Pier 2.0

In 2014, I joined Minerva University as a founding class student. My motivation stemmed from a deep curiosity—I wanted to experience and contribute to building a new kind of university. Today, Minerva is ranked as the #1 most innovative university in the world.

Before joining, I had no idea what entrepreneurship truly meant. But it turned out that the entire journey was a founder-like experience rooted in learning by doing. From acquiring habits of mind and foundational meta-knowledge to co-building our active learning platform (the classroom itself) alongside the product and engineering teams using ideation boards; from immersing in different cultural norms and embracing serendipity through our city-based programs to launching “civic partnerships” (which sometimes meant pitching to Uber drivers); from losing and rediscovering my sense of identity to designing my own system of self-discipline and career path—looking back, I can say that Minerva was one of the best decisions. It was there that I began my journey of self-awareness and intentional discovery through lived experience.

In 2019, before approaching graduation, I co-founded Pier with my classmate Joao—the first network-driven investment group focused on nonconformist entrepreneurs with non-traditional educational backgrounds. It began as a simple alumni venture project, but at that time, I had been in venture investing for some time and started to sense there was something bigger than just Minerva.

In venture capital, pattern recognition is a norm. But patterns can lead to overfitting, especially when new inputs are ignored. Education credentials are often used as strong signals in evaluating talent and allocating resources, but the actual educational experience is often overlooked. Yet entrepreneurship is a cognitive and decision-making journey through uncertainty, shaped profoundly by the founder’s prior feedback systems and mental models.

This discussion led us to believe that non-traditional education reflects broader shifts in social norms and infrastructure—a signal of generational change. “Non-education education” includes alternative learning paths like bootcamps, dropouts, self-taught journeys, and other unconventional approaches. While this group is underrepresented in numbers, they are overrepresented among successful entrepreneurs—presenting a unique opportunity in venture.

The self-selection and experiences within non-traditional education tend to foster a shared mindset and essential competencies that better prepare individuals for entrepreneurship.

Examples of shared experience

So we started Pier, rooted in San Francisco, with the intention of connecting people to boats—and preparing them to sail away. We made our first investment in Outlier, which offers the world’s best for-credit, university-level online courses. It was founded by Aaron Rasmussen, co-founder of MasterClass. Later, the company secured continued funding rounds led by Google Ventures and was eventually acquired by Savvas Learning Company. Although Outlier didn’t lack initial funding, the Minerva learning experience contributed to the design of its learning and administration systems, especially for underserved educational communities.

We then made our second investment in Seabound, founded by two classmates, Alisha and Roujia. They are building carbon capture equipment for ships—starting with an intriguing idea, it has since reached successful pilot launches and achieved promising milestones, with continued funding rounds led by Lowercarbon Capital.

More interestingly, the Pier community has also grown organically. Later, Evgeny joined to explore opportunities in crypto communities, and Yinwei brought institutional knowledge from the family office industry. At the same time, more and more Minerva alumni began launching their own venture capital practices or joining established funds—forming an extended support network that truly makes Pier a “pier” in every sense(investor network).

What’s Pier 2.0?

Many people have asked, and we’re fortunate to have received interest from institutional LPs to explore formalizing Pier as an investment fund. While we deeply appreciate this interest, we chose to maintain Pier as a personal investing group to preserve the flexibility of participation and the quality of time spent with our community.

What excites us even more is how the conversations we started back in 2019 have likely been accelerated by the development of AI. Tradition is a relative term. Non-traditional education may evolve into a parallel education system as human-machine interaction advances. Increasingly, people will experience some form of non-traditional learning as lifelong learning becomes a necessity.

Three following open questions intrigue me:

• The meaning of learning: What and how do we learn in the era of intelligence?

• The journey of creation: What is the process and economic mechanism in the creator economy?

• The structure of capital: What are the new funding structures in alternative financing?

When knowledge and resources are abundant and become the norm, where does true scarcity lie? Personally, Pier 2.0 is about returning to the roots of intentionality, original thinking, and self-navigation—especially in today’s world of information overload. Pier is not about a specific group—it’s about the curiosity, courage, and persistence people embody throughout their journey. Most importantly, it’s about having fun along the way.

As of 2025, we are more convinced by the original intention behind Pier—and excited to experience Pier 2.0 in the future (soon).