"Hey, I'm Neik Shariati. I'm a first-yea...

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"Hey, I'm Neik Shariati. I'm a first-year from McLean, Virginia, and I'm planning to study econ.

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What got me into startups was building one. In high school I started ClaryticAI, an A.I platform that helped private equity firms research software and healthcare I.T companies they wanted to buy. I got it to about six thousand a month in revenue and ended up selling it.

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The thing that stuck with me is that in investing, you're judging decisions someone else made. When you're building, every call is yours, and you find out really fast if you were wrong. I like that pressure, and it's why I want to build something during college."

2. A startup you find interesting (~60 sec)

"A startup I find really interesting is KoBold Metals. They use A.I to find critical minerals, and they've already made a major copper discovery in Zambia.

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It caught my attention because of a paper I wrote this summer modeling copper prices out to 2035. Everyone talks about A.I driving demand for copper and silver, but I found A.I is only about ten percent of copper demand growth. The real constraint is supply. A new mine can take sixteen to thirty-two years to come online.

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That's why brownfield versus greenfield matters. Expanding near existing mines is much faster than building on brand new sites. And KoBold's biggest win so far was actually on a deposit others had already explored, which kind of supports that.

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So the question I'd want answered as an investor is whether their edge in finding deposits turns into an edge in actually getting mines built."

3. Why Midway + what you'd bring (~45 sec)

"I'm interested in Midway because it's one of the only places on campus where people building companies and people evaluating them are in the same room, and I want to be around both. I'd love to learn from people who are further along and have them pressure-test my ideas early.

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As for what I'd bring, I've screened hundreds of companies and I'm comfortable doing diligence and building financial models. I also build with A.I. This summer I built a three-agent workflow that researched and scored acquisition targets, and I think something like that could be really useful for Midway's sourcing or for the startups we work with.

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