Karlton Haney led a gaggle of geese as an elementary-age boy in Northwest Arkansas. One, a heather-feathered goose named Lucy, started following him everywhere, and her offspring did the same. Wherever the boy walked, the flock followed.
Today, Haney leads a different kind of operation. He is the co-founder and managing partner of Meridian Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm that has raised more than $35 million to invest in technology startups. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list for Venture Capital, one of three University of Arkansas College of Engineering alumni on the magazine's 2026 list.
The path between leading Lucy and Forbes 30 Under 30 is considerable.
No trail existed. He carved his own.
The Birds and the Business
Haney grew up on 28 acres outside Rogers, in the small community of Little Flock. His parents, both physicians, raised birds as a family hobby. At their peak, the Haneys kept more than 100, including chickens, guineas, turkeys and geese. A large garden provided much of the family's food during the summers, and an orchard on the other side of the house produced peaches, plums, pears and apples.
"It was a really beautiful Arkansas childhood," Haney said. "We were running around mostly barefoot, played a lot in the woods."
His father used the birds to teach business. Haney collected two to three dozen eggs a day, cleaned them and sold them. He carried them into school and delivered them to teachers who had become regular customers at about three dollars a dozen. The house cleaner bought the surplus at wholesale.
His father also talked about investing. He explained how certificates of deposit had helped pay for medical school and made the case for index funds. They bought Apple stock as their first investment together. The day Haney turned 18, they submitted the paperwork to Fidelity to open his first brokerage account. All the egg money and lawn-mowing money went in.
"My parents did a really good job instilling the idea that money compounds really early," he said.
Leaving the Family Business
He enrolled at the University of Arkansas and was awarded an Honors College Fellowship, initially studying biology on the pre-med path, the only professional world he knew. His parents were doctors, and his grandfather had been a doctor as well.
He did well in the classes. He enjoyed them. But something gave him pause.
"It seemed like it just wasn't flexible enough," he said. "It wasn't entrepreneurial enough."
Two friends steered him toward the Department of Industrial Engineering. They made the case that the curriculum offered a strong STEM foundation with the flexibility to go in many directions. It kept doors open.
Haney switched. His parents were uneasy. The path ahead was unclear.
Then something clicked into place that had nothing to do with engineering.
A Summer in Belize
The summer between his freshman and sophomore years, Haney and two other University of Arkansas students traveled to Otoxha, a village of about 300 people in the western jungle of Belize, near the Guatemalan border. Their church had sponsored a shorter trip over Christmas break, and Haney helped petition for a longer return.
The three of them, college-age guys, spent seven weeks in the jungle. They slept in hammocks in a cinder block home. They bathed in the river. They ate whatever came out of the jungle, including armadillo and wild mushrooms. They farmed and hunted alongside their host family. There was no cell service and no electricity.
"You're standing in the middle of the jungle," Haney said. "You've got this green, massive jungle canopy over top, these parrots flying overhead. You got a machete in your right hand. You're wearing these thick rubber boots, because you got to protect yourself from snakes and mud."
It was that summer in the jungle, machete in hand, that he decided to change his major.
"I realized maybe for the first time that life is very moldable," he said, "and that you can choose your own path."
'I Was Drowning'
Back at the University of Arkansas, Haney's world continued to expand, largely because of one person.
Chancellor emeritus John White, a fellow industrial engineering graduate of the university, taught Haney's first engineering course, engineering economic analysis. It was a large lecture, and Haney struggled at first.
"I was drowning," he said. "All my fellow engineers, I felt like they knew 10 times more than I did."
He caught up. He did well. He built a relationship with White. The following year would be White's last before retirement, and his final offering of an invite-only leadership seminar, normally reserved for seniors, would include a few juniors. White invited Haney.
The class featured leaders from around the world and required extensive coursework, including papers, reports and reading five or six books. Two of those books were written by professors at Harvard Business School.
"I had not heard of it, really," Haney said.
He sat at his desk on the fourth floor of Bell Engineering Center and Googled "What is Harvard Business School?" While reading the website, a targeted ad appeared for a program called the 2+2, which allows college seniors to apply for admission and defer enrollment while gaining work experience.
The ad described him exactly: STEM major, campus leader, heading into an operating role. He had already accepted a position at Walmart.
"This ad is literally speaking to me," he said. "This is looking for me."
He bookmarked the page. He told no one. He bought GMAT prep books and quietly began building his application.
"That was the single most pivotal experience at Arkansas," Haney said, "and it's probably the only reason my life looks like it does today."
White later wrote one of his recommendation letters. White, who earned his own industrial engineering degree from the university in 1962, said Haney stood out among decades of students.
"Among more than 4,000 students I've taught over a 60-year period, Karlton is included in my 'Most Favorite 20,'" White said. "Karlton Haney was an exceptional student and an even more exceptional person. Not only is Karlton knowledgeable, but he also possesses the highest integrity."
Match Point
Spring of his senior year, Haney applied to all seven top business schools. Then COVID-19 hit. Classes were mostly canceled, which gave him more time for applications.
His best friend from college, Alex Kammien, was on a parallel track. They met freshman year as pre-med students and quickly grew close. Over the next four years, they pushed each other, not with reminders about deadlines but with strategy sessions about how to reach the next level.
Which roles would strengthen an application? Which experiences would make them stand out?
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They read each other's essays and talked constantly about their futures.
Kammien stayed on the medical path and set his sights on Yale. He got in. Haney was still waiting the spring before graduation.
Harvard Business School releases admissions decisions at a set date and time. On the day Haney's was due, they decided they could not sit around waiting. It was a warm, sunny morning, and they drove to Wilson Park in Fayetteville to play tennis.
As noon approached, they stopped and checked his phone. No email. A few minutes later, it arrived. Haney went quiet, reading the screen.
He was in.
"It was a really cool way to end our time together at Arkansas," Haney said, "because we both got into our dream schools."
Kammien and Haney check in regularly as friends to this day.
"It doesn't take long from meeting him to realize he's both very, very smart and a very thoughtful person," Kammien said.
Starting From Zero
Haney started at Walmart and spent his evenings learning about a world no one in his medical and engineering worlds could fully explain to him.
He downloaded Harvard Business School's career reports and encountered names like McKinsey, Bain and BCG for the first time. He worked through the options systematically and decided that private investing was where he belonged.
"I didn't have mentors that knew anything about business school," he said. "But we had the internet. And the internet was my mentor and my teacher."
He had no network in finance. So he built one through cold emails to HBS alumni working in private investing. One of them, Scott Quigley at Nordic Partners in Rhode Island, was honest with him: it was going to be really hard, and to some extent he had missed the traditional window. But Quigley played golf with someone at The Stephens Group, a private investment firm in Little Rock, and offered to introduce him.
The Stephens Group hired him. He spent two years there as an analyst, discovered he loved software investing and learned the industry from the ground up.
Outsider Advantage
Haney also sent a cold message on LinkedIn to another incoming Harvard Business School student named Devon Gethers.
Over the next three years, Haney and Gethers became close friends, traveling to see each other and sharing deals. Gethers was working at a growth equity firm in Utah. Both were software investors. Both attended a large state school. Both were hungry to build something.
Eight months before business school started, they began sketching out an idea: What if they started their own venture capital firm?
Over Thanksgiving break in 2022, they built their first pitch deck for what would become Meridian Ventures. By Christmas, they had raised more than a million dollars. They quit their jobs six months before school started, with no income and a fund too small to pay themselves.
Their thesis was built on research from a Stanford professor who had studied every venture-backed billion-dollar company in the United States over 25 years. The finding: roughly 20 percent of those companies had a founder with an M.B.A. from one of 10 schools.
"We were state school guys," Haney said. "We were coming in from a whole different stratosphere of the world."
Their classmates, many from elite undergrads and coastal backgrounds, did not find the data remarkable. Haney and Gethers did.
"We felt like we won the lottery," Haney said. "I want to take a big swing. I want to see how amazing this could be. And I'm willing to take a lot of risk, because if I fail, I'm already head and shoulders above where I thought I would be."
Meridian Ventures invests in seed-stage technology startups founded by graduates of top M.B.A. programs. Developers with a software product and a business plan come to Haney and Gethers, who buy a small percentage of the company in exchange for capital to hire engineers and build the product. If the company succeeds, everyone makes money. If it fails, the investment goes to zero.
"It's kind of like drilling for oil," Haney said. "You drill a lot of holes and a lot of them miss, but occasionally you hit."
Their first investment, a company called Cast AI, which helps businesses optimize cloud computing costs, is now valued at more than a billion dollars. Meridian Ventures has made more than 60 investments and has raised two funds, now managing a combined $40 million.
Gethers said Haney's strength as a partner comes from who he is, not just what he knows.
"Karlton possesses magnetic properties that were different from most high achievers I had encountered," Gethers said. "He grew up on a farm in a small town and resourcefully managed to chart his path into the right rooms. He was never the loudest one in the room, which allowed him to excel at active listening, identifying blind spots and developing powerful relationships by letting others feel heard."
A Kid from Little Flock
When Haney thinks about what he would tell students at the University of Arkansas today, he returns to something that still surprises him about his own story.
Only about 5 to 10 percent of his Harvard Business School class came from the South, he said. Elite schools are actively looking for engineers, for Southerners, for people with stories that do not fit the standard mold.
"They want diversity in their class, to have people from Arkansas," he said. "They want to have engineers in business school. They want to have people with unique stories. And I didn't know that they were looking for people like me."
He paused.
"I'm just a kid from Arkansas."
He was. And he cut his own path from Little Flock to Forbes, machete in hand, so the next kid from Arkansas could see a trail.
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Contacts
Christopher Spencer, associate director of marketing and communications
College of Engineering
(479) 575-4535, cjspence@uark.edu