Minnie Ingersoll Joins TenOneTen
tl;dr — Minnie Ingersoll has joined TenOneTen and we’re feeling pretty darned lucky about it!
Here’s the story:
Back in November, we decided that it was time to add to the TenOneTen team. Austin, Gil, Eytan and I felt we needed another full-time investor to really do justice to the opportunity in front of us. With Todd Gitlin’s help, we spec’d out a position for a Senior Associate or Principal and started our process. We spread the word but didn’t advertise much: a few tweets, a link in StrictlyVC, and a couple newsletter inclusions. We got 111 applicants and spoke to at least 60 of them. Many terrific people applied. If we were able to hire more than one person, we certainly would have.
Minnie Ingersoll was never part of that search. When we met her, she was moving back to her hometown of Pasadena and taking a few exploratory meetings with people in the local tech scene. Her resume is dauntingly impressive: Stanford CS, HBS, 12 years at Google, co-founder COO at Shift, and COO at Code for America. Given her terrific operational background, we asked her to meet a few companies in our portfolio in the hopes that she’d join one or help out as an advisor. Then one CEO wrote me back to say “I think she’s more interested in investing than being a COO.”
Insert. Screeching. Record. Sound. Here.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the details but we slowed down our principal search and went into overdrive to see if there was really a fit. From day one we all felt totally at ease with Minnie and in each successive meeting she seemed less like a candidate and more like part of the team. It didn’t take us long to decide we definitely wanted her to join TenOneTen.
In many ways, Minnie has a similar background to the rest of the team. She has a technical education and is a very experienced operator who has founded and grown her own company. Like all of us, she’s mission-driven. We’re not an ‘impact fund’ per se, but all of us care deeply about doing work that is impactful. We share a common delight in helping founders achieve their goals and believe we can make our investors a boatload of money doing it.
In other ways, Minnie is incredibly complementary. Of course, adding a woman to our investment team creates an exciting new dimension to our firm. This will bring access to new networks and, we hope, make TenOneTen a more appealing partner to the best female entrepreneurs out there. Perhaps just as importantly, Minnie brings stylistic diversity to the team. She is a ‘big personality,’ a high-energy extrovert in the best possible sense of the word.
Founders who work with TenOneTen should be particularly excited by Minnie’s operating experience and network, and the concrete skills she has to share. She’s a doer who’s already signed up to teach a course on Product Management at Caltech. It’s great to have another teammate who knows how to get things done in a startup. She’s been on the rollercoaster and made her share of critical decisions in the face of imperfect information. We all have strong networks, but as former COO of Code for America and a new transplant from SF, she brings a host of new connections to the party.
Minnie is just getting started at TenOneTen but hit the ground running and is already making big contributions. We’re incredibly excited to have her and even more excited to see how our fund evolves now she’s on the team.
