With Salisbury serving as a solo GP, Cambrian plans to back 30 companies, with investments of up to $500,000. So far, the firm has made five investments over the last few months, including Keep Financial’s recent seed round. Salisbury expects the capital will be fully deployed over 24 months.
Generally, he plans to back U.S.based companies with U.S.-oriented go-to-markets.
“My key goal is, ‘how do I identify, and then also support, the next generation of fintech founders?” Salisbury said. “And at the earliest stage, you’re really investing in people.”
There were no hard feelings on the part of his former colleagues at a16z.
“Rex’s influence, reach, and ability to identify the next great entrepreneurs in fintech are impressive and made him a valuable asset at a16z,” said Acharya. “We are delighted to see how he and Cambrian will continue to support the fintech ecosystem with the launch of this fund.”
Carra, a SoFi co-founder who Salisbury worked with early in his career, recalls first meeting him after the engineer had completed a coding boot camp.
Although he was still early in his career, Carra describes Salisbury of being the person “who asked the incisive ‘hard’ questions in all-hands meetings,” to a point where other members of the management team thought Carra was feeding him queries.
“The case was simply that Rex is smart, understands both finance and tech, has a keen analytical mind, and is willing to ask the hard questions in good faith,” he said. “It was a running conversation among those of us who worked with him that we looked forward to investing in his startup — we assumed he’d be a founder next time around.”
It turns out that Salisbury’s “startup” was Cambrian, and Carra is now an LP in the new fund.
“I really like the community that he’s built and refer aspiring founders to it when I can,” he told TechCrunch via email. “I love that he’s taken time to understand the space as an operator in multiple roles, and I like Cambrian’s model and risk profile.”
Betterment Founder Jon Stein described Salisbury as a “great investor.”
“I invested with him because he’s among the best builders of network and community that I’ve ever seen,” he said via email.
Salisbury is not the only accidental VC in the fintech space. Earlier this year, Nik Milanovic — who had also started out with a newsletter and meetups —