Matthew McGraw positions himself as "a dad, husband, entrepreneur, and investor – in that order" and built his credibility by running Rocket Science Consulting, a bootstrapped firm that helped iconic startups like Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber scale from early stages to IPOs without ever taking VC money himself. At Anthropocene Ventures, he deliberately focuses on deep science and hard tech rather than typical climate software, arguing that the climate problem is fundamentally physical and that there are far fewer hardware VCs, so he goes where most VCs won't while maintaining that their fund will never exceed $100M because smaller, earlier funds have better venture return dynamics.