Alex thinks about investing the way he thinks about sports. He wants to compete and he wants the work to have an impact. At Lightspeed, he focuses on AI infrastructure, AI applications, and defense, with an emphasis on early and early-growth companies. He’s especially drawn to founders using technology to tackle problems with real stakes, from treating disease to helping make the world safer to giving people more time back.

That competitive streak has shaped most of his career. Alex played varsity football at Harvard before spending six years at Summit Partners, where he invested in growth-stage technology companies including ManyChat, Keeper Security, StackAdapt, and Later. Summit also gave him one of the principles he still carries with him: “Hustle scales infinitely.”

After Summit, Alex earned his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. A few days before graduation, he met Bejul Somaia, followed the next day by what was supposed to be a 30-minute coffee with Ravi Mhatre. The coffee turned into a three-hour walk through Menlo Park and a conversation about what it takes to build an enduring firm. Alex heard a lot of the same things he valued himself: humility, competitiveness, and the willingness to keep getting better.

His work ethic started much earlier. Alex’s mother put herself through school, while his father bootstrapped an executive search business he still runs today. Alex remembers his dad taking search calls from Holiday Inn rooms in small towns in Georgia while helping him chase his own athletic ambitions. His father’s reminder was simple: you can’t control what God gave you, but you can control how hard you work.

Alex brings that same mindset to working with founders. He wants to earn the right to be their first call, both when they’re raising capital and when they have a problem. For him, that starts with building the trust and respect that make a real partnership possible.

Outside of work, Alex is usually lifting, hiking, going to live sporting events, or trying a new restaurant. He still sees a lot of investing through an athlete’s lens and believes that progress comes from focus, monotonous compounding, and learning to love the work long before the results arrive.