Welcoming New True Partners Kevin Rose and Mike Montano

When we say “the answer’s in the room,” we’re referring to how the hundreds of Founders in our portfolio community can ask almost any question along their journeys and find another Founder who’s been there and has an answer to their question. This ethos extends to the True Team as well in terms of supporting Founders with skilled, experienced operators and investors who can help with the most challenging questions in growing startups.

Today, we welcomed two new full-time Partners to our investment team who can help True Portfolio Founders answer their questions: Kevin Rose and Mike Montano. Both Kevin and Mike entered our ecosystem as Founders we backed. Kevin was funded initially in 2011 and Mike in 2009. As long-time repeat entrepreneurs and large-scale operators, they bring deep experience and expertise across multiple sectors, including artificial intelligence, consumer and B2B software, and health and wellness.

Kevin Rose: A Longstanding Partnership With True

Kevin’s relationship with us traces back to his early entrepreneurial days. His new role as Partner is the next step in an illustrious journey as both a multi-time Founder and seed investor. Our entire team is beyond thrilled, especially considering his history with our team.

In 2004, Kevin launched social news platform Digg, pioneering online content aggregation and virality. Digg attracted 38 million monthly users, becoming a mainstay of internet culture. In 2011, True backed Kevin to start Milk, acquired by Google in 2012. In 2014, we funded Kevin’s app incubator North, which later merged with Hodinkee, where he served as CEO.

Kevin’s entrepreneurial streak continued when True backed his longevity and meditation apps Zero and Oak, which later became Zero Longevity Science in 2019. In 2022, we – again – backed Kevin (for the fourth time), to start PROOF, a web3 media and technology company, which was acquired in 2024 by Yuga Labs.

Kevin is also a seasoned investor, having angel-funded companies including Twitter, Square, Nextdoor, Wealthfront, and Facebook. He previously served as General Partner at Google Ventures. His work as an entrepreneur and investor has been featured on ABC Nightline News, The Jimmy Fallon Show, The Joe Rogan Experience, and The Tim Ferriss Show, and he’s appeared on the covers of Businessweek and Inc. Magazine. Kevin hosts three podcasts exploring technology trends, longevity, financial well-being, and internet culture: The Kevin Rose Show, The Random Show, and Diggnation Rebooted.

Kevin is now fully focused on investing here at True, particularly in AI innovation across health, consumer, and enterprise technologies and markets.

“I’m thrilled to dedicate my full attention to investing at True,” he shared. “This firm has played such a big role in my own journey as a Founder, graciously encouraging me to tinker and build different businesses through the years. Being a Founder is all about riding the ups and downs of building a company, and the True Team gets how to support in the most challenging moments with the kind of unconditional belief that makes all the difference. The right investors can be transformational and I’m eager to be that kind of partner for today’s builders as I put all my chips in at True.”

Mike Montano: From Founder and Engineering Leader to Investor

For Mike, returning to True is a kind of homecoming. True invested in his first startup, a social media analytics platform called BackType, in 2009. When Twitter acquired BackType in 2011, Mike joined Twitter and spent a decade scaling its engineering team, rising through leadership roles from Director to Vice President to Head of Engineering, ultimately leading a team of 3,000 and overseeing everything from mobile applications, machine learning, and data center operations.

While Mike led the engineering team, Twitter usage and revenue doubled. Additionally, he was proud to serve as the executive sponsor of Twitter’s Black Employee Resource Group, Blackbirds. As an angel investor in dozens of companies including biotech R&D platform Benchling and open source LLM platform Ollama, Mike has helped Founders with product, hiring, and scaling engineering culture.

“My experience has taught me the importance of building a world-class team,” shared Mike. “At Twitter I learned how to deliver at massive scale, but I also really enjoyed the early days at BackType when I worked with a small team of builders. There’s a magic that happens at that size and I’m happy to jump back into the trenches of that really early stage with Founders.”

In 2023, Mike joined True as a part-time Venture Partner, and now as a full-time Partner he is particularly keen on our steady increase in AI investments. Overall, we’ve backed more than 60 AI companies, and in the fourth quarter of 2024, 75% of our new investments were AI-native.

“The pace at which technology is moving right now is something I’ve never seen before,” shared Mike. “There’s a flood of talent building never-before-imagined products, and it’s a joy to work with these really hungry Founders working on the biggest ideas. Our recent AI investments have spanned tools that make developers and other professionals multiply their ability and completely rethink the ways we interact with technology and devices.”

Learn more about our growing team and what types of deals excite us most right now.