Today we’d like to introduce you to Shane Moise.
Hi Shane, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I actually started out wanting to be a teacher — I designed curriculum and co-taught coursework as an undergrad. I loved it, but I saw how hard it is to sustain that energy quarter to quarter and year over year. My mom was a teacher for over 20 years, and I saw how rewarding the experience could be. At the same time. I knew that she faced consistent resource constraints inside a K-12 system with little support. So I moved toward policy, thinking I’d work in state or federal government at a level that could improve the system for all teachers and students. What I found there was almost the same problem at a different altitude: even good policy runs into funding gaps, deployment failures, and plain avoidance at the ground level.
That’s what pushed me toward innovation work instead — it’s less about designing the perfect solution and more about actively navigating toward whatever actually works. It let me combine an athlete’s mindset toward teams and competition, a real desire for impact, and a knack for spotting unlikely connections between people and ideas.
The teaching part never actually left — it just changed shape. I’m not in a classroom, but a lot of what I do with founders is still teaching: leading by example, helping people learn through direct experience rather than a syllabus. With founders like Jeff Tully, M.D., Erin Walsh, M.D, and Daniel Wangpraseurt, I’m not the scientist or the doctor — they are. My job is helping them navigate a path from discovery to real-world impact. There’s an old proverb I think about a lot and was a consistent refrain during my time at Stanford for grad school: a society grows great when people plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit. That’s most of what this work actually is.
That belief — that universities are essential infrastructure for entrepreneurship, not a nice-to-have — is something I made the case for publicly with Elizabeth Lyons, a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. We wrote about how UC San Diego has helped generate over $13 billion in startup value since 1990, and warned that without continued support, San Diego risks losing hard-won momentum. That path eventually led to founding the Horizon Accelerator at UC San Diego, where I have worked with around 62 startups and key industry partners like Nvidia, Salesforce, Qualcomm, Google, and Bow Capital.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who tells you it was. Early on, the challenge was less about opposition and more about translation and discovery. Navigating UC San Diego means navigating a distributed system: centers of influence and programs that have grown organically over decades to meet different communities’ needs. Nothing about that is a straight line. So a lot of the early work was building alongside our stakeholders, asking founders directly what they actually needed and how it should be delivered, then building the data systems and case-making to show what this kind of program could actually deliver, and earning trust with departments that had much longer track records than we did.
The external side of that same challenge was different. It was about figuring out exactly how much value-add and structure an early-stage venture actually needed to be ready for real outside money, real partners, and the kind of decisions that can make or break a company in its first few years. We studied the signals that mattered most and found a white space, value we could add further down the pipeline than most university programs typically operate. None of that is a one-time fix. The data, the impact, and the relationships all take daily, ongoing effort. It’s not something you solve once and move on from.
Long before Noodle Bagz, I got to watch some good friends, Preston Rutherford, Tom Montgomery, Kyle Hency, and Rainer Castillo, launch Chubbies. I helped with early site selection, getting product into the hands of the short-shorts-loving rugby community, and recruiting models for shoots here in San Diego. Watching them build a brand from nothing, make the hard early trips, and grind through the parts that never make it into a press release taught me more than any class could have, lessons I carried straight into Noodle Bagz. We had drawstrings shipped from China, printed and cut in Pakistan, sewn in LA. One batch came in at 54 inches per drawstring, so we spent a week cutting absurd lengths of excess cord off every single pair. Margins that drift by even a few centimeters can ruin the fit on a garment that’s already using minimal fabric. But we also built photo arches for beach rugby tournaments, played exhibitions at the USC Coliseum and on the World Rugby 7s circuit, and built something with two of my best mates that I’ll carry with me regardless of what the balance sheet said.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ve played rugby for years, on and off since college, and it’s shaped how I think about this work more than any professional training has. A rugby team doesn’t win because it has fifteen talented players. It wins because of everything around those players: coaching, conditioning, a bench, fans who show up, a club that keeps the lights on. Take any one of those away and talent alone doesn’t hold up. That’s the exact problem I work on for startups. A brilliant idea from a lab or a dorm room doesn’t survive contact with the real world on its own. It needs governance, funding structure, legal scaffolding, and people who know how to build a team around a founder.
That’s what Horizon and our Proof of Concept grant programs are built to do. I curate the board and review panels, weigh their assessment alongside my own, and make the final funding decisions, but the rigor of that process, not any one person’s judgment, is what gives it credibility with investors and industry down the line. This year I’ve gotten to watch two very different founders go through that process. For Jeff Tully and Christian Dameff, both physicians at UC San Diego, that meant funding Project CRASHCART, a system that can get a hospital’s core technology running again in hours instead of weeks after a ransomware attack, recruiting them into Horizon on a timeline built around their research schedule, and connecting them with mentors who could help them navigate two things academic founders usually struggle with most: federal contracting and the university’s own bureaucracy. For Daniel Wangpraseurt’s Hybrid Reefs, which is fighting a crisis where we’ve already lost about half the world’s coral reefs, my role was more on the capital side: introducing him to dozens of investors, helping build the bridge toward follow-on funding, and getting his technology in front of strategic partners, like Alma Life Sciences and Lucas Venture Group, who could apply resources to actually scale it.
We can typically fund four to six teams a year through proof-of-concept support, and we see applications from more than fifty researchers. I wish we could fund all of them. That gap is the reason I spend so much energy on the mentorship side of this work, not just the money side. Sometimes the most useful thing I can offer a founder isn’t a check; it’s knowing the right person to call.
I’m also proud of the role I played in bringing Poseidon Fellows to life this year with Shawn Xu, a UC San Diego alumnus, and Elizabeth Lyons. There were twelve students in the first cohort, learning company-building and venture capital directly from people actively doing both.
What ties all of this together for me is the same instinct I bring from rugby: individual brilliance matters, but it’s the structure around it, the team, the systems, the support, that decides whether something great actually survives long enough to matter.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
I garden every day: vegetables, and a few trees with real meaning to my family, like a flamboyant tree from the Caribbean and a manuka tea tree. Most days I’ve got one or more of my three kids out there with me. They’re endlessly curious, always asking questions, always up for an adventure, whether that’s a road trip, a new dish they want to help cook, or Mario Kart taking over the living room. I introduced my eldest to Bob Ross a while back, and he’s completely hooked now, which might be my proudest cultural contribution as a parent. Their taste in music somehow spans BTS, Motörhead, and Imogen Heap, which tells you everything about how their minds work. Watching them explore the world that curiously is, honestly, the best part of my week, and it’s not that different from the instinct behind Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book I’ve given away more times than I can count: it’s about flying for the joy of it, not for what it gets you.
I’d also just say I’m genuinely open to hearing from other builders and creatives in this region, whatever you’re working on, whatever stage it’s at. Some of the best partnerships I’ve been part of started as an unplanned conversation with someone doing interesting work nobody else knew about yet. If that’s you, I’d love to hear about it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://beyondhorizon.ucsd.edu/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanemoise/
