Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

Where was Molly Mielke when she had the idea for Moth Fund?

20 Jun 2023 · 1 min

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In this interview excerpt, Molly Mielke explains how the idea for Moth Fund developed over time. She began by giving small grants to support unconventional creators, describing this as providing "belief capital"—a way to signal confidence and encouragement rather than full funding. While consulting, she became a Sequoia Scout, which revealed significant overlap between grantmaking and venture investing, and highlighted clear pathways from early grant support to later venture capital. The conversation traces the fund's evolution from a belief‑capital grant model to a hybrid approach that bridges philanthropy and venture.

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So where were you when you had the idea for Moth Fund? It kind of, it took a while. Like, I feel like there was a lot of different evolutions of the idea. It started as being a project that was more focused on trying to accelerate innovation by investing in people via grants. And that was something that I did as kind of like a meta extension of getting a grant myself and then finding people that were doing weird, interesting work and giving them small checks. So that was kind of the first iteration and that was really just trying to be a source of belief capital for these people as opposed to being more actual capital to fund the thing. It's more just saying like, hey, your thing's really cool. I hope you continue to do it and count me in and my money is behind it. And then I did that for a while while I was doing consulting and I became a Sequoia Scout through consulting. And I realized that there was actually a lot of overlap between venture and the grantmaking. Mm-hmm. And oftentimes there was pretty clear paths between the two.