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Founding Partner of Behind Genius.
Behind Genius focuses on finding and…
Behind Genius focuses on finding and…
Articles by Paige Finn
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3 Key Insights from Giff Constable's "Talking to Humans"
3 Key Insights from Giff Constable's "Talking to Humans"
For SDSU's Lavin Entrepreneurship program, we read a couple books each semester in the product/entrepreneurship space…
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Lessons from Shaun White: Olympian & Entrepreneur
Lessons from Shaun White: Olympian & Entrepreneur
I wanted to share a few lessons that I learned at the Entrepreneur Organization dinner that I attended where Shaun…
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How Informatics is Busting Silos of Health Care and Data Science
How Informatics is Busting Silos of Health Care and Data Science
This past weekend, I had the honor of being one of ten undergraduate students selected from across the country for the…
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Activity
18K followers
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Paige Finn Doherty shared thisWoohooo!! A fun, action-packed fall coming up.... I am getting so excited for our first Behind Genius Field Trip, bringing friends of the fund to tour the NOX METALS factory with Zane Hengsperger in Detroit early October. Following that up with a celebration of Kristen Wiley's inaugural Status Summit in New York (Here's a fun snap of us in SF earlier this summer). And maybe even an international keynote speech...🤫 So excited to see some of my favorite people in person soon; let's goooo 🪩 ✨
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Paige Finn Doherty reposted thisPaige Finn Doherty reposted thisOn Saturday, Fortune published an article co-authored by me and Naveen Rao: “We’ve seen Silicon Valley move fast and break things but consider the math of where we’re headed.” I grew up on a farm in Robesonia, PA. Naveen grew up in coal country in Whitesburg, KY. Between us, we've spent 70+ years watching technology disrupt industries and upend lives. So when people say they're scared AI will eliminate their jobs, we don't dismiss that fear. We've lived next to it. We've also lived the other side. At Intel, we used robots to check chemical pipes so our safety technicians didn't have to risk their lives, then turned those same people into fleet managers. Naveen's team designed a chip in six months without a dedicated team, something that wasn't possible before AI. Not because they needed fewer engineers, but because they could finally afford to try more ideas. America has a labor shortage across huge parts of the economy. We're short roughly 350,000 construction workers for the AI buildout alone. Healthcare, our fastest-growing sector, is driven by an aging population. None of that is what AI is coming for. We believe this transition, as daunting as it is, will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys, just like every major tech shift before it. Thanks to Fortune for running the piece, and to Naveen for being such a thoughtful co-author. https://lnkd.in/ewySp5SuPat Gelsinger and Naveen Rao: we've seen Silicon Valley move fast and break things, but consider the math of where we’re headed | FortunePat Gelsinger and Naveen Rao: we've seen Silicon Valley move fast and break things, but consider the math of where we’re headed | Fortune
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Paige Finn Doherty shared thisHappy Monday! New writing from Chinwuba E. up on the Behind Genius blog: "A Primer on AI-Roll-ups vs AI-Native Services," covering key questions we're thinking about as a firm as businesses are being reimagined. 🪩Paige Finn Doherty shared thisWhat should an accounting firm look like if you built it today? That question sits at the center of a new piece I wrote on AI roll-ups and AI-native services. For decades, the technology playbook was to sell better software to service businesses. AI creates an opportunity to rethink the service provider itself. Two approaches interest me: • AI roll-ups acquire existing businesses, gaining customers, distribution, and domain expertise, then deploy AI across their operations. • AI-native services start from scratch, designing the people, workflows, and business around what humans and AI each do best. I lean toward building from scratch. There is something compelling about designing an organization around today’s capabilities without inheriting yesterday’s constraints. But sometimes the most valuable thing an incumbent owns is permission to operate: licenses, contracts, regulatory infrastructure, or relationships that take years to build. In those markets, buying first can make more sense. For either model, I keep coming back to three questions: Does the productivity gain actually show up in the financials? Can the company retain that gain as competitors adopt AI? Does the investment work at the valuation a buyer will actually pay? Automating work is only the beginning. Turning that automation into a durable economic advantage is the harder part. The piece explores where these models work, where they can break, and why some very large companies may emerge from rebuilding how services get delivered. Read “A Primer on AI Roll-ups & AI-Native Services” here: https://lnkd.in/g2YRis3B If you’re building in this space, I’d love to compare notes.
