Baris Akis is a Stanford-trained computer scientist who started raising and deploying venture funds as an undergraduate, backing companies like Brex in his early 20s rather than following the traditional associate-to-partner path. He built his investing approach around personally guiding over 500 software engineers on their career decisions, using those relationships as the foundation for deal flow while also taking on an active Talent Engineering role at xAI to assemble exceptional people for frontier-technology companies.