You ever get caught up in a scandal and suddenly everyone forgets what you actually built? That's basically what happened to Lachy Groom when his San Francisco mansion got hit by an armed robber who made off with $11 million in crypto. The headlines immediately pivoted to "Sam Altman's ex-boyfriend" and suddenly nobody wanted to talk about his actual resume anymore.

But here's the thing—if you actually dig into what this guy has accomplished, the robbery becomes almost a footnote in what's honestly a pretty insane career arc.

Lachy Groom is 31. Australian. And by most Silicon Valley standards, he's already lived like five different successful lives.

Let me back up. Kid grows up in Perth, teaches himself to code at 10, founds and sells three companies before he's 17. Not side projects—actual businesses. By the time he's old enough to think about college, he's already figured out that traditional education isn't the move. So what does he do? Packs up, moves to San Francisco, and gets hired as Stripe's 30th employee.

Stripe wasn't even the household name it is now. But Groom spent seven years there (2012-2018), watching it transform into a Silicon Valley titan. He wasn't just watching though—he was building. Led their card issuing business, managed global expansion into Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand. This wasn't just a job. It was basically a paid MBA in how to scale a B2B SaaS company from zero to a hundred-billion-dollar business.

When he left in 2018, he had three things: financial freedom, deep operational knowledge, and a ticket into what people call the "Stripe Mafia"—basically the network that now runs half of VC in Silicon Valley.

Then he became a solo investor. And this is where it gets interesting.

Most angel investors throw money at 100 companies hoping a few stick. Groom's different. He's a sniper. When he sees something, he writes checks for $100K to $500K and moves fast. His thesis is pretty straightforward: invest in tools people want to use, not software they're forced to use.

The results speak for themselves. According to PitchBook, he's made 204 investments across 122 companies. Some of his bets:

Figma—invested in the seed round in 2018 at a $94 million valuation. When it IPO'd last year (July 2025), market cap hit $67.6 billion on day one. That's roughly a 185x return. Not bad.

Notion—lead investor in 2019 when it was at $800 million. Two years later, $10 billion valuation. Last I checked, they're doing over $500 million in annualized revenue.

Ramp, Lattice—early bets on fintech and HR tools that reshaped how companies operate.

The pattern is obvious: he invests in products that fundamentally change how people work.

But here's what's wild—he's not done. In March 2024, Groom co-founded Physical Intelligence with some seriously heavy hitters. We're talking former Google DeepMind researchers, Stanford professors, ex-Tesla engineers. The mission: build a universal AI model that becomes the "brain" for robots.

Capital markets went absolutely crazy. $70 million seed round in month one. Then $400 million seven months later with Jeff Bezos backing it. Just last November, another $600 million round at a $5.6 billion valuation.

So yeah. The robbery made headlines because of Sam Altman. But if you actually look at what Lachy Groom has built—from Stripe's early team to backing Figma and Notion before anyone knew what they were, to now building AI robotics—the "ex-boyfriend" label is basically irrelevant.

This is just a guy who figured out how to consistently identify the next wave of innovation before everyone else caught on. That's the actual story worth paying attention to.