For Marlon Nichols, the defining moment of his venture career didn’t happen in a boardroom or while working on a lucrative deal. It came quietly, during his tenure at Intel Capital – then the investment arm of tech giant Intel Corporation. Over time, he realized something had fundamentally shifted. “Entrepreneurs were initially interested in speaking with me because I was carrying that business card,” he recalls. But over time, the dynamic changed. Founders sought him out—not just the Intel brand name—and many of the ideas brought to him didn’t fit Intel Capital’s strategy.
What began as a subtle pattern soon became a source of mounting frustration. Nichols found himself energized by founders and markets that fell outside the firm’s framework, unable to pursue deals he felt compelled to champion. “I thought to myself, it could be more interesting and fulfilling if I were to branch out, develop my own strategy and thesis, and invest in accordance with that.” That realization became the spark that ultimately led to the creation of MaC Venture Capital.
MaC Venture Capital, which Nichols co-founded in 2019 with Charles D. King (who had previously launched MACRO, an integrated media company focused on underrepresented artists) and fellow General Partners Michael Palank and former Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, is one of the industry’s most distinctive early-stage investment platforms. MaC focuses on startups at the intersection of technological innovation and cultural transformation—backing founders who are building solutions that align with evolving shifts in behavior, technology, and regulation.
“If I can understand where people will spend their time and money tomorrow,
I can invest in the companies that will define the future.”
– Marlon Nichols, Co-Founder & Managing General Partner
The firm invests primarily at the seed stage, backing companies with real products and early market traction, while remaining flexible enough to pursue standout pre-seed and Series A opportunities. MaC has raised three funds to date, all of which met or exceeded their caps at close, with Fund I performing in the top fifth percentile. The firm plans to begin raising Fund IV in Q2 2026. Each fund typically targets 30–40 companies, investing up to $4 million for a 10%–15% fully diluted ownership stake, while reserving approximately half of the capital for follow-on investments in its highest-conviction winners.
An ‘Aha’ Moment at Intel Capital
For Nichols, the path to venture capital unfolded through a series of deliberate pivots that sharpened his ability to anticipate change. After studying at Northeastern University, he helped scale an enterprise software company into Europe before its acquisition by SAP. He later consulted for media giants, including Warner Music and McGraw-Hill, as the internet reshaped entire industries. The experience honed Nichols’ instinct for spotting cultural and behavioral shifts early—an ability that would become foundational to his investment philosophy.
While earning his MBA at Cornell, Nichols led the school’s student-run pre-seed fund, gaining firsthand exposure to venture investing and the broader ecosystem. That experience led him to Intel Capital, where his perspective began to crystallize. Nichols’ first step toward that vision was Cross Culture Ventures, which he co-founded with music executive and prolific angel investor Troy Carter. The fund invested between 2015 and 2019, but as it wound down, the partners’ paths diverged. “Troy wanted to get back to music, and I wanted to continue building what I believed could be the preeminent early-stage venture firm,” Nichols says. Rather than raise another fund together, Nichols decided to carry the brand forward and expand its ambition.
As he built toward that next chapter, Nichols found himself frequently co-investing with M Ventures, founded by King, Fenty, and Palank. Conversations about collaboration quickly turned into a shared vision. “We realized we filled gaps for each other,” Nichols says. After spending much of 2018 co-investing and refining strategy as a unified group, the teams formally merged to launch MaC Venture Capital in early 2019. “By the end, we knew this could be bigger than anything we’d each imagined on our own.”
Learning to Decide—Together
Looking back, Nichols realized his career had been quietly steering him toward a very specific role. He had scaled companies as an operator and advised them as a consultant, but neither fully satisfied his desire to be both strategically engaged and meaningfully invested. Venture capital, he came to see, sat at the intersection. It allowed him to work closely with founders on strategy and execution without operating a single company, while maintaining real accountability through ownership. “You have skin in the game,” he says, “and you’re tied to the outcome.” That blend—technology, entrepreneurship, and strategy—made the decision inevitable, and ultimately pushed Nichols to build a firm aligned with how he wanted to work and the founders he wanted to back.
In MaC’s early days, the firm’s greatest challenge wasn’t sourcing deals or raising capital—it was learning how to make decisions together. The three general partners came from vastly different professional and personal backgrounds, spanning public office, top-tier venture firms, talent representation, startup operations, and media. “We’re very different,” Nichols says, noting that each partner arrived with distinct experiences, perspectives, and instincts shaped by where they grew up and how they built their careers. “Here you are trying to blend that together into one thing, and you’ve got to make it make sense.”
