Voices of Women in Venture 🌊

With Antoine Hubert (Ynsect), Sofia Hmich (Future Positive Capital), Bertrand Badré (Blue Like An Orange Capital), and Manuella Cunha Brito (The good Tech Lab).

Kenza was born in Morocco but has quite a rich international experience: from France and Singapore, all the way to the USA. At some point, she found her calling and decided to go back to her home country. Kenza launched a regional fund to support entrepreneurs in Africa. She had some hesitations, but inspired by other entrepreneur stories, she managed to convince investors to contribute to her fund.

Now, she is driven by  the growth of entrepreneurship in Africa, investing in impactul startups from seed to pre-series A, that are aligned with the values that she and her team in Outlierz share. In this podcast, we discover those values and take a look into Kenza's eye-opening journey, the motivations and challenges behind it.

Kenza recommends reading Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers: The Story of Success

Today’s guest is Nina Achadjian, Partner at Index Ventures. Before joining Index, Nina was also the founder of HIVE Ventures, the first seed fund focusing on Armenian entrepreneurs. She was also a higher yield bond trader at Citigroup and the FP&A Lead for Google’s AdSense team.

In this podcast episode, Nina shares her unique journey into venture and her passion for working with brilliant entrepreneurs who shape the world we live in. Furthermore, if you are determined to find a path into VC, Nina provides a simple, effective frame for securing your VC career. 

You’ll enjoy this! :)

Anna Khan is a General Partner @ CRV, one of the pre-eminent firms of Silicon Valley stretching over what is now an incredible 18 funds. In their portfolio, they have the likes of Airtable, Doordash, Postman and PillPack to name a few. As for Anna, prior to joining CRV, she spent an incredible 6 years at Bessemer investing in the likes of Intercom, NewVoiceMedia, RainforestQA and Zylo. If that was not enough, Anna is also the Founder & CEO @ Launch X Ventures, offering female entrepreneurs an immersive opportunity to learn how to raise capital for their businesses.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Anna made her way into venture as an analyst with Bessemer and how that led to her scaling the venture ladder to now being GP @ CRV?

2.) How does Anna feel about the importance of analysts in venture? Should founders spend meaningful time with analysts? How should they determine which to spend time with? What were the biggest lessons Anna learned about venture and people from being an analyst at Bessemer?

3.) With the rise of rounds being pre-empted, how does Anna determine when to lean in and move on a deal vs when to wait? How does Anna determine when to stretch vs be disciplined on valuation? Why does Anna believe very few firms are "doing real early-stage investing" today?

4.) Why does Anna believe that there are so much fewer women in venture? How does Anna respond to the suggestion that it is a "pipeline problem"? How would Anna advise an all-white male partnership looking to truly change how they work? How does carry come into showing commitment?

5.) What advice does Anna give to people on developing your early network? Why does Anna believe VCs spending time with VCs is antithetical? How has Anna's investment decision-making process changed over the last 9 years? How does Bessemer's compare to CRV's?

Items Mentioned In Today's Show:

Anna's Fave Book: Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Amy Griffin grew up in the Texas Panhandle and became an athlete, sports analyst and philanthropist. It was while raising her four young children that she caught the investing bug, and launched her own venture fund, G9 Ventures. In this episode, Arlan visits Amy at her office in New York City, to discuss privilege versus entitlement.

Links:

This episode is sponsored by DigitalOcean. Apply for DigitalOcean Hatch.

(To inquire about sponsoring the YFM podcast, please get in touch.)

The transcript for this episode will be added shortly.

Producer and Editor: Anna Eichenauer

Music by Jeff Kaale (1, 2, 3)

We began this month exploring the theme of career transitions. In the first Build episode for this month, we talked about why even if we want to transition in our careers, we don’t and get stuck in a role. If you missed the last episode of Build you can check it out here.

If you were wondering how to get unstuck, then today’s episode is for you! We’re continuing our conversation with Amy Sun who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm. Amy began her career as a product manager, transitioned to a product manager and most recently became a venture capitalist. Having gone through a number of transitions herself, she’s learned to navigate them in a number of contexts.

Even if you aren’t going through a transition yourself, it’s a valuable episode to tune into, because as a teammate, hiring manager, or leader you may find yourself working with someone who is going through it, and you’ll be equipped to help them out!

