The setup
Ralo is a mortgage platform that helps homebuyers find the best rates. Helly Shah and Arjun Lalwani went through YC's X25 batch and raised a seed round. As a consumer fintech company, most of their founder network skews B2B SaaS. When they have consumer-specific questions about marketing, growth, or operations, the usual founder group chats aren't much help.
What Ken did
Ken Horenstein is a Founder and Partner at Pack Ventures, a pre-seed and seed fund with roots at the University of Washington. His approach is different from most investors: he doesn't try to be the expert on everything. He figures out who is.
- He connects Ralo to the right people for whatever they're dealing with. Founders who've solved similar problems, agencies that specialize in what they need, advisors for specific questions. When Ralo needed to talk to other consumer founders, because almost everyone in their network runs a B2B SaaS company, Ken pulled together introductions to consumer companies in his own portfolio.
- He organized workshops for practical founder needs like tax strategy and asset protection. Things that matter to first-time founders but rarely come up in investor conversations.
The result
Ralo got access to people they wouldn't have found on their own. Consumer founders going through similar challenges, specialists for operational questions, and practical guidance on the personal side of starting a company.
"He never assumes he knows enough to opine. He just connects you with the right person who's going to give you better advice than he would."
-- Helly Shah, Co-Founder & CTO, Ralo
The takeaway
Ken's edge is knowing what he doesn't know. When he's skeptical or out of his depth on a topic, he says so and makes the introduction instead. For a consumer fintech company surrounded by B2B SaaS founders, that kind of honest connector matters more than another investor with opinions.