First Star Ventures is co-founded by two deeply technical former founders—Drew Volpe (conversational AI, search/unstructured databases, computational bio, blockchain) and Millie Liu (AI/ML analytics at APT → $600M Mastercard acquisition; co‑founded Infervision, an AI medical imaging company backed by Sequoia China)—who apply a distinctive technical bar where they won't invest if "3–5 Google engineers could quit and recreate the product in 3–12 months." The Boston/Cambridge-based fund specializes in pre-seed and seed investments in "computing x real-world" companies across techbio, climate, robotics, and industrial infrastructure, explicitly positioning against the last decade's SaaS/consumer-driven VC playbook by arguing that future outliers will look very different from past VC winners.