Joseph Aaron
Founder of TRAC
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Founder
2019 - Current
TRAC is a technology company with a VC business model. Our Alpha is data and how we apply that data. Think Moneyball for VC. Unlike traditional venture firms, we do not look for needles in a haystack. We eliminate the hay. Our prediction technology combines human and machine intelligence to identify (early) those startups likely to become market leaders. If we approach your startup, we have already decided to invest. No further due diligence is required. We also know that you do not need our money. You have several venture funds that already found you and are clamoring to invest. You should agree to a Zoom so we can share data that will confirm your startup's current valuation. That is data you can use. We will also give you the data that identified your startup as well as the data on your competition. Our minimum investment is $250K and we will invest up to $2M immediately.
Co-Founder
2016 - 2019
Annoyed by my abject failures to invest successfully in venture funds and/or technology startups, Dr. Steve Marek and I started DaaS Analytics to seek a cure. We created 12 data-driven metrics to rate and rank early-stage investors. We called the top 1/10 of 1% of these investors SuperForecasters. The name is borrowed from the book "Superforecasters: The Art and Science of Prediction", by Dr. Philip Tetlock. We identified approximately 5,000 DaaS-rated investors. The top 1,000 DaaS-rated investors were classified in the order of their predictability: SuperForecasters, Industry SuperForecasters, and Industry Experts. The bottom 4,000 were called Qualified Investors. A Qualified Investor's criteria required a performance record in the top 5% of all venture investors. When a "crowd" of these knowledgeable investors congregate into the same startup, the probability of success increases. This algorithm is currently being used to identify hypergrowth venture-backed companies for TRAC.
Public Speaker
2014 - 2015
I declared myself an "Economic Futurist" and immersed myself in the study of technological and demographic trends in society and their impact on the economy. To my absolute amazement, groups paid (very little) to hear what I had to say.
Founder
1991 - 2006
I ran a fund of hedge funds composed of long/short "Jones Model" funds. Alpha was so much easier to spot in those days because very few managers actually knew how to short. My fund was net short through the 2000 Bear Market and covered in 2003. In 2005, and I still wonder what happened, my 15+ managers stopped producing Alpha. Worse, I was unable to find replacements to deploy the capital. I decided to return capital and shut down the Fund. I had fun. My claim to fame during that time was I talked the old Montgomery Securities into holding the first Hedge Fund Conference in 1996. That forever changed how hedge funds raised their capital. By the turn of the century, all the Prime Brokers were sponsoring capital introduction conferences.
Founder
1981 - 1991
I became a retail stockbroker at Dean Witter just in time to catch the great Bull Market of the decade. I became a wholesaler of financial products spending most of the decade fundraising for long-only money managers. This lover affair ended when I could no longer avoid the ugly truth that active management could not consistently outperform passive management. My career was rescued with the emergence of the long/short hedge fund.
Special Agent
1971 - 1981
Foreign Counterintelligence. Middle East. I was the Press Spokesman for the San Francisco office for four years.