On a crypto builders’ night in late September 2023, I lingered in the crowd after the event. It was hosted in a crypto company’s newly renovated office in the center of Bangkok. Skipping the cold pizza (mostly due to my lactose intolerance), I made my way towards a friend who worked in that company, one of the only people I knew in the packed room. He made a few introductions before disappearing back into the crowd, leaving me beside a local Thai founder in his early 30s, Noon (a pseudonym), building a decentralized finance (DeFi) product for futures and margin trading.
Outside a crypto builders event in Bangkok Thailand, 2023. Photo taken by author.
What stayed with me from my conversation with Noon was how he read the room. At events like this, he explained, there are two kinds of people: those you already know (painfully few for me at that point of time), whom you can simply elbow your way towards, and those you don’t, for whom a cold approach is a cultivated skill. Company shirts do some of the work. A logo or a lanyard tells you which company they might be from even before a word is exchanged, and his own firm had grown large enough that his shirt now opened conversations for him. He was in the “middle” category of recognition, not a small, unknown company, nor a famous one that everyone wanted to congregate around.
The hardest people to approach, Noon said, were the venture capitalists. Sometimes their shirt would give them away. More often it is a demeanor, a reserve (ying) that marks the investor as the one holding capital in a room full of people who want it.
Two years later, I had become one of the people he was describing: a venture investor. Anthropologists have long framed studying up as a problem of access: how to get inside institutions that do not want us (Nader 1972; Souleles 2018). My problem was different. I started my ethnographic fieldwork studying crypto from the outside, interviewing traders, state officials, NFT (Non-Fungible Token) or digital artists, and coders, as well as attending a variety of events, like the one where I met Noon. Over the next few years, however, I began working in the crypto industry. In 2024, I was the right hand to a CEO of a crypto company in Singapore, and in 2025, became a venture investor for a crypto-AI company. Having spent time doing both ethnographic fieldwork and leading several venture investments, my problem was less about access than about processing the continuities and frictions between these two roles.
Reflecting on the tension between the two roles, I propose that venture due diligence is ethnography’s adversarial twin. Their techniques are nearly identical: the pre-reading, the candid question, and the ear for what goes unsaid. While they resemble each other, their ethical orientations do not. The leverage that venture investors have, with money on the line, enables a different form of data collection that ethnographers should refuse.
Towards the end of my doctoral program, a colleague from the crypto industry reached out: he was building a team for one of the industry’s most recognizable AI companies, and that team soon became the company’s venture investment arm. After joining in January 2025, we evaluated over a thousand deals and invested in more than 20 early-stage startups in less than a year. STS scholars note that venture capital has become a key driver of technoscientific innovation and a distinctive mode of valuation, one that runs on reflexively told stories about the future, valued backward from an imagined “exit” (Birch 2023). While this literature attends to the importance of venture narratives and their effects, I instead attend to the how—the everyday work of a venture investor and the due diligence process that is a key part of it, evaluating whether a company is investable or not.
Our workflow was adapted from the team lead’s previous fund: source a project, take a call, and if there was interest, advance it into due diligence and produce a memo for the investment committee to discuss. This may sound straightforward. But given AI’s popularity in the 2025 crypto industry, with constant inbound deal flow and 24/7 exposure on X (or Twitter), it was not.
Doing Due Diligence
Due diligence meant gathering everything important about a company: product, team backgrounds, other investors’ terms, token plans, and more, then triangulating it against what the data room (i.e. a secure platform used to store private company documents) did not contain, through reference calls and conversations with people who had worked with the founders. In most calls, founders would be expected to pitch. In many of the calls that I took, as part of evaluating their project, I told them not to pitch, but to have a conversation instead. Most times, I would have already read the deck, and their pitch would have been a presentation of the best, most curated version of themselves. What I wanted to know was the un-rehearsed and what the deck had left out: Why did their cofounder quietly depart? What was their financial runway? Why were certain metrics omitted?
