Mike Montano

Mike is a partner at True. He's a former founder and operator, and he builds more now than at any point in his career.

He founded BackType, a True Fund II company and social analytics business acquired by Twitter in 2011. At Twitter he spent over a decade scaling the engineering organization, most recently as head of engineering — the full arc from a handful of people in a room to a platform serving hundreds of millions.

He invests at the earliest stages, with a focus on AI infrastructure and agentic systems, and writes about them from the builder's seat rather than the analyst's — essays like Loops and Swarms and Agentic Infrastructure come out of systems he actually runs.

Most of what he ships now is in service of founders: tooling that sources deals, does the first pass of diligence, and turns two decades of True's founder relationships into something his agents can reason over. He's obsessed with True becoming a genuinely AI-native firm — not a firm that invests in AI, but one whose own work compounds through it — and with what that same shift demands of the companies he backs.

Mike advises founders on product, technology, hiring, and building high-performing organizations.

Pitch his AI and see what he thinks.