A Venture Roast: Making Venture Capital Great Again

Natalie Sportelli is the Director of Brand and Content at Lerer Hippeau. She comes from Forbes, where she served as Associate Editor for the Under 30 vertical. She sits on the Junior Advisory Board of tech nonprofit RaisedBy.Us and runs @bywomenvcs, a Twitter handle that amplifies content by women in venture capital. She graduated from Colgate University, where she studied English and History.

Lerer's Article on the role of Platform  

Natalie's Twitter: @N_Sportelli

Medium post on VC brand

Natalie's website

Jeremy focuses on investments across Scale’s technology portfolio with a primary focus on companies adding machine intelligence to business and vertical software, especially in industries untouched by the first decade of SaaS. Jeremy is also excited about frontier technologies including drones, robotics, and novel applications of AI across the IOT stack. His efforts have contributed to investments in KeepTruckin, Solvvy, TechSee, and OM1.

Articles and Books Covered:

The New Geography of Jobs 

Winners Take All

Stanford - Impact of Venture Capital

Growth Calculus

Alex Fayette is a Principal at ACME Capital, where he focuses primarily on leading investments in early frontier technology companies and early consumer businesses. Alex currently serves as a board observer for Akash Systems, Astra, Ever/Body, IonQ, quip, and Replika, along with two yet-to-be-announced frontier tech investments by ACME. He previously served as a board observer for PillPack, which was acquired in July 2018 by Amazon. Prior to ACME, Alex started his career on the Investment Banking team at J.P. Morgan, working across their Financial Institutions Group in New York City and the Technology, Media & Telecom team in San Francisco. Alex received his B.A. from Yale University and is a former Yale Whiffenpoof. Alex lives in San Francisco.

Article Highlighted in the Episode 

Links from Podcast: 

Emily Kramer Report

Good Technology Company NYT Article

Britt's Bio:

An investor by background, Britt has worked with companies across asset classes to scale. Before joining Alpha Edison, she was an investor at Bain Capital Credit focusing on middle market and distressed companies. More recently, she led deal processing and management for #Angels, the seed-stage principal investing group founded by early employees of Twitter. With a passion for financial inclusion, she also worked in corporate development at the fintech startup Funding Circle.

Britt is a graduate with honors from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and with concentrations in Finance and Management. While at Penn, she was a Captain of the Women's Volleyball Team. She also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where she launched the women's entrepreneurship initiative called Series W and cares deeply about diversity across tech.

Open access to pitch Unshackled

How to Start a Company on a Visa Program

Nitin is a founding partner of Unshackled Ventures, an early-stage fund he conceived to help immigrant founders in the U.S. succeed faster. His experiences working as a strategy consultant, leading strategy and finance at a startup, and as a founder on a visa culminated in designing an innovative venture model at Unshackled. He has invested in about 50 startups at Unshackled across a variety of industries, which has been a perfect avenue to apply his passion and skills including business strategy, business development, solving problems that are considered unsolvable, and doing good while doing well.

Being an immigrant himself and having founded startups while on a visa in the U.S., Nitin understands the venture resources immigrant founders need, besides capital. He is focused on making sure that immigrant founders are not slowed down by immigration in their pursuit of building companies and creating jobs in America.

Unshackled is actively Investing

Nitin's Twitter: @immigreating

Unshackled's Twitter: @UnshackledVC

First LP Episode!

Winter Mead - Winter invested ~$1 billion into >90 funds and companies as an employee of Sapphire Venture Partners and Hall Capital Partners. He was a committee member of the ILPA and NVCA; and is currently an assistant lecturer for Stanford GSB’s VC course. He holds an MS from Oxford, BA from Harvard, and CAIA designation. Winter also runs a maple syrup business.

Winter's Maple Syrup Company: Mead&Mead Maple Syrup

Link: http://meadandmeads.com/

Earnest Sweat is an Associate Partner at GreatPoint Ventures who focuses on verticals whose emerging technologies will have the most significant impact on global GDP, specializing in retail, supply chain, real estate, and manufacturing. Prior to joining GPV, Earnest was a founding team member at Prologis Ventures, the venture arm of the world’s largest industrial real estate owner. Earnest is also a founding Board Member of BLCK VC, a community built for and by black investors, and, shortly after college, founded an online marketplace to provide college advisory and professional development services, which was acquired four years later. Earnest is an alum of Columbia University and earned his MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

Prashant is a former teacher, entrepreneur, and Partner at Tuesday Capital. Since joining in 2013, he has led or been involved with over 60 investments in consumer, enterprise, and frontier technology including Cruise Automation, Opendoor, Iron Ox, and nTopology. Prashant’s hobbies include music, motorsports, and aviation.

Alyson DeNardo is a Partner at MaC Venture Capital and M Ventures. In addition, she is the Founder/CEO of Alden - a consulting firm focused on organizational and individual efficiency. Previously, she served as Employee #1 at Atrium, building out internal operations and hiring the first 100 employees within the first year. Prior to Atrium, she served as Justin Kan’s Chief of Staff and Head of Social Media.

Aly's Airtable Template:

https://airtable.com/invite/l?inviteId=invS9GMdHCOhnmHme&inviteToken=7aa5c44b9fa3bc04c2e89a4f519fbc4582b5c021ef45da2e6d7c93db8c487373

Book Recommendation: The Courage to be Disliked

https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Be-Disliked-Phenomenon-Happiness/dp/1501197274

Recorded 6/23/2020

Shawn is a great emerging mind in venture that I am lucky to call a friend. On the podcast he talks about the things trends he and the Floodgate team are excited about, some stories from the industry that are pretty shocking, as well as what we can do to give back and make venture and tech a better place people that are not named Michael (if you don't get it look up the JPM story).