Miles learned venture capital from the ground up at a tiny Thrive Capital straight out of Yale, giving him an unusual early-stage perspective, and grew up watching his stepfather build e-commerce companies from their living room, providing deep personal exposure to entrepreneurship from childhood. He focuses on backing technically intense platforms like Benchling and LangChain before their markets look obviously large, and has developed a contrarian AI thesis that avoids foundation models in favor of the application layer where companies can sell work rather than software. Miles learned venture capital from the ground up at a tiny Thrive Capital straight out of Yale, giving him an unusual early-stage perspective, and grew up watching his stepfather build e-commerce companies from their living room, providing deep personal exposure to entrepreneurship from childhood. He focuses on backing technically intense platforms like Benchling and LangChain before their markets look obviously large, and has developed a contrarian AI thesis that avoids foundation models in favor of the application layer where companies can sell work rather than software.