Voices of Women in Venture 🌊

Corinne Riley, Investor at Greylock talks about how an investment thesis strengthens a VC fund and a founder’s ability to pitch to that fund effectively. We discuss how much time you should spend trying to fit into an investment thesis and if you can expect a fund to make an exception to their thesis on your behalf.

Corinne's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinne-marie-riley/

Corinne's Twitter: https://twitter.com/CorinneMRiley

Greylock: https://greylock.com/

An overview of investment theses 

Monique Woodard of Cake Ventures joins Nick to discuss The "Three Layer Cake" Fund, How Personal Experience Drives Your Investment Lens, The Future of Tech for the Aging Population, & How a Solo GP Can Do it All. In this episode, we cover:

• Walk us through your background and path to VC
• What's the thesis at Cake Ventures?
• You have a strong focus on looking for startups that are addressing the needs of a world undergoing massive demographic changes. Talk to us a bit about how you approach investing in demographic change?
• What sort of demographic changes do you believe will have opportunities?
• Were you surprised to see Baby Boomers dominating online shopping?
• What is it like being a solo GP? What are the pros and cons?
• How do you replicate and try to scale yourself?
• Context switching is often cited as the hardest thing about what we do. Talk us through your schedule and how you manage context switching?
• This question is called three data points. I'm going to give you a hypothetical situation w/ a startup and you can ask three questions for three specific data points.
• • Let's say you are approached to invest in a consumer social business with 100k MAUs, and 20% MoM growth for the last 3 months. The catch is you can only ask for 3 data points to make your decision.
  • What 3 questions do you ask?

Salone has 14+ years of experience as an interactive media VC investor, game entrepreneur and ex M&A banker. She has seen companies from different vantage points ranging from seed to IPO stage. Prior to Lumikai, she was a Principal at LVP, Europe’s pioneering seed stage games VC where she was involved with multiple companies in the gaming ecosystem across content, platform and technology bets.

Salone was also Co-founder and CEO of TrulySocial, a venture backed gaming company for female audiences out of Europe and India. She was responsible for product vision, overall commercial strategy and new market growth striking up novel partnerships with global strategics, celebrities, influencers and brands.Earlier to that, she worked across global financial institutions as Vice- President, Global COO Office at Barclays Bank and M&A at Morgan Stanley, amassing $10B of M&A transaction experience.

Salone has been recognised as Top 30 Women in Mobile, Top 100 Asian Stars in UK Tech, Iconic Women Leaders by WEF and Jury Member, Bafta Games in 2017. Salone is also a renowned thought leader on “Innovating in New Game Genres” and “Building Games for Female Audiences”. She has an MBA from IESE Business School, Spain.

. . .

In this episode we will cover:

The year 2020 at Lumikai (2:12)

The impact of a fund’s thesis on the fundraise (4:43)

Challenges of raising a fund during a pandemic (8:57)

Salone’s journey and the genesis of Lumikai (13:31)

What’s hot within gaming in India (18:51)

How do you solve for monetization at scale within gaming in India (28:23)

How do you devise an India strategy if you’re a gaming startup (38:25)

How are LPs looking at gaming in general? (53:00)

What role will the later stage funds play in the gaming ecosystem? (59:08)

What role do VCs play in drafting the regulatory framework within gaming in India (1:01:00)

Fantasy and gambling: Game of skill vs game of chance? (1:04:35)

This week we had on Rachel Lauren (@RachelnotLauren) of BDMI.

BDMI is an early-stage fund that makes investments into innovative companies in the tech and media landscape. Although the fund specializes in digital media, Rachel focuses most of her time helping the fund diversify its focus to more enterprise software and fintech deals.

In this talk, we discuss:

đŸ“« For weekly insights from the next era of investors and operators, make sure to subscribe to Confluence.VC Weekly.

