Mike Edelhart

Mike Edelhart has been active in technology journalism, product testing, startups, and venture capital for roughly four decades. In the 1980s he helped found *PC Magazine*, *PC Week*, and other Ziff-Davis computer publications, serving in senior editorial roles (including Executive Editor of *PC Magazine* and Editor/Publisher of *PC/Computing*), overseeing the Ziff-Davis product-testing labs, and eventually becoming Ziff-Davis's Executive Vice President. He later directed content at SoftBank for the Seybold, Interop, and Comdex conferences and led investment activity there.

Over the following years he served as CEO of multiple technology companies, including Olive Software, Inman News, Zinio, and Live Deal, and was a partner at the Redleaf venture fund in the early 2000s. He has authored more than 20 books and has consulted for Bloomberg, Reuters, and AARP. He also hosts the "Inception" podcast about startup creation and funding.

In 2011 Edelhart co-founded Social Starts, a data-driven "moment-of-inception" seed fund that PitchBook and CB Insights repeatedly cited as one of the most active early-stage investors in New York and California. In 2017 he and co-founder William Lohse launched Joyance Partners, a fund focused on emerging science and technology that helps people "feel happier, healthier, calmer, more confident, less anxious or subject to pain" — its "Delightful Moments" thesis. In mid-2020 the partners created Ataraxia Partners as the umbrella organization managing the Social Starts and Joyance fund families (plus SH², a longevity-focused fund). Across the families, the organization has managed multiple funds and hundreds of investments spanning more than a decade, and Edelhart's more recent Ataraxia VC vehicle centers on helping people "live longer and live better."

• Invests at pre-seed/seed (through Series A); typical checks of ~$50K–$1M; does not lead rounds.
• All funds are data-driven: "All Ataraxia funds are data-driven, using an intensive research methodology and proprietary machine learning platform to identify startup signals pointing toward outsize investment return potential."
• Core well-being thesis built on four pillars — sleep, food, exercise, and mood — plus deep-science / "TechBio" solutions addressing systemic failures in health and daily life.
• Applies "editorial rigor to assess founder character and narrative clarity," valuing founder resilience, vulnerability, and community obsession over unicorn-chasing.
• Prioritizes sustainable profit and real-world utility rather than inflated valuations.
• Sector emphasis: personal/digital health, techbio, beauty, food & beverage, consumer, sustainability, and social impact.