Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Mary Meeker was called the "Queen of the Internet" by the financial press in the 1990s, and the title stuck because it was accurate. Her annual Internet Trends reports, published every year from 1995 through 2019, were the most anticipated single documents in the technology industry. When she published, CEOs rearranged schedules to read them the same day. The reports synthesized hundreds of data points into a coherent picture of where technology was going, and they were almost always right in their directional conclusions. Mary Meeker investments, first at Kleiner Perkins and then at BOND Capital, which she founded in 2018, are the direct application of that research discipline to capital allocation. She doesn't invest in narratives. She invests in what the data says.

The Analyst-to-Investor Transition

Meeker began her career as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, became a technology analyst at Salomon Brothers, and joined Morgan Stanley in the early 1990s. In August 1995, Morgan Stanley was lead manager for Netscape's IPO, and in February 1996, Meeker co-authored "The Internet Report," which became known as the bible for investors during the dot-com boom. The report was the first systematic attempt to map the economics of the internet as an industry, and it established her reputation as the analyst who could see the structure beneath the noise.

After navigating the controversy that followed the dotcom collapse, she returned to prominence at Morgan Stanley, where she was the lead analyst on Google's IPO in 2004. In December 2010, she left Morgan Stanley to join Kleiner Perkins as a partner, making the transition from analyst to investor in her early 50s. Her decision to join Kleiner was based on the conviction that pattern recognition she had developed as an analyst could generate better returns from the investor side of the table.

At Kleiner, she backed Facebook at the Series D, Spotify, Airbnb, Twitter, Slack, and Instacart, among others. Shiyan Koh, Hustle Fund managing partner, has talked about how the most powerful investor profiles combine genuine pattern recognition with the resources to act on it at scale. Meeker had spent fifteen years developing an unusually comprehensive model of how internet companies grow before she deployed a single dollar of venture capital.

BOND Capital and the Current Portfolio

In 2018, Meeker left Kleiner Perkins to found BOND Capital as an independent firm. BOND focuses primarily on late-stage growth investments, making it a distinct strategy from early-stage seed funds, but with an analytical process that is more rigorous than most late-stage vehicles. As of early 2026, BOND has made 176 investments across 130 companies, with 51 unicorns in the portfolio.

Notable portfolio companies include Applied Intuition, the autonomous vehicle software platform. Canva, the design platform valued at over $30 billion. Checkr, the background screening API. CLEAR, the biometric identity verification company. Hipcamp, the outdoor recreation marketplace. Ironclad, the contract management platform. On Running, the Swiss athletic shoe brand. Substack, which BOND backed in a $100 million round at a $1.1 billion valuation in July 2025. ElevenLabs, the AI voice synthesis platform, which represents BOND's most recent new investment as of early 2026. Baseten, the AI inference infrastructure company, which BOND led a $150 million round into in September 2025.

Meeker also serves on the boards of Block/Square, Genies (the avatar technology company), and OpenEvidence.

The 2025 AI Report

After six years of relative public silence on major trend reports, BOND published a 340-page AI Trends Report in May 2025. The report immediately became the most-circulated document in the technology industry, doing for AI what her Internet reports had done for the web in the 1990s.

The key findings: ChatGPT reached 365 billion annual searches in 5.5 times fewer years than Google. India is the top user of ChatGPT at 13.5% of usage, ahead of the US at 8.9%. Google's AI developer community grew from 1.4 million to 7 million between May 2024 and May 2025. The "Big Six" tech companies' capital expenditures hit $212 billion in 2024, up 63% year-over-year. On China: the US-China AI competition is a geopolitical race, and the US lead in closed-source commercial models is fragile.

Shiyan Koh, Hustle Fund managing partner, has talked about how the best investors share their frameworks publicly because it builds the kind of trust with founders that deal access requires. Meeker has been doing this for thirty years, and the 2025 AI report is the clearest demonstration of why the model compounds over time: she had more data, more context, and more intellectual credibility than anyone else who could have published that analysis.

Angel Squad and the Research-First Model

Mary Meeker investments are a thirty-year demonstration that research-first investing outperforms narrative-first investing across every market cycle. The investors who have the most accurate models of how technology companies grow make better decisions at every stage of the company lifecycle. Angel Squad builds investors around the same principle. With 2,500 members across 50 countries, the community trains investors to develop genuine analytical models for the companies they evaluate, not just compelling theses. Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund GP, has talked about how the investors who outperform consistently are the ones who ask harder questions before writing checks, not the ones who are most enthusiastic about a sector. Meeker has been asking the hardest questions in technology investing for thirty years. Visit hustlefund.vc/squad to build the same habit.

The Takeaway

Mary Meeker turned thirty years of obsessive data synthesis into one of the best venture track records of her generation. The Internet Trends reports were the foundation of that track record: they forced her to develop a comprehensive model of how internet economics work before she deployed a dollar of capital. The 2025 AI report is the update to that model for the next computing era. For early-stage investors, the lesson is that the work done before the investment, the research, the data, the framework, is where the returns are built. The check is just the expression of the work.