Vanessa Larco: From Product Guru to VC Powerhouse
Vanessa Larco didn’t expect to become a venture capitalist, but with great role models and an All Raise community, she’s thriving in her role as Partner at NEA. Now on the investment committee, Vanessa’s journey proves tech smarts and a strong network can make a power player VC.
“I never had a goal of being a venture capitalist,” Vanessa Larco explained in a recent interview with All Raise. “I studied computer science in undergrad and discovered the product management role right out of school. I loved it, and I thought that’s what I was going to do for the rest of my life.”
Vanessa set out on her professional path as a product manager in consumer companies — mostly gaming — before eventually moving on to enterprise companies like Twilio, a cloud communications company, and Box, which provides cloud-based content management, collaboration, and file-sharing tools. She was also a founder of an app development company that was acquired.
Becoming a Venture Capital Partner
Although her career intersected with venture capital at several points, Vanessa had no experience as an investor and no background in finance.
But Vanessa’s lack of direct VC experience didn’t stop New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world’s largest venture capital firms with about $25 billion in assets under management (AUM), from recruiting her seven years ago.
“I’ve known NEA for a long time,” she explained, she was introduced to NEA through Pete Sonsini, who led an investment in her brother’s startup a while ago. When NEA approached Vanessa about potentially joining, she stated “I didn’t think they were serious. I thought you had to be a finance person to go into venture. After all, it’s an investing role, right?” But, after spending a lot of time with the NEA team, Vanessa began to understand why early-stage investing might be a perfect fit.
“I felt that my experience in evaluating product opportunities — what do we build and who do we sell it to — translated better into venture than I had anticipated. And so kind of out of nowhere, and to the surprise of everybody that knows me, I decided to take a role at NEA. I came in as a partner.”
Coming into a VC firm with little experience isn’t that unusual, but starting as a partner is, especially as a woman at a billion-dollar firm. “I was so naive going into it. I was like, ‘Partner! Yeah, great. Sounds good.’ And then once I got in it, I realized what the partner title entailed and the ways you have to deliver and stand on your record. You have to get deals through the investment committee to fund them, and that means you have to convince an entire partnership when you don’t have a track record to stand on … that’s a tall order.”
Fortunately for Vanessa, she had time to grow into the role. VC moves fast, but Vanessa feels lucky that NEA, as she put it, “… is a very patient fund; our fund cycles are long.”
“NEA has a lot of patience when it comes to building companies. We also have a lot of patience in building people. NEA was very supportive of me not doing a deal for my first year.”
Vanessa’s first check
As she was on her way to making her first deal, Vanessa was able to get her bearings and figure out where she wanted to invest and what type of investor she wanted to be. And eventually, she wrote her first check, a seed deal she led late in her first year with NEA. It was a $500,000 check, she’s modest about admitting how her skills and expertise brought this deal to the table. “It was, and still is, a phenomenal company and they’ve grown and have hit scale.”
The company she invested in is Greenlight Financial Technology, which offers debit cards for kids and teens, allowing minors access to funds and providing them with a financial education.
When she made the investment, Vanessa explained, “I didn’t have kids, but I’d babysit my eldest niece all the time — she was six or seven. And I would just bribe her, like, ‘Dude, if you eat all your vegetables, I’ll give you five bucks.’ I’m not the parent so I can do that. But I didn’t have cash. So I’d go to the ATM, take out $20, go to the convenience store, break the $20, and give her five bucks. And she’s like, ‘Thanks, Tia. Um, how do I get this into Roblox? Can I just have your credit card?’”
“So when I saw Greenlight, I thought, ‘Oh my God, a debit card for kids. This makes so much sense.’ The interface was like a Venmo. Therefore, I could Venmo five bucks to her debit card so that she could have it in Roblox and her parents have complete control over where she can spend the money and where she can’t.”
The thesis behind Greenlight, Vanessa explained, “made so much sense. And there was nothing else like it — which, looking back, probably should have spooked me.” Fortunately, it didn’t, and when Vanessa went to the other NEA partners, she was able to make a case for Greenlight’s business model and profit potential.
“I said, the business model makes sense. And everybody asked, ‘Are people going to pay for it?’ And I said I’d pay for it. And then I called a bunch of other people. They said they’d pay for it.” The investment committee gave Vanessa the green light.
