The most durable companies are built around fundamental human systems — how people learn, work, and live. These markets are large, compounding, and often underpriced.
Our team has spent over a decade investing inside these systems — learning where they break, how they scale, and deploying capital to founders whose proximity allows them to see what the market misses.
Ruthless for Good is relentless about the companies we back–and principled about the people they serve.
Aaron T. Walker is the Founding General Partner of Ruthless for Good. Aaron grew up on the line between two New Jersey zip codes. One had an award-winning high school. The other didn’t. Same talent on both sides. Different outcomes. That was the first broken system he noticed. It wasn’t the last.
He graduate from UVA, then law school at Penn. He taught ninth-grade English in West Philadelphia. As a lawyer at Allen & Overy, he had a front-row seat to the 2008 financial crisis and the machinery of capital moving in its own interest.
Working in education and big law, raising a venture philanthropy fund, and building four companies exposed the same pattern: the people closest to the problems could see what the market did not value yet.
In 2015, Aaron built an accelerator (Camelback Ventures) for founders who didn’t have VC access to friends-and-family capital. Over a decade, they invested in 180+ founders that went on to raise $365M and impact 6 million people. That was the apprenticeship. Ruthless for Good is built on this proximity and pattern recognition.
Michael is a believer in the creators, designers, and inventors of world changing technologies that don’t wait for permission to do Good. He can be found rolling up his sleeves to partner with mission driven startup founders to develop business models, financial analysis, market strategy, or whatever is needed to make impactful visions a reality.
To support founders, Michael pulls on his interdisciplinary multi-industry experiences; from driving Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and corporate transactions as an investment banker (Prairie Capital Advisors) to impact investing in startups that broaden the path to economic opportunity (Impact America Fund), paired with leading product & marketing teams in business & operational strategy (Discover Financial Services). At the Ruthless for Good Fund, Michael aims to reel in an equitable future, by investing in the unyielding builders of that future today.
