Founded Earthling VC (backed by Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Andrew Chen, Adam Draper), a venture capital fund investing in pre-seed companies supercharging the next paradigm shift in digital technology.

Before entering venture, Arien was a senior machine learning engineer at Meta Reality Labs working on spatial AI, and operator-angel investor. In his own words: “I’m a failed startup founder in an earlier life.”

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Income details

Note: Arian is no longer at Meta, but this was the information from when he was an Engineer at Meta.

Compensation is interesting because you get compensated through salary but also In my case, stock makes up about 40% of my income, which in total is somewhere between $275-325K.

‍I typically sell my stock right away, so it’s basically cash as well.

Investing Philosophy

"Currently, I’m saving a lot of money. A lot more cash than I historically save. I’m in the process of transitioning from engineer to fund manager, and I want to have some degree of cash certainty in the beginning.

*Aside from that, I probably have one of the most aggressive investing strategies of anybody on the planet, which ***means virtually no savings and plowing everything into highly asymmetric bets. I have a very specific reason for doing this and it’s very calculated.

A lot of people put their disposable income into index funds that appreciate an average of 5-10% per year under normal market conditions. In my opinion, that’s the definition of mediocrity, i.e. doing what everybody else is doing.

Unless you already have a large amount of capital to start with, you won’t have an extraordinary life or outcome by just investing 5-6-figure savings (what most early-career folks can typically save). You basically know what your future holds. For some people that works, for me, it doesn’t.

Around the same time that I began angel investing is also the same time that I started caring about my portfolio because I also started making real money.

Since then, about 75% of my money has gone into angel investing and 25% into Bitcoin. I’ve put money into nothing else, and I would typically have less than $10K sitting in cash at any given moment. I don’t have any public equities as I sell my Meta shares immediately when they vest"

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Portfolio Composition

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Financial Stack

• Charles Schwab - my Meta shares vest through Schwab
• Wells Fargo - for personal banking
• Spreadsheets - for budgeting and keeping track of my finances and investments
• Chase - credit card
• Robinhood - mostly for crypto
• Ledger - for crypto cold storage
• Amex - credit card

And, I encourage everyone to get a good CPA. Mine got me about $18K in savings for $1K spent on the CPA.

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