Voices of Women in Venture 🌊

In this special two-part episode of She Starts Up, I'm sharing a startup story and interviewing two women on opposite sides of the narrative, Chrissy Cowdrey and Lolita Taub.

More about Lolita

Lolita Taub is a first-generation Latinx operator and investor pushing for diversity in tech. She's acting Chief of Staff and interim head of sales at Catalyte; a scout at Indie.vc, Venture Partner at NextGen Venture Partners, and an LP at Operators Collective and Portfolia's Enterprise Fund; and a mom to the cutest Dachshund mix.

More about Chrissy

Chrissy Cowdrey is CEO & Founder of Stagger. Chrissy's career has been rooted in leading creative teams through the human centered design process. She's designed digital experiences for startups and large companies ranging from Disney, USAA, Logitech and frog design. As an avid traveler and addicted to seeing the way other parts of the world works, she designed Stagger to solve a problem of visual storytelling for herself that has grown into a business focused on visual storytelling and brand building for businesses. When she's not working, she spends her time staying active and planning for her next travel adventure.

Listen for...

Part 1

• An announcement some exciting news: I've made my first investment in Stagger, an app for visual storytelling for your brand.
• The tweet from Lolita Taub that got me over 30 pitch decks for review, sparking the investment in Stagger.
• Lolita Taub's story and background, including how she became involved in the startup world.
• How working with an executive coach allowed Lolita to find her purpose and magic sauce: connecting people to resources to achieve goals and produce results for all.
• Lolita's involvement in the startup community and the projects she is currently working on, including an investor and startup matching tool.
• The importance of diversity in startups, teams, and investment. Lolita is helping to create a world where technology is led by the diversity of our population

Part 2

• What it was like for me, a former founder raising capital, being on the other side of fundraising as an investor.
• How Chrissy stumbled upon Janine's tweet expressing she was looking to invest and how the conversation continued from there.
• The story of how Chrissy came up with the idea for Stagger, and how she turned her idea into a widely-used app by influencers and small businesses.
• Chrissy's experience with fundraising and what it was like to raise money during COVID-19.
• The evolution of Stagger's product and ways it will help small businesses and businesses with storytelling and building their brand.
• Behind the scenes of Stagger, including user testing, building the product, and juggling fundraising and product management.

Listen Now on iTunes, Spotify and Google Play!

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Connect with Lolita Taub Online

Lolita's Twitter

Lolita's Newsletter

Schedule a Call with Lolita

Connect with Chrissy Cowdrey Online

Chrissy's Email

Chrissy's Twitter

Mentioned in this Episode

Startup Investor Matching

Raising During COVID - Virtual Demo Day

Startup Investment Consideration Form

Fundraise from Scratch Course (if you use the link + promo code TeamLolita, you'll get 10% off)

Arlan Hamilton's Book

Stagger.it

Join me and my guest, Martina Welkhoff, Co-founder and Managing Partner at WXR Fund, an early stage venture fund investing in women led spatial computing companies. Martina is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, a member of the Young Entrepreneurs Council, and an advisor to the Center for Leadership & Strategic Thinking at the Foster School of Business. She served for four years as the board president of Seattle Women in Tech and in 2018  won a Lumiere Award for Distinguished Leadership from the Advanced Imaging Society. 

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Nicole Quinn of Lightspeed Venture Partners joins Nick to discuss The Effect of Technology on Relationships, The 5 Indicators of a True Brand, The Appeal of Love/Hate Businesses, & the Rise of Super Apps. In this episode, we cover:

