For Maryam Khan, venture capital did not begin with a fund. It began with being a founder, a mother and an entrepreneur who experienced firsthand how difficult the earliest stages of building a company can be. For the past decade, Maryam and her husband have been building ventures together while raising their three children, with her husband providing the support that allowed her to pursue work she believes matters. That experience shaped one of her strongest convictions: women should not have to choose between their families and their ambitions.
Maryam’s transition from founder to investor came from seeing the same pattern repeatedly. Talented women had strong ideas, deep expertise and the determination to build, yet many struggled to access the networks, mentorship and capital that could help those ideas become companies. Mizan is her attempt to change that equation, not simply by writing checks but by building the rooms, relationships and ecosystem that many founders never get access to.
The Loneliness of Building From Zero
Maryam knows what the earliest stages of entrepreneurship feel like because she lived them herself. With Shams & Laylah, she built as a solo founder without a team or outside capital, learning how much of the early journey depends on the people willing to stand behind you. Every company she built reinforced the same lesson: a founder’s ability matters, but so does the quality of the network surrounding that founder.
Over time, Maryam began noticing the same struggle among women founders around her. The ideas were often not the problem. Access was. She saw talented women with compelling businesses stall because they lacked the mentors, introductions and capital that could help them move forward.
Her advisors eventually helped her recognize that her strengths extended beyond building products. Maryam was also good at creating communities, networks and trust. A fund, she realized, could turn that ability into something much larger, allowing her to create the kind of support system she wished she had when she was starting out.
From Founder Instincts to Investor Judgment
Being a founder has fundamentally changed the way Maryam evaluates founders. She has little interest in judging an entrepreneur by how polished a pitch deck looks because she knows what it means to pitch while running a household and doing the work of several people at once. Instead, she pays attention to how founders think, how quickly they learn and whether they are honest about what is happening inside the business.
For Maryam, a messy deck is not necessarily a warning sign at pre-seed. A founder who can clearly explain what is not working, what they have learned and what they are doing next can reveal more than a beautifully presented set of vanity metrics. She wants to see evidence of curiosity, adaptability and the ability to bring other people into the mission, whether that means early customers, a first employee or a community.
Her founder experience has also shaped how she thinks about the role of capital. A check can provide runway, but the right introduction at the right moment can change a company’s trajectory in ways that money alone cannot. That is why Mizan is designed to bring more than capital to the table.
The Problem Was Bigger Than a Funding Gap
Maryam’s decision to build an investment platform was not triggered by one dramatic event. It emerged from repetition: the same conversations, the same barriers and the same pattern of talented women struggling to access opportunities that seemed much more readily available inside established networks.
Through founder communities, Maryam repeatedly encountered women who had the ability to build but did not have equal access to mentorship, warm introductions and investors. Many of the networks through which those opportunities circulated were networks these founders simply were not part of. She kept waiting for someone to build the bridge between those founders and the capital ecosystem.
Eventually, Maryam realized that waiting was itself becoming part of the problem. If nobody built that bridge, the next generation of founders would encounter the same barriers. So she decided to build it herself, turning her experience in entrepreneurship and community-building into the foundation for Mizan.
The goal was never simply to create another fund. It was to create access.
Why Mizan, and Why Now?
The fund did not always have its current name. Its original name served an important purpose: it helped signal to women founders that they were being seen and understood, and that positioning brought considerable early energy to the community. But conversations with investors revealed a potential limitation: a name centered too heavily on identity could cause people to view the fund as a niche vehicle or even a charitable initiative.
Maryam believes Mizan represents the broader philosophy more accurately. The word means balance, capturing the tension she wants the fund to navigate: returns and values, rigor and heart, ambition and wellbeing. The founders Mizan serves have not changed; the name simply communicates more clearly that the fund is building serious companies and pursuing serious investment outcomes.
That distinction is important to Maryam because identity is not the investment thesis. Mizan does not invest in founders simply because they belong to an underrepresented group. It invests because it believes some founders are overlooked despite having the potential to build significant companies.
Betting on the Founder Before the Numbers
At pre-seed, there is often very little data to work with, which means Maryam places significant weight on the founder. Her concept of founder-market fit goes beyond asking whether someone has worked in an industry. She wants to understand why this particular person is uniquely positioned to solve this particular problem, often because they have experienced the problem themselves.
She also watches what happens between conversations. Does the founder learn quickly? Do they return having acted on previous feedback? Are they transparent about what is not working? Can they persuade early customers, recruit a first employee or build a community around an idea?
The market still needs to be real and sufficiently large, but Maryam does not treat early traction as an absolute requirement. At this stage, she would rather see a founder who has deeply understood 20 customers than one who has accumulated vanity metrics without understanding the underlying problem. Traction is a signal, but at pre-seed it is not necessarily the whole story.
There is another condition: Mizan needs to be able to add value beyond the check. Maryam wants to invest in areas where the fund’s networks, knowledge and relationships can genuinely help the founder build.
Overlooked Doesn’t Mean Undeserving. It Can Mean Underpriced.
One of Maryam’s most distinctive perspectives is the difference between investing in an underserved demographic and investing in an overlooked opportunity. Mizan does not invest because someone is underrepresented. Maryam believes the opportunity exists when talented founders are overlooked by traditional venture networks and that persistent lack of attention can create a form of market mispricing.
When capital repeatedly fails to recognize talented founders, Maryam sees something more than a social problem. She sees a potential investment opportunity. Many of these entrepreneurs are building from lived experience, giving them insight into customers, behaviors and problems that investors outside those communities may not see.
The investment bar, however, remains the same. Being overlooked may explain why Mizan is interested in a founder, but it does not determine whether that founder deserves investment. For Maryam, the company still needs a real market, a compelling founder and the potential to become a meaningful business.
Building an Ecosystem That Outlasts a Fund
Mizan is still raising Fund I, so Maryam is careful to distinguish the fund’s pipeline from an investment track record. Yet the founders she is meeting are already reinforcing her thesis: the entrepreneurs who stand out often experienced a problem personally or within their communities and began building before anyone gave them permission.
Some already have revenue, research backing or real users, while having raised very little outside capital. For Maryam, those signals reveal something that a pitch deck cannot manufacture: commitment. She has learned from building companies that early excitement can be deceptive, while commitment appears in smaller moments, such as following through, acting on feedback and continuing to build when nobody is watching.
Her ambition extends beyond Mizan’s own portfolio. Through initiatives such as Angel Academy, Maryam wants to help more women become confident direct investors, creating another layer of change in who gets to participate in venture capital. Her belief is straightforward: when the people writing checks change, the pool of founders receiving those checks can change too.
Over the next decade, Maryam wants Mizan to become known first for serious returns, because those returns create the credibility to build everything around them: founder communities, investor education, partnerships and future funds. Her most ambitious vision is a cycle in which today’s founders eventually become tomorrow’s limited partners and investors, creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem of capital, knowledge and opportunity.
For Maryam, that is what balance ultimately means: not choosing between returns and values, family and ambition, or founders and investors, but building an ecosystem where those forces can strengthen one another.
