Before launching Ascend Venture Capital's first fund in 2015, Dan Conner spent time tracking hypothetical startup picks in a self-created "Fund 0.0" to test his own judgment, and he built on an operator and engineering background in oil, biofuel, and wind energy before moving into venture. He has also written publicly about treating venture as an ethics-driven profession, calling for a formal code of conduct and for standardized, bias-reducing evaluation processes, while crediting his investing results to researching thousands of companies before settling on a small number to back.