Mahati Sridhar's career runs through the same North Carolina startup scene from several different angles, moving from a college internship in Chapel Hill to an investing job in Durham to her current role in Raleigh, and earlier in her career she helped start a venture fund in Charlotte rather than simply joining one that already existed. She also applies clear, specific standards when deciding whether to invest, backing full-time teams that already have a working product even before they have revenue, and she looks at how a company is actually using AI rather than just whether those letters appear in its name.