The working axiom of due diligence is that the things people do not want to share are likely the things most worth knowing. Every technique in the process: the candid question during the call, the reference check, or the attention to their hesitation is organized around that axiom. Most venture bets fail, and a fund’s returns rest on rare outliers (Birch 2023; Mallaby 2022), so the entire due diligence process is oriented toward surfacing key risks before capital is committed.
At first glance, venture due diligence looks para-ethnographic. Holmes and Marcus (2006) use the term for the interpretive, person-based knowledge practices embedded inside technical institutions, which emerge precisely where formal analysis fails. They describe the Federal Open Market Committee, where members and district banks sustain networks of situated interlocutors, bankers, manufacturers, and union leaders, explaining that anecdotal reports of sentiment form key data points. Due diligence extends this practice, in a way. Facing early-stage firms with little revenue history and no comparables, a venture investor would use interviews and qualitative judgements to determine whether or how to allocate capital.
But the para, a prefix meaning “beside” or “alongside,” deserves further scrutiny. Due diligence resembles ethnography, but is outfitted with a capital-optimizing set of values. The investor holds leverage: consent to scrutiny is manufactured by the possibility of an investment. The investor digs precisely into the discomfort the subject has not offered to share, because that discomfort is the point. Occasionally, though, the leverage is not absolute. A popular project’s founder can make investors compete for the privilege of writing the check, just as many ethnographers hold a higher social status than their interlocutors. But these two industry and research-based orientations are still fundamentally bifurcated.
Where due diligence extracts, the ethnographer often waits: their interlocutor decides what to share and when. I think of the porch in Barracoon, where Zora Neale Hurston (2018) kept returning with peaches, ham, and insect repellent for Oluale Kossola, one of the last survivors of the Clotilda’s captives, until he was ready to share his life. Or of María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2012) injunction to think-with. Ethnographers here do not try to mimic due diligence in trying to extract information that is hidden, but value instead presence. Due diligence has no porch. Instead, it has a hot seat.
Tracing this divergence is another way to ask about money’s place in ethnography. It is tempting to locate this boundary in money itself: investors pay, ethnographers do not, and that keeps ethnographers clean. A recent intervention in American Ethnologist dismantles this division. Salverda et al. (2026) show that payment has been part of ethnography since Malinowski’s tobacco payments in the Trobriand Islands, and that the “corrupting narrative,” in which money is assumed to taint ethnographic relations, obscures inequalities those relations already contain.
Building on their argument, I locate the tension not in money’s presence but in the direction of its leverage. In due diligence, capital flows conditionally: submit to scrutiny, get funded. The potential payment supports the practice of information extraction. In fieldwork, payment can flow as recognition of time and expertise, with nothing hinging on what the interlocutor chooses to disclose (or not). Money is not just social or “earmarked” as Zelizer (2017) proposes, but a potential investment (or lack thereof) produces different kinds of ethnographic relations and knowledge.
After an investment, the adversarial posture for VCs often inverts. The VC becomes the founder’s champion by making introductions, giving advice, and even recruiting the next round of investors. But it is, again, a form of care with a financial stake. Fieldwork relations, whatever their imperfections, are not supposed to be indexed to a portfolio.
The due in due diligence is far from the same dues that ethnographers owe. This is not a call to denounce VCs or glorify ethnography, but by comparison, train critical attention on the role of money and leverage in ethnographic work. Put a different way, Maurer and Mainwaring (2012) propose an anthropology with business: neither the purity of studying industry from the outside, nor the service work of consulting for it, but a practice that recognizes its entanglements and collaborates without merging. As more STS scholars move between academia and industry, and through various circuits of capital, these questions of ethical knowledge production grow more acute. Money’s leverage, how it is entangled in relations with industry colleagues or interlocutors, and how qualitative data is acquired are not matters to be hidden in the footnotes or appendix. As ethnography’s adversarial twin, the venture investor’s skill is extracting what people would rather not share—surfacing risks for investment, while the ethnographer’s discipline is patience: staying present until what people hold back is offered on their own terms.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my colleagues and interlocutors for prompting the thinking behind this piece
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Toh Sook-Lin, and reviewed by Contributing Editor Samiksha Bhan.
References
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