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Paige Finn Doherty shared thisToday, Intermezzo, the AI-native global payroll platform, announces its $10M seed round led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from UKG, CloudPay, and other investors. Getting paid correctly and on time should be a given, wherever someone works. But globally, this still requires an extraordinary amount of manual work: reconciling spreadsheets, clarifying local requirements, and chasing approvals. This is difficult, consequential work. These teams deserve better infrastructure. Through Intermezzo's AI-native payroll solution, platforms can calculate gross-to-net pay in real time, generate payslips, automate tax filings and compliance reporting, sync payroll data with accounting systems, and run payroll on demand. Intermezzo's impact can be substantial: They can bring a 20-day payroll processing cycle down to 24 hours, with accuracy above 99%. Congratulations to Siddharth Ram, Kumar Ramanathan, and the entire Intermezzo team on this milestone. We are proud to be early investors through Behind Genius! Thanks to John Zeratsky for the introduction and to Chinwuba E.nd to Chinwuba E. for his impactful research on the last 100 $1B+ exits, which illuminated key patterns in our diligence. As we invest in the future of applied AI at Behind Genius, we are very excited about the ability of agentic technologies to build better infrastructure for difficult, consequential work.Paige Finn Doherty shared thisToday, we’re pleased to share that we have raised a $10M seed round, led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from UKG, CloudPay, and other investors. Payroll remains one of the most operationally intensive parts of running a global workforce. Critical payroll knowledge often lives in documents, spreadsheets, and people’s heads. Teams have to keep up with frequent regulatory changes across multiple countries, where mistakes can have real financial and compliance consequences. We’re building global payroll infrastructure from the ground up to address these challenges. We’re proud to have the support of companies like UKG and CloudPay as we build a modern, AI-native payroll platform designed to make global payroll faster, more automated, and easier to operate. Thank you to our early believers - Character Capital, Behind Genius and many others. On our blog: https://lnkd.in/g6Ref9Dw and Axios: https://lnkd.in/gQ5mvUFs Tobias Nilsson-Roos David Silverman Ed Park Richard Limpkin Timo Weber Roland Folz John Zeratsky Eli Blee-Goldman Paige Finn Doherty Chinwuba E. Kumar Ramanathan
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Paige Finn Doherty reposted thisPaige Finn Doherty reposted thisThanks PG for having me over and becoming a nox metals investor! Fun to chat metal, the beauty of growth rate, watches, and social radars. PG founded Y Combinator and we are grateful to have him on board!
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Paige Finn Doherty posted thisMy love affair with stories began at age 6, when I finished my first “big girl book”: Charlotte’s Web. I’ve since read hundreds of books, ranging from a history of refrigeration to historical romance novels and science fiction. I believe in the often underestimated power of stories to inspire, connect, and transform. Over the past five years, I’ve experienced the transformative power of storytelling. I wrote a children’s book to explore my passion for venture capital, called Seed to Harvest. Sharing this story of writing Seed to Harvest and building a venture firm online even landed me on the cover of Forbes 30 Under 30 for Venture Capital at 23. That belief eventually became part of our investment philosophy. Fund II’s thesis centers around technical storytellers, and one of my favorite parts of supporting founders is helping them craft powerful stories that inspire investors, candidates, and customers to take action. One of the tips I shared today on a call with a founder friend: Specific stories stick. Here's a framework I use when crafting specific stories: (S)ensory - Can your audience see, hear, smell, taste, or touch the moment? (P)ractical - Choose a story that reinforces the point you're trying to make. (E)motional - What were you genuinely feeling? (C)haracter-Driven - Give us someone to root for. (I)nner Monologue - What was going through your head that nobody else could see? (F)riction - Where is the challenge or tension in the story? (I)nsight - What insight did this experience spark? (C)hange - How did this story change you? I most vividly remember the stories of founders sleeping on factory floors, of flashes of inspiration on a dorm room couch, of quitting jobs and moving instantaneously to pursue a dream. All of their stories shared these elements. Think about the most memorable stories you’ve heard…what specific details do you remember?
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Paige Finn Doherty shared thisOne of the founders we've backed, Dhaval Patel, shows me amazing customer videos on every catch-up call. His company, Lotus, helps folks with limited mobility increase their agency. The beauty of Lotus is its ease of use - a small infrared ring you only need to charge every 60 days or so, and a magnetic light switch cover that snaps on. No wifi, wiring, etc needed. When I first met Dhaval on The Pitch a few years ago, I was wowed by his technical storytelling ability. He is a former Apple engineering manager who sought a solution to his own problem. One of the most crisp pitches I'd ever heard. And then he clicked his Lotus ring and turned on the light in a studio. Magic. I committed in the studio, live, that day (of course, subject to further due diligence, which revealed even more incredible details). Behind Genius was one of the first backers of Lotus, and they've grown from a few prototypes to huge demand from state Medicare programs seeking technology to help our elders stay independent longer. But what really gets me is their customer interviews. I have teared up multiple times hearing customers describe the impact Lotus has had on their independence. Sharing a great one below, hope it brightens your day!
