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 Capital Management is structured as an investment adviser running a pooled hedge fund vehicle, not a family office. The firm manages outside capital alongside partner capital in a commingled long/short equity fund. It does not operate as a multi-family office or a venture capital firm, and it does not offer separately managed accounts to high-net-worth individuals as its primary business.

Mastodon is primarily a public-equity long/short manager. While David Krane's background includes extensive private-company board work at Uber and Nest through GV, Mastodon's fund mandate centers on liquid technology equities. The firm may occasionally participate in pre-IPO cross-over rounds given its network, but its core strategy does not market itself as a hybrid vehicle, and its 13F filings reflect a public-markets portfolio.

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.

Mastodon does not publicly offer co-investment opportunities. The firm runs a single pooled vehicle and does not operate a platform for co-investing alongside GPs in private deals. Its network-driven sourcing model is proprietary and embedded in the fund's own research process; the firm has not syndicated its ideas to outside allocators through club deals or special-purpose vehicles, consistent with keeping its short research tightly controlled.