Making Investment Decisions
NEA’s investment committee (IC) is composed of senior partners who make and approve investment decisions across the firm). Vanessa was promoted to the IC in May of 2023; since then, she told us, she’s begun to think differently about the deals she’s making, including the questions she asks herself.
Following her mother’s footsteps
Vanessa puts a lot of work into ensuring the success of the NEA portfolio companies she works with, including sitting on eight boards of directors (she’s also a board observer for several other companies.) Joining a board, Vanessa says, is a “tremendous responsibility, and it should be taken very seriously.”
“[On a board], the founders are letting someone in the room where big decisions are being made, and where highly sensitive conversations are being had. So, as a VC, it’s probably one of the most important parts of the role. Investing can be done many, many ways, but building and growing companies, you’ve got to get that right. And the more you see how companies are built, the more nuanced you are when you evaluate new companies… it’s a big responsibility; you can’t mess it up.”
This practice of taking on and committing to big responsibilities may be something Vanessa picked up from her Colombian-born mother, Maria Elena Ibanez, whom Vanessa said was an “incredible role model.” While Vanessa’s grandfather wanted her mom to go to finishing school in Europe, her mom “wanted to go to college in the States and study engineering,” Vanessa explained.
“My mom was determined to come to the United States, and if she wasn’t going to do it with her parents’ blessing, she was going to do it without their blessing. She came to the States and put herself through school, studying computer science in the 70s. Not the most common major for the seventies!” Vanessa added.
Vanessa’s mom had settled in Miami, a comfortable place to be at the time because of the large number of immigrants from South America and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, “there weren’t many computer science jobs in Miami in the seventies. So she had no choice but to be an entrepreneur.”
Vanessa’s mom went on to start several hardware and software companies, bootstrapping each one and then selling it so she could move on to the next startup. Vanessa shares, “we grew up with an entrepreneurial mom, and I didn’t know anything else. I didn’t even think going to college and then joining a company was a path. I thought you had to start a company”. Vanessa did wind up working for a few big companies after finishing her computer science degree, then founded and sold a startup of her own, “and now I get to work with entrepreneurs all day,” she added.
But Vanessa says her mom inspired more than just her career; she inspired her approach to motherhood. “She never complained about being tired when she would get back from a work trip. She’d take the red eye, land, shower, and then take us roller skating.”
Now a parent herself, Vanessa has asked her mom more than once how she managed to do it all. Her mom’s response? “‘You gotta have fun in life. It all has to be fun.’ She just had this mentality of, ‘I chose to do this. This is fun. This was my decision.’ I still try to channel her as much as I can.” Her mom is still in Miami running her latest company.
Making connections through All Raise
Vanessa’s mother might be the most inspiring woman in her life, but she isn’t the only woman who’s made a big impact on her career. As Vanessa embarked on her career with NEA, she realized that coming in as a partner meant she didn’t have the opportunity to build the same kind of network that many VCs build as they work up to the partner level.
The typical way of making those connections in VC, Vanessa explained, “Is going to the bars, or going on the fishing trip, or the ski trip, or the whiskey tasting, or the cigar night, or the poker night. I don’t play poker, I don’t smoke cigars, I don’t drink alcohol. I’m not gonna get an invite to the all-guy fishing trip, or the all-guy ski trip.” So where else can those relationships come from and be cultivated?
“Doing this alone really sucked,” Vanessa admitted, but then “All Raise came around and I joined a cohort and I was like, ‘Whoa! Friends in venture!’”
The connections Vanessa made through All Raise provided her with her own network — people she could call and ask: “Is this normal? Or, my firm is talking about XYZ. I’ve never heard of this. I feel too silly asking anyone internally what this is about.”
Her relationships blossomed to the extent that she was recently asked to put together a list of VCs to invite to an event. Her list was all women, and the organizers wanted to know whether she knew any male VCs. “I do know male VCs. But these are people I’m texting on a daily basis.” All Raise, she concluded, has become her village, helping her navigate her pivot into venture. “It’s so valuable,” she said. “It’s hard to describe properly.”
Larco’s glad to bring more women’s voices to VC. She believes it’s crucial to bring a diverse array of experiences, thoughts, and backgrounds to both VC and startups, “with all these different opinions, you can really see different facets of a problem and get to a better resolution.”
