Greg Golkin

Greg Golkin is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Kitchen Fund, a New York–based investment firm he launched with restaurant-franchising veteran Dan Rowe. Kitchen Fund positions itself as a source of strategic capital for emerging restaurant brands, aiming to provide "capital, connections and know-how" to help founders scale their concepts nationally while preserving the brand's original DNA. The firm operates out of 500 Park Avenue in New York.

Golkin's career blends finance and operating experience. He began his career at Goldman Sachs in the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) group, then founded and later sold a technology business where he served as CEO. He subsequently joined Maverick Capital, where he began investing in the restaurant space. His personal early investments in sweetgreen and CAVA — both of which went on to become major public fast-casual brands — laid the intellectual groundwork for the thesis that became Kitchen Fund.

Alongside Golkin, Kitchen Fund's team includes co-founder and Managing Partner Dan Rowe (who brings roughly two decades of franchise-scaling experience with concepts such as Five Guys and QDOBA), Partner Akash Mirchandani, and Vice President Scott Berger, supported by an advisory committee. This pairing of Golkin's investing/finance background with Rowe's operational franchising track record is central to how the firm pitches itself to founders: it markets hands-on operational help, not just a check.

• Invests in digitally enabled, mission-driven restaurant and food-and-beverage brands — "category-defining" concepts with authentic customer experiences rather than trend-chasers.
• Typical stage: seed through Series A / early growth equity, targeting brands with a proven concept and initial multiple units.
• Check size roughly $100K to $5M.
• Emphasis on "purposeful growth" — amplifying a brand's true voice and preserving its original DNA as it scales, rather than forcing it to conform to market trends.
• Provides more than capital: operational expertise, connections, and franchising/scaling know-how — a differentiated value proposition rooted in Dan Rowe's franchise-building background.
• Thesis is grounded in Golkin's own early bets on sweetgreen and CAVA, which shaped the fund's focus on purpose-driven fast-casual brands.