seeing quite a lot of pitches for web3 founders making an attempt to resolve some type of drawback that didn’t actually exist. I noticed a video of a man who had sliced the again wheel of his bicycle into two and made it nonetheless rideable. And I used to be like, “Why would you do that?” And so I captioned it with one thing like “Web3 founders fixing issues that don’t exist” and it went wild. Folks went wild for it.

In addition to investing, you’ve additionally made headlines for some very fascinating issues akin to your marriage ceremony in 2023 being a TacoBell Metaverse wedding and your making an look in a Justin Bieber video in 2021. How on earth did these issues occur?

I received engaged in 2022 and we had a reasonably enjoyable engagement story which I posted on Twitter. Lots of people noticed that I used to be engaged, after which Taco Bell had a contest the place they needed to seek out one fortunate couple to marry within the metaverse. And a bunch of individuals noticed that I used to be engaged and likewise knew that I like Taco Bell, and mentioned, “Hey, Sheel, that is excellent for you.” They ended up choosing us.

As for the video, I used to be on this courting present throughout the pandemic referred to as the Zoom Bachelorette. I didn’t win however I received the viewers’s vote and within the viewers was Scooter Braun, who was the supervisor for Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. We chatted on Clubhouse, and he ended up placing me within the video.

I do know not your whole posts relate to investing or fintech, however I’m certain it’s one way or the other impacted it. Has it helped you entice founders you might not have in any other case attracted or helped you win offers?

Yeah, I feel so. Initially, I’d say, I’m not doing it for these causes. I’m simply having a superb time and posting what I feel is fascinating and thought-provoking and would possibly get folks to show me one thing after the very fact, however I do assume it has been useful.

The primary time I spotted it was after I emailed a founder that I used to be actually enthusiastic about. I do know a bunch of different traders had been reaching out too, however after I reached out, they responded instantly, and mentioned, “I feel we’ve got the identical exercise routine.”And so they had been responding to a tweet I had posted that had that went viral, which was when Chamath [Palihapitiya] had posted a tweet of him with his shirt off, and I used to be simply making enjoyable of myself and him by posting a reply to it. And so these guys had been like, “Hey, we actually like your model. Let’s get it. Let’s start.” And I believed, “Oh, wow, that’s fairly highly effective, like they know who I’m, and it’s gone on to be tremendous helpful.”

Now, in relation to Higher Tomorrow Ventures — what number of funds have you ever raised up to now? And I preserve listening to that fintech is again. Would you agree with that? What are you bullish about?

We’re investing out of our second fund now, and we’ll quickly be investing out of our third fund. And yeah, I feel the fintech market is sizzling once more and we’re going to see extra exits within the close to future. I feel total, the fintech world is fairly poised to have quite a lot of outcomes within the close to future.

I’m enthusiastic about quite a lot of the stuff that we all the time believed in, which is “the all the things is fintech story,” which persists at this time. As I discussed earlier than, vertical SaaS and B2B marketplaces have gotten fintech corporations, and there’s quite a lot of alternative to allow these people. I’m additionally actually enthusiastic about accounting. We’ve three corporations behind this thesis that there’s a giant scarcity of accountants on this nation.

It’s fascinating you say that contemplating that on the finish of final 12 months, an accounting startup referred to as Bench shut down unexpectedly earlier than it received acquired just a few days later by this firm referred to as Employer.com. Lots of people can debate what went flawed with Bench, however it feels like what occurred there doesn’t appear to be impacting your total views on the area as a complete?

It’s fascinating. I consider Bench as actually an accounting agency, somewhat than it being a venture-backed accounting agency, like that they had a bunch of people doing accounting work. And an issue with that’s it’s actually arduous to scale, to construct like a enterprise scale enterprise and proceed to develop at enterprise scale. And so ultimately, I imagine I’ve heard from clients like they ended up chopping corners. Issues didn’t actually go as folks had needed, and they also had a bunch of challenges.

Lately, the large information that dominated was DeepSeek. It was all over the place. Everyone’s speaking about it, OpenAI appeared to be freaking out. What do you assume — is DeepSeek actually this huge menace, or is it only a bunch of hype?

There are a variety of issues to unpack inside DeepSeek. One, it’s from China. One other is that it’s open supply, and one other is that it’s supposedly finished very cheaply.

I feel we’ve all the time believed that the price of inference, the latest modeling prices, had been going to come back down. However I feel DeepSeek launching helped the price come down fairly considerably. And so, now you have got a little bit of a value battle on the foundational mannequin degree, which is nice for our corporations which might be constructing on AI. It’s phenomenal.

What concerning the hype round AI generally?

There are such a lot of corporations that pitch us the identical approach that they pitch you, and so they inform us that they’re AI corporations, and also you look and there’s nothing AI about them, or little or no; I feel only a few corporations are literally AI corporations. After which I feel there are much more corporations which might be seeing super worth from AI however are usually not, “AI corporations.” We make investments throughout the spectrum. I do assume there’s this notion that you should be an AI firm to get consideration. And I don’t assume that’s true. I feel it’s simply vital to be trustworthy about who you’re and what you’re doing.

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