Meera Clark is a Principal at Obvious Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco. Prior to joining Obvious, she spent several years at Morgan Stanley. At Morgan Stanley, Meera began her career on the Cross Asset desk within the Institutional Equities Division in New York. From Sales & Trading, Meera transitioned to Investment Banking, joining the firm’s Technology Banking Group in Menlo Park. Post Banking, Meera began her investing career within Morgan Stanley’s Multicultural Innovation Lab, the firm’s early-stage accelerator focused on backing and supporting women and multicultural founders. She graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Management Science and Engineering. Meera is on the board of Stanford Professionals in Finance (SPIF), the SF Chapter of Synergist Network and currently serves on the Steering Committee for the All Raise Summit.

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Meera Clark: [00:00:00] Hello? Hello, Meera Clark here, principal at Obvious Ventures that is based out in San Francisco and really, really looking forward to today's conversation.

[00:00:35] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:00:35] Thanks so much for finding time to join us on the podcast today. Tell us a little bit more about your backgrounds before we talk a little bit about your current role, curious to know a little bit more about your career timeline, then any specific highlights you want to share with us.

[00:00:53] Meera Clark: [00:00:53] Awesome. Yeah, happy to, I would say at a high level, like so many, I am very much a product [00:01:00] of my environment. And so I grew up in North Carolina to an immigrant mother, working mom, and a little bit of a hippie dad, which was, I would say, a bit unconventional given the more conservative neighborhood that we lived in. And from that experience at a very young age, I became deeply curious and why people consume. What they consume and what drives those shifts in consumer behavior. So, as I began to think about college, I wanted to see as different of an ecosystem as possible to begin exploring some of these questions, which is what led me out to California and to study engineering at Stanford. And so Stanford for me was I think like for so many, a bit of an intellectual playground or summer camp, for lack of a better term, spent a lot of time exploring the startup ecosystem. How different industries interacted, what have you, and found myself and my first super traditional job the summer after my junior year [00:02:00] post a couple of internships at Stella & Dot and PayPal. And with that junior summer internship, I landed at Morgan Stanley on their time square trading floor. For me, I had this naive hope that I could explore the public equity markets. Over the course of the summer, soak up as much as possible. And then start my own thing. Go work in tech, follow the traditional Stanford path, I suppose. But from that summer, what I really came away with was one this true excitement or passion for the energy that pervaded the trading floor and the intellectual curiosity that was espoused by so many individuals there. And two was this belief that I had a lot more to learn as it relates to how different industries interact and how companies evolve within these ecosystems. And so I returned to Morgan Stanley right after graduation to join the firm's cross asset desk. And so on that desk, I was focused on identifying disruptive trends in the [00:03:00] market. Think about the evolution of the automotive industry. Or the shift towards more digital commerce, what have you and with those trends, I was very focused on identifying both plays across the equity markets or the credit markets, as investable means of playing out those themes. And so not actually that different from the mentor in many ways. There was this part of me, kind of the mission driven part of me that itched and that ached and knowing that at the end of the day, I was simply watching lines go up and down o