Tony Shi Partner
“When life pushes you to the edge of a cliff, you can jump or wait to be pushed. I choose to jump every time.”
Bio
Tony is a Partner at Felicis, where he backs young founders — students, dropouts, and researchers — at the earliest stages.
He knows the founder's journey firsthand: at 16 he dropped out of high school to start a tile company, Abolos, in late 2008 with an overdrafted credit card, a rental car, and not much else. Over the next decade he scaled it into a top-category vendor across Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, and Wayfair. That makes Tony a rare operator-turned-investor, someone who understands what it takes to go from ideation to scale.
Before Felicis, Tony backed ambitious pre-seed and seed founders at Pear VC and Dorm Room Fund, fueling their obsessions to help create the magic of PMF again and again. As a late-stage (Series B+) investor at Redpoint Ventures, he developed a sharp understanding of what it takes to scale beyond Series B and brings that perspective to the founders he backs today.
Tony holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford University.
Q&A
Why are you passionate about building communities for researcher-founders?
We’re in the middle of a new industrial revolution. The vertical SaaS playbook can only take us so far. The next generation of problems is more complex and demands bold solutions grounded in deep technical expertise. Researchers are uniquely equipped to build them.
What has changed about the people starting important companies and how they get started?
Today’s founders are often deeply technical. They take on complex problems in fields where the status quo has gone unchallenged for years. Many are creating markets that don’t yet exist, and superintelligence will give them an even more powerful set of tools.
What do you look for in a founder?
Deep domain expertise, a non-obvious insight, and the ability to assemble an A-team.
How has your personal path shaped your worldview?
I think of a career as a graph, with time on the x-axis and fulfillment on the y-axis. Over the long run, the curve tends to slope upward. What changes is the volatility. The downside may cost you a few years, while the upside has no ceiling. That asymmetry often gives the more volatile path a higher expected value. Choose your own curve.
What’s one lesson from your career that you want every student and researcher-founder to hear?
When life pushes you to the edge of a cliff, you can jump or wait to be pushed. I choose to jump every time. Sometimes that means taking away my own safety net. The volatility is what makes it exciting.