Mark Goldberg

Mark Goldberg is a co-founder and managing partner of Chemistry, an early-stage venture firm he launched in 2024 alongside Ethan Kurzweil (a 16-year Bessemer Venture Partners veteran) and Kristina Shen (a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner). Chemistry debuted with a $350M fund backing software companies from seed to Series A, and by mid-2026 the firm was raising an oversubscribed $500M second fund. Goldberg holds a degree in International Relations from Brown University.

Before founding Chemistry, Goldberg spent roughly a decade (2016–2024) as a Partner at Index Ventures, where he led early-stage investments in software and fintech. He built a reputation as one of Index's most active fintech investors, backing companies such as Plaid, Bridge, Persona, Lithic, Newfront, Pilot, Anrok, and Built.

Goldberg brings an operator's background to investing. He was one of the first business hires at Dropbox, where he held a range of leadership roles across the business and finance organizations and helped scale the company from roughly 200 to more than 2,000 employees through its hypergrowth phase and eventual IPO. Earlier, he was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley — where he worked on the Tesla Motors IPO — and spent time at Hudson Clean Energy Partners, a cleantech-focused VC fund.

Outside of work, Goldberg lives in Berkeley, surfs at Ocean Beach, and plays chess. Persona CEO Rick Song has described him as "low ego, high hustle; a no-BS partner."

• "Conviction, not consensus — optimize for outliers, not averages." Goldberg deliberately structured Chemistry so individual GPs can act on high conviction rather than requiring committee consensus, arguing that a firm's biggest misses are omissions (he cites early passes on Uber and Airbnb), not failed bets.
• Founder-first. His personal acid test: *"Would I go work for this person? If the answer is yes, that's a pretty good signal."* He often says, *"Show me a great founder, I'll show you a great investment."*
• Stage: Inception to Series A, with occasional flexibility into late A / early B. He runs a light-reserve model, concentrating follow-on capital into high-conviction winners rather than spreading it evenly.
• Fintech "re-bundling" thesis: He has argued that consumer platforms *"should start with current accounts and embed payments and lending,"* and has spoken about an era of "fintech maximalism."
• AI discipline: Nearly all of Chemistry's early investments touch AI, but Goldberg warns of "AI whitewashing" in pitches and sees the firm's core job as separating genuine innovation from marketing narrative.
• Generalist by sector, expert by stage — he is founder-driven rather than thesis-first at the individual level.