Taryn Pieterse moved from a math and finance background at the University of Queensland through deal experience at Goldman Sachs—including the Campaign Monitor US$250M raise and the AB InBev/SABMiller merger—into early-stage investing at Rampersand in 2020, where she pushes founders to sharpen their financial modeling early and looks for grit, execution, and balanced optimism, treating second-time founders and already-shipped MVPs as signs of lower risk. She has also described shifting her AI investing focus from domain expertise toward defensibility, organized the Giant Warm Intro event that generated 160 hours of mentoring for underrepresented founders in 2021, backed companies like Hatch and Cuttable, and built a reputation for trust and loyalty in how she works with founders.