Mastodon Capital Management

David Krane is the Managing Partner and primary decision-maker. He spent 17 years at Google, joining in 2000 and eventually becoming a partner at GV, Google's venture capital arm, where he served on the boards of Uber and Nest. Tim Burks, a former Google engineer and GV colleague, is a Partner at the firm. The leadership team blends operator experience with public-market investment management, and Krane is the named portfolio manager for the fund.

Mastodon relies on engineering-led, bottom-up research rather than traditional sell-side coverage. The firm's analysts — many with software engineering backgrounds — map technology supply chains, interview product teams, and assess multi-year adoption curves. Krane's two-decade network inside Google and the broader Bay Area technology ecosystem provides a proprietary pipeline of technical experts and corporate development contacts that inform both long and short ideas.

Mastodon concentrates on enterprise technology, cloud infrastructure, and automation, which means it tends to avoid sectors without a heavy engineering or supply-chain analysis component. Consumer internet, biotechnology, and financial services are generally absent from its disclosed long positions. The firm's short book is not publicly disclosed, but its research-intensive, product-diligence approach is difficult to apply to highly regulated or non-technical industries, which acts as a natural screen.

Mastodon Capital Management has no ownership or formal affiliation with GV or Alphabet. David Krane and Tim Burks both worked at Google and GV before founding Mastodon in 2013, but the hedge fund is an entirely independent entity. Krane continues to hold deep relationships across the Alphabet ecosystem, which informs the fund's research process, yet there is no capital connection, branding license, or information-sharing agreement between the two organizations.