Mukul Arora

Mukul Arora, a co-managing partner at Elevation Capital, invests in consumer companies and in SaaS and AI, and his firm profile opens with the line "Founders are superheroes, and getting to partner with them is a privilege."

Meetings with an open mind

"I believe that the most enduring and valuable companies are built by founders who are really customer-obsessed," he says on his Elevation page. Those founders, he argues, understand their markets more deeply and reach distinctive insights, so he goes into meetings "with a completely open mind" and tries to understand each founder's view of the world.

Learning from founders

What he says he loves most about early-stage investing is watching young founders "grow exponentially and become phenomenal leaders." He describes his relationship with founders shifting over time from advising and mentoring them to learning from them.