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Paige Finn Doherty reposted thisPaige Finn Doherty reposted this"There's almost an element of performance... a guiding of you as the investor through: here's my background, here's the size of the market and the opportunity, here's the interesting wedge we found... That is a fantastic experience, and it happens when founders have deep clarity about the opportunity and where they stand." On the latest episode of Fun Raising, I got to sit down with Paige Finn Doherty the founding partner at Behind Genius. We spent a lot of time talking about what makes a founder stand out during the fundraising process, especially in the first conversation(s). A couple things stood out: The first is that you have to show up as yourself. The details of your lived experience, and why you're the one to build this, are the part of your pitch nobody can "AI away" (a term we use a few times in this episode). The second is to also come fully prepared. Deep clarity on the market, the opportunity, and the specific wedge you've found. A real view of how you'll pull it off. When a founder can guide an investor through all of that with command, it shows they've done the homework. And that can make all the difference. We also dive into: - How to build a network from scratch when you don't have one - Why obvious AI in your outreach works against you (a best a "beige flag") - How to time a raise so your conversations create real momentum - What to look for when you're lucky enough to pick between offers - And so much more! Thanks for being on, Paige! Full episode in comments 🎧
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Paige Finn Doherty reposted thisPaige Finn Doherty reposted thisCongratulations to Hostie on their $12M Series A announcement today! Hostie is a vertical voice AI company in the restaurant and hospitality space, led by award-winning restaurateur / product designer Randall Hom and expert voice AI engineer Brendan Wood. We met Randall Hom through Andrew Brackin at Gradient around a year ago, and it's been wonderful to build a relationship: supporting the team with marketing strategy & successful investor introductions, and also getting to share delicious meals together! Since we first invested in April 2025, Hostie's product has continued to evolve and delight customers. Hostie has helped operators manage more than 2 million guest conversations and 24 million messages, book over 400,000 covers, and support more than 50,000 private event inquiries. This growth resulted in 10x’d revenue in under a year! The $12 million Series A funding round is led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Gradient, Scribble Ventures, Burst Capital, and Behind Genius, bringing total funding to $16 million. The round also includes investments from leading restaurant operators Tim Stannard of Bacchus Management Group and Stuart Brioza, Nicole Krasinski, and Elizabeth DePalmer of Atomic Workshop, underscoring Hostie's growing role in modern restaurant operations. We are proud to be participating in their Series A, and to be continuing our partnership. Go team Hostie!!
Paige Finn Doherty commented on a post
3d
Incredible, huge congratulations!!
Paige Finn Doherty replied to a comment
1w
Courtney Russell McCrea, thanks, Courtney - I miss you too! Would be great to see you sometime soon!
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisCalvin Chen and I met back in June 2024 - as he was navigating the early innings of building and potentially selling a company. We sat in an apartment I was subletting in San Francisco and talked about our roots. About where ambition and motivation comes from, and why there is no other way to live other than pursuing your own ideas on your own terms - relentlessly. That laid the foundation for our relationship... and I had a feeling we would have the chance to partner in the near future. Surely enough - it wasn't too long after that he and the crew (Justus Mattern) began to lay the groundwork for what is today Proximal. These early days kicked off the opportunity to be able to work together. 100 strategy calls and countless South Park walks later - the work crystallized and the team began to build the infrastructure that enables AI to improve from real-world experience. Having partnered with this team since day zero and witness their incredible pace of work - hitting $200M run rate revenue in a mere 10 months - is a function of how they operate. Relentlessly. Huge congrats to them with the announcement of their seed, welcoming good friends from the likes of General Catalyst, Diede V., Kristina Shen and more. It is certainly just the start.
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisSomething is shifting around mold toxicity and I feel it. More patients are finding answers. More providers are paying attention. And now there's real conversation happening at a national level about the health impacts of mold exposure and about the fact that too many people have been left without answers for too long. I hope this momentum leads somewhere concrete: increased research funding, better diagnostic standards, and federal agencies taking this seriously as a public health issue. For everyone who has felt dismissed, we see you. And the conversation is finally getting louder. Cheers to my next 23k symptoms 🥂
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisOur B&O bar saw is a precision cutting masterpiece!
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisOur software helps set us apart from other metal suppliers. Developing our own in house software helps us to be more accurate, move faster, and continue to reindustrialize the industry. This video dives into how FactOS impacts our workflow and our mission. "A deep dive into FactOS, our industrial superintelligence that will supply every pound of metal in America for millenniums."
