The best investors are not always the most aggressive ones. Sometimes, the most powerful edge in the room is the ability to think clearly, act ethically, and hold both at once.

Setareh Heshmat has built her reputation on exactly that combination. As Director of ESG Investments at a Singapore-based venture capital firm, she occupies a rare professional space — one where spreadsheets and principles carry equal weight, where a founder's governance structure matters as much as their growth projections, and where the question "is this a good investment?" is always followed by another: "is this a good thing to invest in?"

Understanding how she thinks is, in many ways, a window into the future of investing itself.

The Analytical Foundation

Setareh's intellectual framework was built with unusual care and deliberateness.

Her undergraduate years at the National University of Singapore gave her the quantitative backbone of a trained financial analyst — an ability to read markets, model risk, and think rigorously about capital allocation. Her Master's in Finance and Sustainability from INSEAD layered in the systemic thinking required to connect financial decisions to their broader environmental and social consequences. Her CFA designation added institutional depth and professional discipline. And her MIT data analytics training gave her the modern toolkit to work with large, complex datasets and extract meaningful signal from noise.

The result is a mind that moves naturally between the abstract and the concrete — equally comfortable building a discounted cash flow model and designing an impact measurement framework from scratch.

But analytical rigor, she has been clear, is a tool. Not a value system.

Where Rigor Meets Ethics

The tension that many investors feel between financial performance and ethical conduct is, for Setareh, largely a false one — but it requires active work to resolve.

She approaches every investment with a dual mandate: to generate strong returns for her firm's limited partners, and to ensure that every company in the portfolio is creating genuine, measurable value for people and the planet. These two objectives do not always point in the same direction at first glance. The skill — and the discipline — lies in finding investments where they do, and in structuring her analysis to surface that alignment.

"Ethical constraints are not limitations on your investment universe," she has explained to peers. "They are a filter that removes fragility. Companies with poor governance, extractive models, or disregard for environmental risk carry hidden liabilities that don't always show up in early-stage numbers."

This perspective is informed not just by principle, but by pattern recognition. Over years of evaluating startups, she has observed that founders who cut ethical corners early — in their treatment of employees, their environmental practices, their governance structures — tend to create compounding problems as they scale. The short-term gain rarely survives contact with growth.

Perfectionism as a Professional Force

Those who work closely with Setareh describe a woman of unusually high standards — for herself, for the companies she backs, and for the broader practice of impact investing.

She is a self-acknowledged perfectionist, a trait that drives both her strengths and her occasional tendency to overwork. She holds her analysis to a standard that most would consider excessive, triple-checking assumptions, stress-testing models, and revisiting conclusions when new information emerges. She expects the same rigorous honesty from the founders she backs.

This perfectionism is not rooted in ego. It is rooted in stakes. She genuinely believes that the capital she deploys has consequences — for climate outcomes, for communities, for the credibility of ESG investing as a discipline. Getting it wrong is not just a financial loss. It is a missed opportunity to move the world in a better direction.

Managing that weight, she has acknowledged, requires active effort. Pilates, yoga, and marathon running are not hobbies so much as disciplines — practices that build the mental endurance required to sustain high-performance thinking over the long term.

The Philosophy Behind the Portfolio

Setareh is an avid reader, and her intellectual influences are as eclectic as her career.

She gravitates toward books on behavioral economics — thinkers like Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler who have mapped the ways in which human decision-making deviates from the rational actor models that traditional finance assumes. For an investor, this literature is not just intellectually interesting. It is operationally useful. Understanding cognitive bias — in herself, in founders, in market participants — helps her make better decisions and ask better questions.

She is equally drawn to philosophy, particularly traditions that grapple with questions of ethics, long-term thinking, and the relationship between individual action and collective outcomes. Though non-religious, she describes herself as spiritually inclined — open to frameworks of meaning that extend beyond the purely material.

This philosophical grounding gives her investment thinking a dimension that purely technical analysis lacks. She is not just asking what will happen. She is asking what should happen, and how capital can be one of the mechanisms that closes the gap between the two.

Empathy as an Investment Skill

In a field that often prizes emotional detachment, Setareh makes a quiet but firm case for empathy as a core professional competency.

Understanding a founder's lived experience — the community they come from, the problem they have personally witnessed, the constraints they are operating under — produces better investment decisions, she argues. It surfaces information that a pitch deck cannot capture. It builds the kind of trust that makes founders honest about their challenges rather than performatively optimistic. And it creates the foundation for a genuine long-term partnership, which is ultimately what the best venture capital relationships are.

Her empathy is not indiscriminate. She is analytical about it, channeling it in service of better judgment rather than allowing it to cloud her assessment. But it is real, and it is one of the qualities that founders who have worked with her cite most consistently.

The Integrated Mind

What is most striking about Setareh Heshmat's approach to investing is not any single quality, but the integration of all of them.

The analytical rigor and the ethical commitment. The perfectionism and the empathy. The quantitative discipline and the philosophical depth. The focus on financial returns and the focus on impact. In most investors, these qualities exist in tension, requiring constant trade-offs and compromises. In Setareh, they appear to have found a genuine synthesis.

It is a synthesis that took years to build — through education, through experience, through deliberate reflection and continuous learning. And it is a synthesis that, she would be the first to say, is never fully complete.

The best investors, like the best thinkers, are always updating their models. Always asking harder questions. Always holding the tension between what they know and what they do not yet understand.

Setareh Heshmat is very good at holding that tension. And in the world of ESG investing, that may be the most valuable skill of all.

Setareh Heshmat is the Director of ESG Investments at a Singapore-based venture capital firm. She holds a CFA designation and a Master's in Finance and Sustainability from INSEAD Singapore.