Sarah Tavel is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many more. As for Sarah, prior to joining Benchmark, she was a General Partner at another globally renowned firm, Greylock, where she led deals in Sonder and Gixo. Pre-Greylock, Sarah was the first PM @ Pinterest where she led three acquisitions, launched Pinterest internationally, and was responsible for closing their $100m Series C financing.

20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Chasing GMV Will Lead To The Wrong Direction, The 2 Crucial Tipping Points For Marketplace Adoption, Why UGC Plays Are Like Marketplaces & How To Determine Between Existential and Non-Existential Risk

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Sarah made her way from being the first PM at Pinterest to being a General Partner at one of the world's leading venture firms, Benchmark?

2.) What does Sarah mean when she says, "the small things are not the big things"? How does Sarah determine between existential vs non-existential risk? How does this impact the type of board member Sarah is? How has Sarah seen the best board members engage? Who are they?

3.) Why does Sarah believe that in marketplaces, chasing GMV will lead you in the wrong direction? How does Sarah think about good vs great when it comes to 1.) Average order values? 2.) Repeat purchase rates. 3.) NPS? 4.) Net revenue retention? How should they change with time?

4.) In marketplaces, what is a tipping point? What are the 2 crucial tipping points to be aware of? How can marketplaces ensure demand brings further demand? What can they determine from how demand engages with different suppliers? How does Sarah feel about feedback systems?

5.) Why does Sarah believe that UGC plays are like marketplaces? What lessons can be drawn from TikTok to suggest this? How does Sarah think about her biggest lessons when analysing the growth of DoorDash? What do many not see that is important to recognise?

Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode

Sarah's Favourite Book: Pachinko: The New York Times Bestseller

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.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kelli got her start as a business owner running an experiential marketing agency in the entertainment industry. In 2013, Kelli was introduced to the startup accelerator business model and launched Be Nimble Foundation in 2016. Be Nimble is a 501(c)(3) social enterprise with the goal of advancing diversity initiatives to create fully inclusive tech ecosystems. They focus their efforts on workforce development and start-up and entrepreneurship support. Be Nimble helps people gain high-paying jobs in technology and support diverse start-up founders through our accelerators, workshops, and pitch competitions. They are there to close the economic wealth gap and create generational wealth for their community.   

Through intention, planning, and some serendipity, Kelli partnered with Allos Ventures to launch Sixty8 Capital in 2019. Sixty8Capital is the first Indiana-based Venture Capital firm dedicated to investing in Black, Brown, Women, LGBTQ+, and disabled founders. They use capital, connections, and community to support scalable and investable tech and tech-enabled companies with a clear road to profitability. Kelli and the team at Sixty8 Capital are actively investing in Midwestern startups.

Shruti Gandhi, General Partner and Founding Engineer at Array Ventures talks about how she managed to get into the VC space and what are the most valuable skills needed to do so. We also discussed investing in Deep tech and the big problems that it's solving and how Shruti approaches it.

Shruti's SubStack: ShrutiGandhi.substack.com

Shruti's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shrutigandhi/

Array Ventures: https://www.array.vc/#/

How Shruti broke into the VC field: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6739646432044711936/

Extremely detailed book on becoming a VC from the ground up: https://docsend.com/view/dvufhb27r5bzrpym

In this episode, Siya joins us to talk about her engineering background and the unique perspective it has lent to her career in VC. She expounds her article on choosing a college major along with a book she published. She also sheds light on her interest in taking education online and democratizing it. Siya closes with insights on the role of gender in both engineering and VC workplaces.

👋 Hey! Thanks for checking out the GoingVC Podcast: Uncovering new paths into VC, diving deeper into alternative models, and addressing areas of weakness with Austin and JJ MacLean (@jjmaclean) from the GoingVC team.

We're really excited to be bringing to you today our conversation with Allie Felix (@alliemfelix) of Embarc Collective and special guest host Rachel Masterson (@rachmast). As always, if you've got any questions, feedback, guest ideas, or just want to say hey, don't hesitate to shoot us a message at [email protected]!

Episode Chapters:

Links: