Just saw this wild story about Lachy Groom and honestly, it's way more interesting than the headlines suggest. Everyone keeps leading with "Sam Altman's ex-boyfriend" when the actual story is so much crazier.

So yeah, there was this armed robbery at a San Francisco mansion—$11 million in crypto stolen, the whole dramatic thing. But here's what people are missing: the guy who owned that house? Lachy Groom. And his real story makes you realize the robbery is basically just a footnote in an absolutely insane resume.

Let me break this down. Lachy Groom is a 31-year-old Australian who basically skipped the traditional playbook. Started coding at 10, founded and sold three companies by 17, then made the bold call to leave Perth and head straight to Silicon Valley because he figured out early that valuations in the US were way higher than back home. No college, just raw ambition.

He joined Stripe as employee #30 back in 2012. Seven years there, watching the company transform into a Silicon Valley behemoth. That wasn't just a job—it was basically an accelerated MBA in building scalable B2B SaaS. By the time he left in 2018, Lachy Groom had three things: financial freedom, deep operational knowledge, and a golden ticket into the Stripe Mafia (you know, that network of ex-Stripe folks who now basically run half of VC).

Then he went solo as an angel investor, but not the typical spray-and-pray type. Lachy Groom's approach? He's a sniper. When he sees something, he writes massive checks—$100K to $500K—and moves fast. His thesis is simple: invest in tools people actually want to use, not software they're forced to.

And his hit rate is absolutely ridiculous. He got into Figma's seed round when it was valued at $94M. That thing just went public in July 2025 and hit a $67.6B market cap on day one. His 185x return on that alone is nuts. Then there's Notion—he led the round at $800M valuation in 2019, and two years later it was worth $10B. He also bet early on Ramp, Lattice, and other products that fundamentally changed how people work.

But here's where it gets really interesting. Lachy Groom got bored making money from software. Last year he co-founded Physical Intelligence, a robotics company trying to build the "brain" for robots using AI. The team is insane—former Google DeepMind researchers, Stanford professors, ex-Tesla engineers. And the capital markets are going absolutely wild for it.

They raised $70M seed in March 2024, then $400M in November, then just closed another $600M round in November bringing the valuation to $5.6B. Jeff Bezos personally participated. That's the kind of momentum you see when serious people believe you're working on something that actually matters.

So yeah, the robbery happened, the headlines went crazy because of the Sam Altman connection, but the real story? Lachy Groom is out here building the future while everyone else is still catching up. The "ex-boyfriend" label is doing some serious heavy lifting to minimize what this guy actually is: a talent magnet who's been right about the future three times over.