Nick Arnett

Nick Arnett is currently a Partner at 1517 Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm backing technology companies at their inception. Prior to his venture capital career, he worked at the Thiel Fellowship, where he led community development initiatives and supported a global network of makers, hackers, and young founders. Arnett also founded the WayPaver Foundation, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing lunar settlement and funding early space exploration technologies. Bypassing a formal university degree himself, he started his first entrepreneurial nonprofit organization at age 18 to study and analyze startup ecosystems across small and midsized cities in the United States. He leverages this non-traditional background to identify emerging talent outside standard institutional pipelines. Today, his primary investment focus centers on providing capital to unconventional founders, academic dropouts, and independent scientists developing advanced frontier technologies.