If you follow fintech on X, it’s very likely that you have come across the account of Sheel Mohnot, co-founder and general partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures.
With over 150,000 followers, Mohnot has built an impressive presence on the social media site. Interestingly, many of his posts have nothing to do with venture capital.
Mohnot started Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) after co-founding a few companies, including FeeFighters, which sold to Groupon in 2012.
BTV, which has $300 million under management, focuses on investing mainly at the pre-seed and seed stage in fintech startups. It also operates an accelerator, The Mint.
Since its November 2019 inception, BTV has backed the likes of AngelList, Charlie, Coast, and Unit. Mohnot personally has also invested as an angel for over a decade, writing checks into companies such as Flexport, Ironclad, Ethos Insurance, and Apartment List.
I hopped on the mic to interview Mohnot to record an episode of Equity Podcast, and we discussed topics like how he built such a large following on X with viral posts, how he ended up appearing in a Justin Bieber video, what areas of fintech he’s most excited about, and his thoughts on where artificial intelligence is really working in the fintech world.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Besides being somewhat of an influencer on social media, your main job is investing in fintech startups out of Better Tomorrow Ventures. Let’s talk briefly about what BTV considers to be a fintech company.
We think a lot more things are fintech than other people do. So as an example, we think about vertical SaaS as being fintech. And if you think about the Toasts and Shopifys of the world, over 80% of their revenues are financial services. So we think of those as fintech companies. And then also B2B marketplaces, we think of as fintech companies too.
OK, we’re going to come back to fintech. But first, I’d like to talk about your social media strategy. You have over 151,000 followers on X. How did you become a social media star?
I don’t know if I’m a star, but I do enjoy it. I first signed up for Twitter a long time ago, but I really was not very active until the pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, I was active on Clubhouse — as I was so bored at home. I became super active there and accumulated a crazy number of followers. I think like 3.3 million. But of course that’s not really relevant anymore. The only way to write to people on Clubhouse was via Twitter. So that naturally led to doing stuff on Twitter and more followers there. I just started to write, and found that I really liked it. I like sharing ideas and getting feedback from people.
What have been your most viral posts over the years?
My wife actually posted about herself being in a meme at the Folsom Street Fair with an expression on her face where she’s like, “Why? How did I end up here?” That got 250,000 likes. But the one from my account was in the midst of me seeing a lot of pitches for web3 founders trying to solve some sort of problem that didn’t really exist. I saw a video of a guy who had sliced the back wheel of his bicycle into two and made it still rideable. And I was like, “Why would you do this?” And so I captioned it with something like “Web3 founders solving problems that don’t exist” and it went wild. People went wild for it.
Besides investing, you’ve also made headlines for some very interesting things such as your wedding in 2023 being a TacoBell Metaverse wedding and your making an appearance in a Justin Bieber video in 2021. How the heck did those things happen?
I got engaged in 2022 and we had a pretty fun engagement story which I posted on Twitter. A lot of people saw that I was engaged, and then Taco Bell had a contest where they wanted to find one lucky couple to marry in the metaverse. And a bunch of people saw that I was engaged and also knew that I like Taco Bell, and said, “Hey, Sheel, this is perfect for you.” They ended up picking us.
As for the video, I was on this dating show during the pandemic called the Zoom Bachelorette. I didn’t win but I got the audience’s vote and in the audience was Scooter Braun, who was the manager for Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. We chatted on Clubhouse, and he ended up putting me in the video.
I know not all of your posts relate to investing or fintech, but I’m sure it’s somehow impacted it. Has it helped you attract founders you may not have otherwise attracted or helped you win deals?
Yeah, I think so. First of all, I would say, I’m not doing it for those reasons. I’m just having a good time and posting what I think is interesting and thought-provoking and might get people to teach me something after the fact, but I do think it has been helpful.
The first time I realized it was when I emailed a founder that I was really excited about. I know a bunch of other investors had been reaching out too, but when I reached out, they responded immediately, and said, “I think we have the same workout regimen.”And they were responding to a tweet I had posted that had that went viral, which was when Chamath [Palihapitiya] had posted a tweet of him with his shirt off, and I was just making fun of myself and him by posting a reply to it. And so these guys were like, “Hey, we really like your style. Let’s get it. Let’s begin.” And I thought, “Oh, wow, that’s pretty powerful, like they know who I am, and it’s gone on to be super valuable.”
Now, when it comes to Better Tomorrow Ventures — how many funds have you raised so far? And I keep hearing that fintech is back. Would you agree with that? What are you bullish about?
We’re investing out of our second fund now, and we’ll soon be investing out of our third fund. And yeah, I think the fintech market is hot again and we’re going to see more exits in the near future. I think overall, the fintech world is pretty poised to have a lot of outcomes in the near future.
I’m excited about a lot of the stuff that we always believed in, which is “the everything is fintech story,” which persists today. As I mentioned before, vertical SaaS and B2B marketplaces are becoming fintech companies, and there’s a lot of opportunity to enable those folks. I’m also really excited about accounting. We have three companies behind this thesis that there’s a big shortage of accountants in this country.
It’s interesting you say that considering that at the end of last year, an accounting startup called Bench shut down unexpectedly before it got acquired a few days later by this company called Employer.com. A lot of people can debate what went wrong with Bench, but it sounds like what happened there doesn’t seem to be impacting your overall views on the space as a whole?
It’s interesting. I think of Bench as really an accounting firm, rather than it being a venture-backed accounting firm, like they had a bunch of humans doing accounting work. And a problem with that is it’s really hard to scale, to build like a venture scale business and continue to grow at venture scale. And so eventually, I believe I’ve heard from customers like they ended up cutting corners. Things didn’t really go as people had wanted, and so they had a bunch of challenges.
Recently, the big news that dominated was DeepSeek. It was everywhere. Everybody’s talking about it, OpenAI seemed to be freaking out. What do you think — is DeepSeek really this big threat, or is it just a bunch of hype?
There are a number of things to unpack within DeepSeek. One, it’s from China. Another is that it’s open source, and another is that it’s supposedly done very cheaply.
I think we’ve always believed that the cost of inference, the recent modeling costs, were going to come down. But I think DeepSeek launching helped the cost come down pretty substantially. And so, now you have a bit of a price war at the foundational model level, which is great for our companies that are building on AI. It’s phenomenal.
What about the hype around AI in general?
There are so many companies that pitch us the same way that they pitch you, and they tell us that they’re AI companies, and you look and there’s nothing AI about them, or very little; I think very few companies are actually AI companies. And then I think there are a lot more companies that are seeing tremendous value from AI but are not, “AI companies.” We invest across the spectrum. I do think there’s this perception that you need to be an AI company to get attention. And I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just important to be honest about who you are and what you’re doing.
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