As successful professionals accustomed to leading in their own lanes, aligning around a shared decision-making framework became essential. “How we make decisions was a big topic for us—and an important one,” Nichols explains. Defining the firm’s true culture and governance model was the most critical hurdle. Once resolved, it became a strength. Today, the partners operate “in pretty much lockstep,” embracing their differences as a strategic advantage—one Nichols calls “a major differentiator” that allows MaC to access unconventional opportunities and explore emerging industries with confidence.
Breakout Investments and Big Swings
One of MaC’s earliest and most defining investments was Pipe, a platform that reimagined how high-growth companies access capital. Initially built to help SaaS businesses unlock non-dilutive financing by selling the future value of recurring revenue, Pipe offered an alternative to traditional equity or debt. “Pipe created a third option,” Nichols says—one that was faster, more efficient, and aligned with how modern businesses operate. The investment reflected MaC’s conviction in founders building financial infrastructure that evolves alongside changing business models.
MaC invested in Pipe at a $13 million valuation. Within 18 months, the company reached a $2 billion valuation, catalyzing the close of Fund I and accelerating Fund II. Since then, Pipe has evolved into an embeddable version of Square Capital, leveraging real-time transaction data to underwrite working capital loans for small and mid-sized businesses. With global partners that include Uber Eats, Pipe is driving strong revenue growth and moving closer to profitability. The company has also launched a partnership with GoCardless and acquired Glean AI to further streamline operations and accelerate growth.
Another investment completed toward the end of Fund I was Stoke Space, an aerospace startup developing the fully reusable Nova rocket designed for frequent, low-cost access to orbit—a rare bet for an early-stage firm that at the time focused primarily on software investments. Former Blue Origin and SpaceX engineers co-founded Stoke Space and, after MaC’s 2021 seed investment, have raised substantial follow-on capital to advance Nova’s development.
Nichols says Stoke was more of “a big swing in a different direction than anything else we’d ever done,” and credits the firm’s openness to divergent ideas. “Adrian spotted this thing and brought it to us,” he recalls. “We had to be open enough to say, ‘Is this the right thing to get smart on … and potentially make the investment?’ The answer was yes.” That willingness to embrace opportunities outside their comfort zone has helped validate MaC’s broader thesis of identifying major shifts early and backing visionary founders.
Stoke’s Nova represents a new generation of launch vehicles that aim to fundamentally reduce costs and increase cadence through full, rapid reuse, targeting applications from satellite deployment to in-space logistics. Its progress—now backed by hundreds of millions in funding and advanced prototype testing—highlights how an atypical early-stage bet has matured into a potential category leader.
Defining Success—and Legacy
Nichols sees today’s venture environment as both constrained and ripe with opportunity. From the LP side, capital is under pressure. “Capital is not coming back fast enough,” he notes, forcing allocators to make harder choices about which managers continue to receive commitments. At the same time, founders face their own bottleneck. “There are so many great companies popping up—charismatic founders with deep domain expertise, but there’s limited capital to go around.” The result, Nichols says, is a market that demands discipline: “It forces you to be even more selective… which we hope ends up being a really good thing, because you’re only investing in the best of the best.”
Looking ahead, Nichols defines success not just by performance, but by relevance and influence. He wants MaC to become “a necessary stop on every entrepreneur’s journey”—the firm founders think of whether they’re building in a garage or an apartment, alongside the industry’s most recognized names. He also hopes MaC is remembered for making bold choices and pulling others forward in the process. “I want to be known as someone who made bold choices, saw success, and did it while pulling the community along with you,” he says—helping others develop their own playbooks and win on their own terms.
Ultimately, Nichols sees MaC’s mission as a broader proof point for the industry. While diverse partners lead the firm, he is clear that its success is rooted in meritocracy, not exception. “Bias has no place in venture capital investing,” he says. “If you actually do it in a meritocratic way, you’ll find extreme success.” For Nichols, that conviction isn’t just a belief—it’s the legacy he wants MaC Venture Capital to leave behind.
“We built a firm that could pass any operational due diligence—even from the largest U.S. pension funds. We were so naive, we just discovered ILPA, read the standards, and said, ‘Okay, let’s just do all of this.”
– Ernesto Carrizosa, CEO, Managing Partner & CIO
“We built a firm that could pass any operational due diligence—even from the largest U.S. pension funds. We were so naive, we just discovered ILPA, read the standards, and said, ‘Okay, let’s just do all of this.”
– Ernesto Carrizosa, CEO, Managing Partner & CIO