I'm a tech founder and investor based in Los Angeles.
Raised across Latin America, I now live in L.A., at the edge of Griffith Park. I build and back companies working on genuinely hard things. If it involves atoms, I'm probably interested.
Advising & investing
Through Felt Industries and as a venture partner at Also Capital, I work with founders building in robotics, heavy industry, defense autonomy, and more.
Building something new (again)
Developing a couple of moonshot ideas I hope to share more about soon. The thread connecting them: expanding access to things that matter.
Co-founder · Acquired
Co-founded the company behind the world's most advanced short-burst mobile mesh networking — connectivity independent of cellular, Wi-Fi, or satellite. Deployed by 350+ government agencies. Acquired by Forterra.
Co-founder · Open source
Founder · Civic tech
Founded a national volunteer project to expand voters' access to information on core societal issues through the lens of a grassroots candidate's record.
A reading list, of sorts
Apeirogon
Apeirogon
A thousand fragments that somehow form one devastating whole. Structurally ambitious, bitterly relevant.
How to Love Your Daughter
How to Love Your Daughter
Quiet and absolutely brutal. The gap between what a woman believes she's doing and what she's actually doing.
The Sellout
The Sellout
The funniest book ever written is also one of the smartest. Desperately hope Paul Beatty graces us with another novel someday.
The Counterlife
The Counterlife
Every chapter dismantles the one before it. Epitome of unreliable narrator.
Democracy
Democracy
Didion doing what only Didion can — telling you a story while showing you all the reasons stories can't be told.
Temporada de huracanes
Temporada de huracanes
A single unbroken wave of language that drags you through the darkest depths of rural Mexico. I read it in one sitting.
Disgrace
Disgrace
Short, merciless, impossible to shake.
Pale Fire
Pale Fire
A novel disguised as a poem disguised as literary criticism. Nabokov showing off, deservedly.
Regarding the Pain of Others
Regarding the Pain of Others
What it means to look and not see.
Conquest of the Useless
Conquest of the Useless
Herzog's jungle diary from the Fitzcarraldo shoot. Hallucinatory, obsessive, deeply weird. Love his brain.
La ronde de nuit
La ronde de nuit
Paris, memory, fog. Modiano writes like someone trying to remember a dream — and the dream is Vichy France.
Are You My Mother?
Are You My Mother?
Bechdel maps her relationship with her mother through psychoanalysis.
Toward a Psychology of Awakening
Toward a Psychology of Awakening
Where Western psychology meets Buddhist practice, without the usual hand-waving. Genuinely useful.
No Bad Parts
No Bad Parts
The IFS framework explained by its creator. Shifted how I relate to the parts of myself I'd rather not look at.
Post Office
Post Office
Filthy, funny, weirdly tender. The anti-work novel before anyone called it that.
The Association of Small Bombs
The Association of Small Bombs
A novel about terrorism that's really about aftermath — how a single explosion ripples through ordinary lives for years.
The Sympathizer
The Sympathizer
Only book that's ever made me laugh out loud AND cry (of sadness).
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
1,200 pages of journalism from someone who was actually there. The definitive record. Uncanny and necessary.
© 2026 Daniela Perlein | All rights reserved.