Introducing Los Angeles Female Founder Office Hours

Hot on the heels of LA’s 600K-strong Womens’ March and the birth of the #TimesUp movement, I’m thrilled to announce that Female Founder Office Hours is coming to Los Angeles. LA is not just one of tech’s most vibrant ecosystems, it’s also filled with amazing senior women in industries ranging from aerospace (SpaceX) to entertainment (Maker Studios) to enterprise software (Blackline, Lynda) to e-commerce (Tradesy, Reformation). Eva Ho from Fika Ventures and I will be hosting LA Female Founder Office Hours, alongside nine other women partners who are big believers in the women of the LA startup ecosystem.

As with our previous Female Founder Office Hours events in SF and NYC, female founders can sign up for 1:1s with women VCs from a breadth of great firms. They will also have the chance to meet, mingle, and get fundraising advice from each other. We encourage female founders of companies across all stages to sign up here.

Female founders often ask me about my path into venture. Like many of us, I was inspired by my past to support the underdogs in our industry, both women and the Southern California entrepreneur. Looking back, returns may be the metric of success, but who we fund is the mission that makes it worth doing.

Since childhood, I have been fortunate enough to be inspired by strong women. My grandmother was one of the first woman to earn a math degree from Columbia and never gave a damn about what women are “supposed to do.” Thanks to her, I never thought much about my identity being defined by being a woman. I always wanted my academic & career achievements to just stand on their own.

But when I was raising money for my startup Moonfrye, I was six months pregnant with my third child, so there was no pretending I wasn’t a woman. I encountered bias in the process, with uncomfortable stares and some directly asking the question “how would I navigate starting a company and having a child at the same time?” For some it was a legitimate concern and for others it was meant to help me address the elephant in the room. However, there was a firm and partner I had known for some time and trusted not to see my gender or my family as a barrier. To the credit of Upfront Ventures, the conversation never came up and they led a round in our company.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that in 2014 I chose Upfront as the firm in which to build my VC career. I joined the firm as a Partner and have been treated as a peer from Day 1. I came into venture not wanting to be a “women VC partner” but a VC who happens to be a woman and Upfront reinforced this by telling me “don’t feel you need to be the person who looks at every business serving women or every female founder.” A year into my role I realized that I would be crazy not to lean into my gender because not only is it a part of my identity, but it simply needs to happen in an industry in which 93% of my peer group of partners are men. Since 2014, 50% of the companies that I’ve backed have had a female CEO.

It is only fitting that I am co-hosting this event with Eva Ho of Fika Ventures. Eva, a refugee from war-torn Mozambique, was raised in the housing projects of East Boston, and is the product of parents who are 2nd grade educated and non-English speaking. Eva is a example of someone who has not risen from the usual ranks. Eva was also one of my first friends in venture capital.

Together, we’re excited to extend our friendship and support to the greater network of female founders in LA. Join us on Mar 13.