As you tune into today’s episode you’ll learn:

• How to avoid being typecast into a role and be your own advocate

• How to figure out what companies are looking for within a role

• How long it can really take to go through a transition and how to keep your motivation up

• Why short trial periods can be helpful, and how to set expectations and criteria for grading performance

• How to get feedback and build awareness to improve

• How to transition between companies versus across roles within a company

• How to fill in skills gaps, build trust with peers, and present to leaders

“The opportunity won’t just present itself one today. Believe that you want it. And then tell people you want it. Sometimes you’ll get push back. Even if you do, you have to continue to fight for it, if you believe that’s the path that you want to go down.” — Amy Sun, Partner at Sequoia Capital

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Build is produced by Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/).

Career transitions are tough for all of us. Leveling-up or transitioning into a new role or field is challenging because we have to prove that we can do the job, especially when our resume doesn’t reflect relevant or exact experience recruiters or hiring managers are looking for.

 

The countless rejections may cause us to want to stay in our current role and hope that someone will acknowledge our skills, talents, and efforts.

 

However, we cannot build a career on hope alone!

 

In today’s episode of Build, we’re going to share what holds people back from advocating for themselves successfully, and in the next episode, we’ll dig into ways you can make the transition happen.

 

To help us out, I’ve invited Amy Sun who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm. In case you’re curious, Amy’s firm Sequoia Capital has been investing in companies since 1972. They have invested in 250+ companies, and some notable ones are Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Stripe, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo! and WhatsApp.

 

Last year at Grace Hopper, Sequoia Capital was the sponsor for a workshop I was co-teaching with Karen Catlin, which gave me the opportunity to meet Amy. After the workshop, Amy and I had the chance to chat, and I learned about her exciting background and thought it would be wonderful to share it with you.

 

What surprised me was that Amy didn’t start her career with the intention of becoming a venture capitalist; her first real job was as a snowboarding instructor!

 

After graduating from college, she began her career in tech as a product marketer, then eventually became a growth marketer and product manager.

 

As you tune into today’s episode, here’s what you’ll learn from Amy:

 

• How to deal with the inner critic inside each of us who worries about: “What people are going to think” and get your foot in the door in spite of it
• How to suss out if you are missing experience
• How to handle roles that are and aren’t clearly defined or vary between companies
• The value of shadowing people and doing your homework
• How happenstance and luck play into transitions

 

“If you think about your career as the sum of all the knowledge you have—it’s not like you’re throwing away all the experience you’ve had in the past to start from scratch. Having a diverse set makes you more uniquely qualified for certain roles. So rather than holding yourself back by thinking: ‘Oh I don’t want to start from the ground (zero), and all my experience before is useless,’ think about it as compounding upon each other.” — Amy Sun, Partner at Sequoia Capital

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Build is produced by Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/).

Julia DeWahl is one of the rising stars of the Silicon Valley angel investor community with a portfolio including the likes of Linear (Sequoia-backed), Modern Fertility (USV backed) and Primer (Founders Fund backed). Prior to angel investing Julia was one of the first 10 employees at Opendoor seeing their hyper-growth first hand in many different roles from Head of Seller Experience to being General Manager of Pheonix & City Operations. Before Opendoor, Julia spent 3 years as a consultant at Bain. If that was not enough, Julia is also an avid cyclist and is setting up a women's cycling apparel line alongside her investing.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups with Opendoor from Bain and how that position at Opendoor led to her angel investing? What were the 1-2 takeaways for Julia from her time at Opendoor that have most impacted how she angel invests today?

2.) Customer Discovery: When is the right time to engage in deep customer discovery work? How does one select the customers to go deep with? How does Julia structure the process? What questions are most revealing? Where do many go wrong? How does one determine the feedback to accept vs which to reject?

3.) How does Julia think about implementing systems for growth? What is the structure of these systems? Where does one start? How does Julia determine the metrics to track and focus on? How does Julia balance between growth vs profitability?

4.) Does Julia believe people can really scale with the company? What are the leading indicators that people are struggling to scale with the company? How does Julia advise generalists to survive and thrive in a scaling organisation? Should they specialise?

5.) What have been some of Julia biggest lessons of what it takes to be successful as an angel today? Who has Julia learned and gained the most from in this new discipline? How does Julia measure her own success as an angel? What are the core challenges?

Items Mentioned In Today's Show:

Julia's Fave Book: The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness

Julia's Most Recent Investment: Primer: Homeschool with superpowers

As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!