i'm emma. i do platform at fika ventures, where we back pre-Series A B2B founders. i write about AI, data infrastructure, and the gap between what founders think they need and what they actually need.
i'm a technical operator with a weakness for boring infrastructure, sharp takes, and pixel art. BU computer science, class of '22. spent two and a half years at EY-Parthenon doing software M&A, the part of diligence where you read every line of someone's codebase before someone writes a nine-figure check. investigative work dressed up in spreadsheets, and i loved it.
now i'm at fika ventures doing platform. we back pre-Series A B2B founders, and my job is pretty simple to describe: anything that creates value for our portfolio. hiring, technical diligence, internal tooling, introductions, writing. whatever unlocks the next milestone.
i publish on linkedin and medium about AI, data infrastructure, and what actually makes startups defensible. most of what i write comes from patterns i notice in diligence or conversations with founders. things i keep seeing enough times that they feel worth writing down.
i live in LA with my cat Pig (she is a cat, it's a whole thing). other things i enjoy: a good spreadsheet, a bad movie, and the specific joy of closing 47 browser tabs at once.
a snapshot. updated whenever something changes enough to matter.
mostly about AI, data infra, and what i see in due diligence that you wouldn't guess from a pitch deck.
startups are shipping 10x faster with AI coding tools and reading 10x less code to do it. velocity is real. so is the crisis nobody's talking about: the codebases that made that velocity possible are increasingly understood by nobody. here's the framework i use to keep teams fast without losing control.
// before AI shipping: monthly reading: every line debt: visible // after AI shipping: daily reading: lol debt: "future emma's problem"
if you're building something in AI, data infra, or anything B2B pre-Series A, i'd love to hear about it. if you want to argue with me about something i wrote, even better.