What Paradromics and Alexandrea Winery have in common — and why that's not a strange thing to say

People who know me from the semiconductor industry find the winery strange. People who know me from the winery find the brain-computer interface strange. Almost nobody knows about both at the same time, which means almost nobody has asked me the question I find most interesting about my own career.

Why does the same person keep ending up in the same place?

Not the same industry. Not the same geography. Not the same technology. But the same place, which is to say, early. Before the infrastructure exists. Before the market understands what it's looking at. Before the people who will eventually be certain about this thing have made up their minds.

I've been thinking about why that keeps happening. The more I think about it, the more I believe it has more to do with what Paradromics and Alexandrea Winery have in common than it appears.

Both started with a problem nobody thought was solvable

When Matt Angle described what Paradromics was trying to achieve - record from individual neurons at scale, create a high-bandwidth interface between the human brain and a computer, eventually restore communication to people who had lost it entirely — the honest reaction from most of the investment community was polite skepticism.

Not because the science was not solid. Because the distance between where the science was and where it needed to be felt too large to bridge in any reasonable timeframe. The engineering challenges were real. The regulatory pathway was uncertain. The market, in the traditional sense, didn't exist yet.

I wrote the first check anyway and joined Matt in co-founding Paradromics.

When I drove up to the Proshyan hillside in Armenia and decided to plant Pinot Noir in volcanic rock at 1,315 meters altitude, most of the wine world reacted similarly. Polite skepticism. Pinot Noir in Armenia? From a tech entrepreneur with no winemaking background? On a site that required Japanese rock-cutting equipment just to prepare for planting?

I planted anyway.

In both cases, the problem being solved was real. The people doing the work were serious. The timeline was long. And very few people were willing to believe before the proof arrived.

That's the common denominator. Not the category. The condition.

Both required a specific kind of technical humility

I am not a neuroscientist. I cannot build a brain-computer interface. I cannot evaluate the electrode design or the signal processing algorithms or the surgical robotics from first principles.

What I can do is recognize the difference between people who understand complexity and people who are performing understanding. I can tell when a technical team has genuinely reckoned with the hard problems versus when they are presenting a version of those problems that's been made comfortable for investors. I can feel the difference between a founder who knows where their certainty ends and one who has papered over the uncertainty with confidence.

Matt Angle knew exactly where Paradromics was on the map. He knew what was solved and what wasn't. He knew the timelines were long and said so. He spent years in neuroscience academia before starting the company, and that proximity gave him a relationship with the problem that no amount of outside research could have produced.

Jeff Ritchey, who has been making wine for over thirty years and who flew from California to Armenia because he believed in what the Proshyan hillside could produce, has the same quality. He knows what he knows, and he knows what he doesn't. When I ask him a question he can't answer yet, he says so. When he tells me something is ready, I believe him completely.

In both cases, I was not the expert. I was the person willing to back the expert before the world agreed they were right.

That's a different skill from expertise. It's pattern recognition applied to people rather than to technology. And it turns out to be useful in neurotechnology and winemaking in exactly the same way.

Both operated on timelines that the market couldn't hold

Venture capital has a structural problem with time. The fund cycle, the LP expectations, the pressure to show markups on paper before the underlying value is real - all of it creates a systematic bias toward things that can be validated quickly. Which means a systematic bias against things that can only be validated slowly.

Brain-computer interfaces cannot be validated quickly. You are implanting a device into a human brain. The regulatory pathway alone takes years. The clinical evidence takes longer. The market understanding takes longer still. In June 2025, surgeons at University of Michigan Health implanted the Connexus device into a woman living with motor neuron disease — one of the first times a high-channel-count interface has been placed inside a living human brain. That happened nearly a decade after the company was founded.

A vineyard cannot be validated quickly either. You prepare the soil for years before you plant. You plant and wait for the vines to mature. You harvest and wait for the wine to develop. You release and wait for the market to understand what it's tasting. The 2024 Pinot Noir that won gold at Concours Mondial de Bruxelles this year was planted on land I first stood on nine years ago.

In both cases, the investment thesis required holding a position through years when nothing visible was happening, when the work was real but the results weren't yet legible to anyone outside the process.

Most investors can't do that. Not because they lack patience in theory but because the structures they operate inside make patience expensive in practice.

At this stage of my career, I've had the luxury of making bets I intend to hold. Not because I'm indifferent to outcomes but because I've learned that the outcomes worth holding for don't arrive on anyone else's schedule.

Both are, at their core, about restoring something

This is the part I didn't understand about either investment when I made it. I understood it later, slowly, from the inside.

Paradromics is building technology to restore communication to people who have lost it. ALS patients who can no longer speak. People with severe paralysis who can no longer move. The Connexus device translates the intention to communicate, still present in the brain and still firing, into actual speech and movement. It is restoring a connection between a person and the world that disease or injury severed.

Alexandrea Winery is doing something similar, more quietly. Armenia has been making wine for 6,100 years. Soviet collectivization destroyed the tradition. The decades after independence produced quantity over quality. What we are trying to build at Proshyan is a restoration — of the land's potential, of the indigenous varieties that survived, of Armenia's place in the international wine conversation that history interrupted.

Both are recovery projects dressed as innovation projects. Both work to give back what was taken.

I don't think I would have articulated it that way when I wrote the first check for Paradromics or when I stood on that hillside for the first time. But I think it's what drew me to both. Not just the technical opportunity. The human one.

The woman in Ann Arbor who received the Connexus implant — I don't know her name. I don't know what she thought when she first communicated through the device. I don't know what it felt like to have that connection restored.

But I know that something I did a decade ago was part of the chain of events that made it possible.

And I know that somewhere in Armenia, a vineyard is producing wine that the world is starting to understand belongs in a serious conversation.

Both started with a check written before the outcome was obvious.

That's the only investment thesis I've ever really had.