• Walk us through your background and path to VC
• What if anything changed the most from your early days, angel investing on your own to the days you joined the team at Lightspeed?
• I think a good place to start is with an article you wrote a little over a year ago about your investment philosophy, and how it was shaped by the book, Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight. What was the seminal learning from that book, and how has it shaped your approach?
• What's the thesis at Lightspeed?
• What are the consumer behaviors in different regions?
• You emphasized the importance of hiring and the framework Lightspeed uses for its portfolio companies. Could you give us the broad strokes on that?
• How did you develop your thesis on Lunch Club, and what makes you so excited about it and kind of the way they're thinking about relationships?
• You have such a lens on social and all these things, but how will relationships be affected over time with not being able to achieve that same level of authentic connection with folks when it's just over chat or the internet?
• Are you bullish or bearish on Clubhouse?
• What are the early indicators in a company that signal that a true brand is being built? Are their must-haves vs. nice to haves?
• Have you ever come across an opportunity where the NPS was? marginal or low, but the repeat rate and referral rate was high?
• Have you looked at all this? You know, kind of buzzy new way of looking at that the Rahul Vohra Superhuman? How pissed off would you be if this was taken away or something like that?
• Most of the super apps have been outside of the states, places like China, Latin America. Do you expect the rise of more super apps here? Why or why not?

In this episode we talk to Jennifer Fonstad about her experience as a venture capitalist for over two decades. Jennifer touches on her journey growing DFJ from a $150 million fund to $3.5 billion AUM and her experience working closely with entrepreneurs as an angel investor. Lastly, she dives into her experience with gender dynamics in the VC industry and actions she has taken to bridge the gap, including founding a network of female angel investors, Broadway Angels and her commitment to funding female entrepreneurs at Aspect Ventures. 

Join us for this bonus Q&A episode to learn more about the host behind The Two Percent and Female Founders Fund Founding Partner, Anu Duggal! Anu sits down with FFF investor Adrianna Samaniego to answer listener questions across a range of topics from fundraising to networking, and much more. Anu shares stories and lessons learned from her formative years, her early-career as a consultant, her time in culinary school and as a founder of two successful food ventures, to eventually entering the VC world as a solo GP with Female Founders Fund in 2014.

This week we had on Abhinaya Konduru, who works as an associate at M25.

M25 is one of the most respected early-stage funds in Chicago, and within her role Abhinaya spends her time sourcing new investments and working with portfolio companies. 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.

My guest today is Sara Deshpande, Partner at Maven Ventures. Maven Ventures is a consumer focused micro-fund that focuses on investing in seed stage companies. Some of their investments include Zoom, Wild Type, Angellist and Nuggs. What I most enjoyed about this conversation was looking at what types of businesses were being built on top of Zoom and the opportunities in telehealth. Without further ado, here's Sara.

You can catch her on Twitter @sara_desh.

Three books that have inspired Sara:

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Maid by Stephanie Land

Some of the questions I ask Sara:

1. You came from healthcare consulting at Deloitte. What was your attraction to venture capital, startups and innovation?
2. Tell us a bit about Maven.
3. What do you consider micro-VC?
4. Walk us through your due diligence process?
5. How do you access how big of a pain point a company is solving?
6. What are some of the opportunities that you're seeing telehealth?
7. Another area of focus are technology that serves families. What's an example of a company you're excited in this space or a problem that you are hoping to see solve?
8. Has COVID affected any of the themes you focus on?
9. What are some other trends that you're curious about?
10. What's one thing that you would change when it came to venture capital?
11. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
12. What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?

Petra Griffith, Founder & Managing Director at Wedbush Ventures talks about venture debt as an alternative to venture capital, key resources that founders can utilize in their ecosystem, and about Wedbush and what they invest in. Petra also explains staying ‘focused on the product’ and her own experience with product development.

Petra's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petragriffith/

Wedbush Ventures: https://www.wedbushventures.com/

Another episode on the LA ecosystem and resources for startup founders can be found here.

In this second episode of Chasing Capital, I chat with Lightspeed’s Anoushka Vaswani on a wide range of topics like why she chooses to focus on growth investing, the importance of network over operating experience, the burgeoning European startup ecosystem, and the value and low opportunity cost of completing your degree.