If you follow fintech on X, it’s very likely that you have come across the account of Sheel Mohnot, co-founder and general partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures.With over 150,000 followers, Mohnot has built an impressive presence on the social media site. Interestingly, many of his posts have nothing to do with venture capital.Mohnot started Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) after co-founding a few companies, including FeeFighters, which sold to Groupon in 2012. BTV, which has $300 million under management, focuses on investing mainly at the pre-seed and seed stage in fintech startups. It also operates an accelerator, The Mint. Since its November 2019 inception, BTV has backed the likes of AngelList, Charlie, Coast, and Unit. Mohnot personally has also invested as an angel for over a decade, writing checks into companies such as Flexport, Ironclad, Ethos Insurance, and Apartment List. I hopped on the mic to interview Mohnot to record an episode of Equity Podcast, and we discussed topics like how he built such a large following on X with viral posts, how he ended up appearing in a Justin Bieber video, what areas of fintech he’s most excited about, and his thoughts on where artificial intelligence is really working in the fintech world.This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.Besides being somewhat of an influencer on social media, your main job is investing in fintech startups out of Better Tomorrow Ventures. Let’s talk briefly about what BTV considers to be a fintech company.We think a lot more things are fintech than other people do. So as an example, we think about vertical SaaS as being fintech. And if you think about the Toasts and Shopifys of the world, over 80% of their revenues are financial services. So we think of those as fintech companies. And then also B2B marketplaces, we think of as fintech companies too.OK, we’re going to come back to fintech. But first, I’d like to talk about your social media strategy. You have over 151,000 followers on X. How did you become a social media star?I don’t know if I’m a star, but I do enjoy it. I first signed up for Twitter a long time ago, but I really was not very active until the pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, I was active on Clubhouse — as I was so bored at home. I became super active there and accumulated a crazy number of followers. I think like 3.3 million. But of course that’s not really relevant anymore. The only way to write to people on Clubhouse was via Twitter. So that naturally led to doing stuff on Twitter and more followers there. I just started to write, and found that I really liked it. I like sharing ideas and getting feedback from people.What have been your most viral posts over the years?My wife actually posted about herself being in a meme at the Folsom Street Fair with an expression on her face where she’s like, “Why? How did I end up here?” That got 250,000 likes. But the one from my account was in the midst of me seeing a lot
Mer. Feb 12th, 2025
