GoAhead Ventures

Managing partners Clancey Stahr and Phil Brady, along with partner Tuck Oden, jointly manage investment decisions. All three are Stanford alumni who designed the firm's investment process around a distributed network of student scouts who source and diligence companies alongside the general partners.

GoAhead Ventures runs a structured scout program that recruits current students across major research universities — primarily Stanford, MIT, and Harvard — to identify and refer companies founded by their peers or professors. Scouts receive carry participation and operate as de facto junior investment team members rather than passive referrers. This model aims to capture deals before they reach open institutional processes.

The firm targets pre-seed and seed-stage companies, with initial check sizes generally between $250,000 and $1.5 million. GoAhead Ventures also reserves capital for follow-on investments into portfolio companies that demonstrate strong early traction through subsequent funding rounds.

GoAhead Ventures operates as a standard institutional venture capital firm, not a family office. It raises committed capital from limited partners through closed-end fund vehicles with a 2% management fee and 20% carried interest structure, deploying primarily into early-stage private technology companies.

The firm concentrates on enterprise software and AI/ML companies, with additional coverage of fintech, digital health, and consumer technology. The portfolio skews toward companies founded within university ecosystems where the firm's scout network maintains active presence. GoAhead Ventures has not publicly disclosed explicit sector exclusions.