Tim Rehder first got to know Earlybird as a founder running his own crypto exchange before joining the firm to lead fintech investing, giving him a rare founder-to-investor path shaped by years as an early Bitcoin adopter, plus earlier stints in M&A, gaming, and consulting that now show up in bets spanning regulated finance, software infrastructure, and commerce tech, including Upvest, finmid, M0 Labs, Hive Technologies, and Flanks. He looks for founders with a clear personal edge and complementary co-founders rather than backing solo founders, traces part of his interest in commerce infrastructure to watching his wife build a direct-to-consumer brand in Berlin, and keeps returning to the underlying plumbing of finance, from custodianship banking to open wealth data to decentralized internet applications.