Just saw this wild story about Lachy Groom trending and honestly, the robbery angle is the least interesting part of his life. Everyone keeps leading with "Sam Altman's ex-boyfriend" but that's like introducing Elon Musk as "Grimes' ex." Let me tell you why this guy's actual resume is insane.



So this 31-year-old Australian started coding at 10 when his grandfather taught him HTML and CSS. By high school he'd already founded and sold three companies. Most kids are worrying about prom—Lachy's already figured out that Australian startups don't scale like Silicon Valley ones. At 17 he literally packed up and moved to San Francisco because he understood one brutal truth: US valuations hit different.

He didn't immediately become a VC though. Instead he joined Stripe as their 30th employee in 2012. Seven years there wasn't just a job—it was a masterclass. He went from growth to running global expansion, led their card issuing business, and watched the company transform into a Silicon Valley heavyweight. That's where he really learned how B2B SaaS scales from zero to billion-dollar territory. More importantly, he joined the "Stripe Mafia"—that crew that basically owns half of VC now.

2018 rolls around and he goes solo. Not joining some mega fund, just pure angel investing. But his approach is completely different from typical angels. While most spray $5k across 100 companies and pray, Lachy's a sniper—$100k to $500k checks, quick decisions, focused thesis. According to PitchBook he's made 204 investments across 122 companies with a legitimately high hit rate.

Now here's where his net worth gets interesting. Check his portfolio: Figma (invested seed round at $94M valuation, now $17.5B after IPO—that's roughly 185x), Notion (led investment when it was $800M, hit $10B two years later), Ramp, Lattice. These weren't lucky shots—there's a clear pattern. He invests in tools people actually want to use, not software they're forced to tolerate.

But he didn't stop there. Last year he co-founded Physical Intelligence with some absolute legends: former Google DeepMind researchers, Stanford professors, Tesla and Anduril engineers. The mission is wild—build a foundational AI model that becomes the "brain" for robots. The capital markets agree it's huge: $70M seed in month one (Thrive, Khosla, OpenAI, Sequoia), $400M Series A in November (Jeff Bezos leading), then $600M Series B just last week bringing valuation to $5.6B. Bezos is literally writing checks for this guy.

So when people ask about Lachy Groom's net worth, they're missing the point. Between his Stripe equity, his angel portfolio returns (especially those mega hits), and his stake in Physical Intelligence at $5.6B valuation, we're talking about someone who's genuinely built multiple fortunes. But the crazy part? He's not even done yet.

The robbery was unfortunate, sure. But that's just noise in a story about someone who went from a Perth teenager teaching himself code to one of Silicon Valley's most feared investors and now building the future of AI robotics. That's the actual headline.
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