Rick Smith brings an unusual blue-collar background to venture capital, having been adopted by high school dropout parents in Illinois where his father ran a small plumbing business, and working jobs from pipe fitting at nuclear plants to de-tasseling corn before becoming a lawyer and then VC. He built a $750 million corporate venture platform from scratch at SunAmerica despite initially knowing little about tech, then co-founded Crosscut as a $5 million fund during the 2008 financial crisis and grew it into a larger platform that has produced multiple unicorns from that original tiny fund. Rick Smith brings an unusual blue-collar background to venture capital, having been adopted by high school dropout parents in Illinois where his father ran a small plumbing business, and working jobs from pipe fitting at nuclear plants to de-tasseling corn before becoming a lawyer and then VC. He built a $750 million corporate venture platform from scratch at SunAmerica despite initially knowing little about tech, then co-founded Crosscut as a $5 million fund during the 2008 financial crisis and grew it into a larger platform that has produced multiple unicorns from that original tiny fund.