Ita Ekpoudom: VC Champion for Women with Nigerian-American roots and values
Ita Ekpoudom knows what it means to build value and cultivate relationships that propel success. Now as Partner at GingerBread Capital, she empowers female-founded startups on their journeys to become industry leaders.
Ita honed her financial skills at Goldman Sachs, but she realized her true passion was helping build the cultures and communities that would propel companies to greatness. With its focus on nurturing early-stage businesses, venture capital became the perfect avenue for her to make a real impact.
“I’d rather work at the beginning when people are building the companies they want to be a part of and know the communities and cultures they want to build. And gravitating towards women and leadership and building those diverse companies from the outset, that’s where I wanted to play,” Ita told All Raise in a recent interview.
Recognizing the need for a strategic pivot, Ita pursued an MBA at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Maybe, if I’d been a guy, I’d be like, ‘I’m going to go raise a fund and go do this.’ But no, I’m Nigerian, I’m much more pragmatic than that.” And what’s more pragmatic than an MBA?
Wharton equipped Ita for the next step. She joined a private equity-backed firm, but the allure of a smaller, more personal environment proved too strong. She left to create Tigress Ventures, a management consulting firm. Tigress connected female entrepreneurs with the expertise and resources crucial for success in the startup world. Her clientele primarily composed of women founders and established investors committed to supporting women in the early stages of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Relationship Maven
A cornerstone of Ita’s success has always been her commitment to fostering long-term relationships. “I think [those relationships] really come back to help you in surprising and interesting ways.”
Relationship building brought Ita to the next phase of her career. After Wharton, Ita joined a mentoring group for mid-career women in 2012. One of her mentors was a colleague of Linnea Conrad Roberts, founder and CEO of GingerBread Capital, which has invested over $50 million in female founders and female-focused funds. That mentor mentioned Ita to Linnea, which set in motion a chain of events that led to her landing her partner role.
Creating A Partnership
Linnea asked Ita to describe her dream role and share it with her. Not long after their initial meeting, Ita joined GingerBread as Partner. She wasn’t afraid to stop taking new engagements for Tigress Ventures because she realized she would step into the exact role she imagined for herself.
At GingerBread, “we are a family office fund, investing in female founders and gender diverse teams,” Ita explained. “I spend a lot of time speaking with entrepreneurs and founders, learning about their companies.” Direct investments are the main business, but Gingerbread also acts as a limited partner (LP) in over 20 funds, most of which are general partner-led. “We are looking out to see if there’s a thesis we haven’t yet covered across our existing fund managers,” she said.
“We view ourselves as collaborative capital,” she explained, so for startups, “we’re not going to be the largest check in your round, but we’ll bring our network to bear and try to get you access to some of these later-stage companies or introductions that you might not otherwise have been able to get.” She noted that her team is “always thinking about the ways in which we can help a founder and company be successful.”
A few notable GingerBread investments include Spring Health, which provides mental healthcare and wellness support; HopSkipDrive, which provides ridesharing for children, including helping those in foster care get to school; Pair Eyewear, which offers customizable glasses and sunglasses; and Goodles, a healthier mac and cheese alternative.
Making Investments
When deciding to invest, she explained that being a founder and building a startup is hard and that as an investor, “you want to know that they’re really in this for the right reason and that they’ll say stick with it.’ So that kind of grit and resilience is what I’m looking for.” She also asks herself, “Am I genuinely interested in it? Because these are long-horizon investments. Is this something that I’d love to keep getting updates about?”
More specifically, the GingerBread team is “thinking about opportunities where other women — or allies who want to get more involved in backing female founders and fund managers — can potentially do so by thinking about becoming LPs themselves in other emerging fund managers,” Ita said. “We work in an industry dominated by men both from the standpoint of who’s getting the capital and who’s writing checks on the other side,” she added, explaining that this makes allyship across the multiple intersections of diversity important.
“There’s so much more to do. But every day in this work, we get to try to make that difference and move that needle forward.”
A Future with Parity
Ita envisions a future where achievement in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is recognized on its own merit, free from labels that diminish the accomplishments of underrepresented groups. During her interview, she pointed out that no one says, “that’s a great male-founded company,” yet people tend to call out when a company is “female-founded” or “Black-founded.” When there’s true parity, there won’t be such qualifiers.
Ita’s passion for fostering diversity in business extends beyond her work at GingerBread Capital. She actively contributes to the cause by serving as Chair of the All Raise New York chapter steering committee. “I’ve found another community in which we get to do the same kind of work that I do day in and day out. I always say I like to align my personal and professional life. It’s like rowing in the same direction.”
Networking with All Raise
Ita stresses that building relationships with people “that are more seasoned than you can give you perspective as you think about different challenges.” But she doesn’t believe in networking just for the sake of networking.
With All Raise, she likes that she can create deep bonds with her fellow All Raisers through the variety of activities they do together — themed breakfast series, Poker Power, book discussions, and fitness Fridays. “We like to have fun and get to know each other,” she said.
With All Raise, Ita told us, “it’s fantastic working with a group of people that are just as passionate about building this ecosystem for us in the New York area and nationally.” The relationships she’s built within All Raise have also led her to co-invest with other All Raisers.
“An All Raiser is multidimensional,” Ita concluded: We are investors. We are trailblazers. We are community builders.
