heretic backs consumer founders working at the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology.
we start before day one
how we work
- we work with people who have not quit their job yet
- we prototype the idea before anyone commits to it
- we design the brand and the culture before the product
- we look for a structural advantage, not a head start
- capital is there on day one, not when the round closes
- the people who prototype it with you can join you full time
who we work with
- operators who have built someone else's company and want their own
- builders who take creative risks that could actually fail
- founders who came up outside the usual pipelines
- creators who watched the platform keep the bigger half
- people who can see the category before it has a name
- anyone told to go get more experience first
early partner to contrarian companies
team
mariam naficy
managing partner
Mariam Naficy is a serial entrepreneur and operator with more than 25 years of experience building consumer businesses at the intersection of commerce, creativity, and technology. She is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Minted, the design marketplace for creative goods that she built from scratch into a profitable business generating more than $300 million in annual sales.
At Minted, she pioneered a new model for discovering and developing design talent: crowdsourcing the world's best emerging designers through competitions and giving consumers a voice in what the brand sold. She then built the systems to turn that model into a distinctive, scaled consumer business, from sourcing and manufacturing to quality control, pricing, and delivering beautifully made products. That combination of taste and operational discipline has defined her career. Before founding Minted, she co-founded Eve in 1998, a pioneering online cosmetics retailer, and later launched and ran The Body Shop International's e-commerce division.
Mariam has made early investments in Reddit, Gusto, Color, Our Place, Madison Reed, Middesk, and more. She currently sits on the board of Victoria's Secret and previously served on the boards of Medium, Yelp, and Every Mother Counts, as well as serving as a trustee of Williams College and a member of the advisory council of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Today, as Founder and CEO of Arcade, she is applying that same operating lens to the next era of commerce, using AI to connect designers and brands with vetted makers around the world, with an emphasis on manufacturability, quality, customization, and speed to market.
huy hoang
principal
Huy Hoang is a Principal at Heretic Ventures with a background in finance and strategy across investing, large institutions, and high growth startups. He started his career at Blackstone, working across M&A, financial planning, and treasury, and later led strategic finance at Snackpass. He currently leads finance and strategy at Arcade, where his work spans capital strategy, business operations, and broader strategic initiatives. At Heretic, he brings that experience to evaluating businesses and working alongside founders. Huy earned his undergraduate degree from Villanova University and his MBA from Duke University.
andrew carr
advisor
Andrew Carr is a computational mathematician and AI researcher focused on machine learning, large language models, and generative AI across modalities and industries. His career has taken him across some of the field's most important frontiers: program synthesis and code generation at OpenAI, self-supervised audio understanding at Google Brain, physics-based prediction for autonomous vehicles at Lyft, and privacy-preserving synthetic data at Gretel.ai. He also edits TLDR AI, a newsletter covering the latest developments in artificial intelligence, and holds a master's degree in computer science and a bachelor's degree in computation and applied mathematics from Brigham Young University.
Today, Andrew is applying that breadth of experience to the future of animation as co-founder and chief scientist of Cartwheel, an early-stage generative AI company building text-to-motion models and creative tools for animators across games, film, and advertising.