Shane M. Moran

Shane M. Moran is a Founding Partner of Blue Horseshoe Capital, which he launched in 2014 with Lance White. The firm was built to do one thing: take a network of venture and private-equity opportunities that had long sat with institutions, family offices, and a small circle of insiders and make that access available to retail investors.

Shane’s work is built around a simple question: what problem is this company solving, and is the market large enough and broken enough for the solution to matter? He looks first at the problem, then the market, then the disruption the company is targeting. From there, he considers whether the team can reach the outcome it set out to achieve. He wants to understand why the status quo fails, who feels that failure most acutely, and whether the product can become the default way the problem gets solved. Where he can help a founder, he does: introductions, capital structure, customer conversations, and the unglamorous work of getting from thesis to traction.

His first structured exposure to venture came through Ohio Tech Angels, although the catalyst that ignited his passion for the asset class was attending Y Combinator and spending time afterward with founders, builders, and capital allocators in Silicon Valley. Seeing companies at the earliest stage and sitting with the people building them turned private investing from an allocation into the center of his work.

That venture and private-equity focus sits on a public-market foundation. Shane spent more than 25 years at Morgan Stanley and UBS before joining NewEdge. At Morgan Stanley in New Albany, he served as Director of Investments, responsible for research, individual stock selection and analysis, manager selection, and the implementation of client portfolios. The same habit of tearing apart a market, a product, and a business model is what he now brings to private companies.

Some of his more notable private investments include Facebook, Palantir, Bloom Energy, SpaceX, Figure AI, Hark, and Apptronik.

Today, Shane spends his time on companies trying to change how capital, data, energy, robotics, and intelligence move through large markets and on bringing those opportunities to investors who were historically locked out of them. The goal is not to watch from the sidelines. It is to underwrite the problem clearly, stay close to the founder, and help in any way that improves the odds of the outcome they set out to achieve.

Shane graduated magna cum laude from Wittenberg University, where he also played football. He is deeply involved with the Thanks for Giving 4 Miler, a local charity race close to home in New Albany. When he is not digging into a company’s modus operandi, he enjoys fishing trips “Up North,” snow skiing out west, walking and jogging, and spending time with his family. He resides in New Albany, Ohio.