EVERY WOMAN IS AN ISLAND

Matriarchy, money, and a modern mariner named Marina.  

- Virginia Heffernan

MARINA HADJIPATERAS, THE dashing American venture capitalist, has only one word of derision. She speaks it softly and rarely. Conservative. A family can be conservative. An investment, a choice. The way she uses the word, it's never political. It's also never a good thing.

The first time I hear Marina deploy her tender curse is during lunch with her brother Alex on the harborside deck of Zephyros, a seafood restaurant in the fifth-century-BCE port city of Piraeus, near Athens. Sophisticated-God, they're sophisticated, I keep thinking, dimly recalling a line from Fitzgerald. As platters arrive, I'm aware that I've never settled on a way to gracefully extract bones from fish.

Marina, a general partner of the VC firm TMV, which she founded with the Iranian-American entrepreneur Soraya Darabi in 2016, is brooking my questions about something else: Dorian LPG, the public shipping company started by her forebears in the 19th century. At the end of 2023, the company was valued at around $1.9 billion. Its stock price shot up 141 percent in the past year. But it's the company's history that's most thrilling, and each version of the fairy tale I hear is more romantic than the last. Marina's background in shipping, in fact, makes the origin stories of just about every other VC frat house at Harvard, at Stanford, you don't say-look like provincial banalities.

Greek shipping companies like Dorian sometimes seem to have emerged fully formed from tiny, rocky islands, as Athena from the head of Zeus. The tales of their genesis constitute latter-day Greek myths whose gods have bold-faced names like Onassis and Niarchos. Hadjipateras is a less bold-faced name, but these days it's a far more valuable one.

At the same time, Marina's past and patronym haven't been her calling card for a long time. At TMV, she ventures rather than hedges, and she much prefers the future to antiquity.