Hanseul Nam

Great people, compelling design, exceptional passion from teams & customers alike— for Hanseul, these are the building blocks of a successful company. She believes that these three traits combined with the right team working on a worthy problem can produce transformational technology. “Talented people in the right place can have an outsized, often pivotal impact on a company’s success,” she says.

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Hanseul was born in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to rural New Zealand when she was a child. She left her hometown to attend Princeton University where she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s in economics and minor in computer science. After school, Hanseul joined Alpine, where she invested in and supported a range of companies with ambitions to grow and expand their reach.

“I’ve always loved people who are black sheep: willing to take risks and be different,” she says. She prioritizes founder attributes over experience and views a company’s unique vision as a guiding principle for making investments. “It’s often difficult for people to embrace things that are genuinely new in the world,” she says. “I’m committed to looking past that initial discomfort to find founders and companies whose work sparks an almost unreasonable joy in others.”