Ghazwa Khalatbari

Ghazwa is a Vice President based in our San Francisco office. A generalist, she's particularly drawn to AI infrastructure, developer tools, software eating the physical world - and the creative tools quietly changing how humans make things.

Born in Paris to a Persian father and a Syrian Lebanese mother, I was raised in a family shaped by politics and contradictions - at home were stories of revolution and exile; outside was the sharp logic of systems and structure. We spoke four languages around the dinner table, and I picked up two more along the way. Moving between them taught me how to inhabit different ways of thinking - each one a window into how another mind organizes the world.

I never met my grandfather. He was disappeared in Iran before I was born. My great-uncle, a diplomat, became my bridge to that world. I grew up staring at those photographs, wondering how history moves through people. For a while, I considered that path. But I realized politics rewards performance. I was more interested in truth.

At Columbia, I studied political science and economics to understand how incentives shape behavior but spent equal time falling down rabbit holes - string theory, or what Freud and Jung really fought about. After summer mediating research between UNESCO ambassadors on a sensitive dispute, it became clear I wanted to operate in arenas where ideas move faster and decisions compound.

My time at Brevan Howard taught me how markets and incentives move together. Private equity sharpened my understanding of how mature businesses operate. But the world was accelerating. Friends were building. AI was doing things I hadn't imagined. I felt something pulling. So, I leaped. As the first commercial hire at an early-stage startup, I ran everything from AI product testing to go-to-market – learning what it really means to drag something from zero to one: the exhilaration, the loneliness, and the critical importance of who you build with.

As AI shifted from research frontier to economic force, I moved into venture at Lux Capital and relocated to San Francisco to be closer to founders building new technical primitives and redefining what software can abstract.

To me, venture is journalism by another name: assembling fragmented signals into conviction, interrogating assumptions, and staying honest about what you don’t yet know. The difference is that here, you back the builders rewriting the systems.

Joining Creandum felt less like a decision and more like alignment. I had long admired the founders the firm backed - technical, product-driven, often early to shifts others hadn’t yet articulated, and above all, kind. 

When the opportunity came to help expand Creandum’s presence in the US, it felt obvious. I’m European, I live in America, and I’ve spent my whole life finding meaning in the spaces between things.

The best part of this job is sitting with founders in the earliest, most ambiguous moments - when the architecture is still forming and the narrative isn’t clean. After you strip everything back, the question is simple: does this founder understand something others don’t and do they have the stamina to build through ambiguity?

Beyond chasing companies, I chase new countries, spontaneous adventures, good food, and time with my family. My sister is a therapist and my brother a music producer, which means I'm equally likely to be found deep in conversation about the human psyche or somewhere in a crowd cheering him on.