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisA deep dive into FactOS, our industrial superintelligence that will supply every pound of metal in America for millenniums.
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisFirst Principles is back — and it's no longer a podcast. My goal is to explain hardware engineering in simple terms. But after ~25 episodes, it was clear that podcasting wasn't dense or visual enough… So I went to a nuclear reactor, pulled out a control rod, and got it all on film. The resulting video recently crossed 1 million views across platforms; it's been out almost two years, and it's still getting >1,000 views every day. Awesome format. Hard to pull off, equally hard to replicate. I was stoked and wanted to make more. But unfortunately for the show / very fortunately for my career & life, I got WAY more busy at Astranis at exactly that time... and creating fell by the wayside. But we are back, baby! Next video drops *tomorrow*, and I just shot two more last week. If you're building a hardware product that can teach a smart college freshman something about engineering — or want to nominate another startup for a feature — please reach out. Can't wait for tomorrow. Video goes live at 5am Pacific.
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Paige Finn Doherty liked this1 year down. A lifetime to go. On my commute to Ferndale this morning, I was listening to a podcast about difficulties and the importance of learning to pushing through them. I couldn't stop thinking about my first year at NOX METALS Nothing has been easy. Not one "quiet day" like the ones I'd gotten used to before. Every day we're challenged, pushed to our limits, and I LOVE IT. There's real pride in learning every day. In being 1% better than yesterday. In knowing that failure isn't failing. It's learning. That mindset has changed my life, my mind, and my heart. Thank you to everyone at Nox Metals for making this the best year of my career. Here's to many more on this crazy ride. "We can just do things." And we are.
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisYesterday was a very, very exciting day. 🎯 If you know me, you know I absolutely love Target (as any good, true Minnesotan does). And of course, I love biom (like... a lot) so you can only imagine me trying to play it cool at Target's Fall Shoptalk when biom was named this season's Essentials & Beauty Vendor Award winner. *spoiler: I did not play it cool.* Building this brand alongside Target has been one of the most fun, rewarding things I've ever gotten to do. The thank you list here is long, but I'm infinitely grateful for the partnership of our entire merchant team Maddie Kastner, Trista Wacker, Ariel O., Max Barendregt, Rebecca Ehrenberg, Riley Bolton, Alyssa Ward, Laura Wieck, Josie Nielsen, Allison Cohoon, Udit Thilakarajah, Tina Sederberg, Katie McGinnity-Hurst, Amanda Nusz and Cara Sylvester for placing a big bet on biom early, and continuing to believe in our vision. & to Team biom: none of this happens without you, the best team in the game 💚 Here's to making everyday moments just a little more magical, one Target run at a time. The best really is yet to come!!!
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Paige Finn Doherty liked thisPaige Finn Doherty liked thisIn restaurants, there's a tradition called "Family Meal." Before service, the whole team, front and back of house, sits down and eats together. Most of us at Hostie come from the restaurant industry, so when we started building this company, we knew we wanted to keep that ritual by calling our biweekly all-hands meetings Family Meal. What started as just a handful of us has grown to over 30 full-time employees in just over two years. That means more faces on the video call, more ideas brought to the table, and more wins to celebrate. Watching that table get bigger has been one of the most rewarding parts of building Hostie, and we're just getting started.
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Venture Capital Investment Competition Coach
San Diego State University
- Present 5 years 8 months
Education
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Mrs. Floto's Assistant
UC San Diego Extension
- 5 months
Education
Taught speaking, critical reading, writing, and everyday discussion in English to study abroad middle schoolers from China, alongside my favorite English teacher (RIP Mrs. Floto)
Honors & Awards
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Forbes Under 30 All Star Alumni
Forbes
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Hall of Fame Inductee
Rancho Bernardo High School
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2025 Rising Aztec
San Diego State University
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Cover of Forbes 30 Under 30: Venture Capital
Forbes
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Forbes Under 30 Scholar
Forbes
An award granted to 1,000 college students nationally, recognizing achievements in leadership, academics, and community service
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2nd Place - Silicon Valley Regional Venture Capital Investment Competition
Venture Capital Investment Competition
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Class of 2020 SDSU Scholarship
San Diego State University
An scholarship given to Aztecs who uphold SDSU's value and are active servant leaders in their communitities
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AP Scholar with Honors
College Board
Awarded to students who complete three or more AP exams with scores of 4 or higher.
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Paul Marchisotto HIP Scholarship
Northrop Grumman
A competitive scholarship awarded to one HIP student nationwide based on factors such as community involvement, academic performance, and future career goals.
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John Jester Memorial Scholarship
San Diego State University
A highly competitive four-year scholarship focused on dedication to community service, involvement, and academic performance.
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