Meghan Heintz
- Based in
- Brooklyn
- Day job
- Startup Jack of All Trades (Machine Learning Engineer / Product Manager / GTM)
- Book Club since
- 2016
- Book Reviews since
- 2023
- Investing since
- 2025
Backstory
I am a simple woman who is trying to make sure her brain doesn't turn to mush through the age of AI by creating structured reasons to read arXiv and learn new skills. I started my sci-fi book club when I first moved to NYC as a way to farm friends. It worked! I've met a lot of great people from all kinds of backgrounds and read approximately 1M books on whether AI has a soul. Spoilers: the AI the main character wants to bang always has a soul!
I started reviewing the books on Substack a couple years ago. After my last maternity leave, I decided to amp up the science part of my science reading and started diving more into the emerging technology of the books. After a few more months, I decided to make investments as a way to track the accuracy of the authors' predictions and put a little skin in the game. More fun than Kalshi and Polymarket imho.
We read books with a much wider range than you might assume from the title Hugo and Nebula Award Winners. As we have been running for ten years as of 2026, we long since exhausted the list of winners we wanted to read. Now we vote in person at the end of each book club. That means we get to read a ton of books I have never heard of and we read old and new sci-fi. Both the old and new often touch on very timely subjects, and I love especially when an author from several decades ago touches on something that would seem too on the nose today.
Where this is going
In real life, I am also writing small angel checks into companies building the technologies these books keep predicting: biotech, AI, climate, energy, space, etc. If you are a founder working on something that sounds like it belongs in a Hugo winner, message me. Co-investors with a similarly long-horizon, research thesis welcome too.
One day, I would love to turn this into a real ETF or raise a fund so I can do this with other people's money instead of just mine. Until then, enjoy the fake ETF, follow along on Substack, and if you are in NYC come to one of our meetups.
Find Me
- msheintz
- meghan-heintz