General Partner & Co-Founder at BlueYard Capital · Joined 2016
View Live Interactive Profile →Ciarán O'Leary is the son of former IDA Ireland chief Barry O'Leary, giving him an unusually direct family-level view of how global technology investment decisions get made. He built his early venture career as a Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital in Berlin, where he backed Wunderlist (later acquired by Microsoft) and Peak Games (sold to Zynga for $1.8 billion) alongside future BlueYard co-founder Jason Whitmire. The two broke off to found BlueYard in 2016, organizing the firm's entire investment thesis around three forces - decentralization of markets, democratization of capabilities, and liberation of data - deliberately backing companies addressing what O'Leary calls civilization-scale problems years before they reach consensus with other investors. That conviction produced BlueYard's seed investment in Protocol Labs, the company behind Filecoin, and the firm's debut fund generated a 76% gross IRR and 3.4x DPI.