Joseph Guzel is a venture capital investor at Haven Ventures who brings an immigrant, blue-collar background to fintech investing, having grown up in a Turkish-Jordanian family that built a Mediterranean restaurant chain after fleeing Kuwait during the Gulf War. He's betting his career on the bridge between traditional fintech and web3/DeFi, combining deep hands-on experience from early investments in companies like Chime and Step with a personal mission to serve underbanked populations that stems from watching his own family struggle to access mainstream financial products.

• Deep specialization in financial technology and infrastructure. He frequently highlights the technical complexities of the sector, such as the shortage of developers skilled enough to build in-house processing, and he actively champions portfolio companies like Chime and Step that are modernizing banking for specific demographics.
• Strong advocacy for the Los Angeles tech ecosystem. He consistently promotes the region as a premier hub for innovation, celebrating wins for local companies and collaborating with other LA-based investors to support the growing market there.
• Appreciation for operational clarity and high-quality communication. He explicitly praised a CEO's update letter as a prime example of masterful writing, noting that superior communication skills bring clarity that benefits the entire organization.
• Focus on business model mechanics and unit economics. He looks at companies from a first-principles perspective, such as when he broke down the business model of gas stations to explain that they are essentially small businesses relying on snack sales rather than fuel margins.
• Value for grit and humble beginnings. He relates to founders and investors who started with unglamorous jobs, noting his own background working in fast food, and playfully respects the tenacity often seen in immigrant families.