DV FACES: Jane Zhang, Lead Venture Architect
“The most exciting part is always seeing things come to life.”
Those on the business side are perhaps not usually those you’d expect to be the most artistic, but Jane Zhang is the exception to that rule. Her medium? The three-panel comic. “Sometimes while working on a venture, I would draw comics about things that happened or things that people say that I think are funny,” she explains. Her reputation as a business builder as well as a talented comic artist has led to collaborations in and outside BCG Digital Ventures — whether that’s as a venture architect on ventures like Ware2Go or going off-piste to design a card game about dogs.
Jane has always been drawn to thinking creatively. She first heard about BCGDV when she was still at business school, where during a course about creative thinking and product build, she just happened to meet someone who worked there. “It was very early, this was back in 2014 or so,” she says. “I think at that time BCGDV might have been only a handful of people.” After a stint consulting in Toronto, she ended up moving to San Francisco for a role at BCG: closer, though still not in Digital Ventures. But she talked to everyone at the company as much as she could, asking: “what are they doing over there?” she remembers. “It just sounded really cool.”
After a few collaborations with BCGDV, Jane joined full time. Once she began working with BCGDV, where she is now Lead Venture Architect, there was lots more to like. “What really drew me in was the innovation methodology,” she says.
Having been at BCGDV since the early days, Jane has seen the company grow. “I would say it’s changed pretty significantly in terms of building out methodology and being really crystal clear what that looks like. It’s much more structured, although we still are innovating.”
While the venture architect role focuses on financial and business topics, Jane appreciates that it also has a wider scope. “Things like go-to-market and financial modeling were areas I was already strong in before from my career at BCGDV. The thing that drew me to the venture architect role is that it spans a lot of different areas. I get to work on a lot of different parts of projects.”
Another upside for Jane about BCGDV is being able to gain valuable knowledge from people in other fields: “I’ve learned so much from product managers and developers, probably more even than from my own cohort,” she says. “I think the most exciting thing about working at BCGDV is the different disciplines that we bring together.”
Even though Jane enjoys the experimentation and ideation phases of building a venture, it’s witnessing a product out in the world that she cherishes most. “The most exciting part is always seeing things come to life,” she says. “Customers start signing up, we start seeing a product being launched…”
Now, Jane is experiencing this sense of startup excitement on her very own project, cofounded with a former BCGDV colleague, Sharon Tom. “Sharon said: ‘I have this idea for a game in my mind, but I don’t really know what the game would look like,’” recalls Jane. Sharon had come to the right person. The pair were already into playing board games together, so the concept of making one of their own made sense — and even better, it would have a beneficial social impact, increasing awareness of the large numbers of rescue dogs in need of homes. “I wanted to better spread the message of ‘adopt don’t shop,’” said Sharon, whose own rescue dog, Tom Tom, serves as one of the game’s muses.
“It was a year and a half in the making, and during that time, Sharon had a baby. And then I had a baby,” Jane explains. Now, after a highly successful crowdfunding campaign, the game has just been shipped out to all supporters and made available on toomanydoggos.com. Three lucky backers even earned the reward of having their own pup feature as a card in the game’s first edition, immortalized in Jane’s careful drawing style. When she’s not drawing comics of her colleagues or the cutest adoptable canines, Jane also draws more personal and comic diaries about her life with a new baby in Treehouse Doodles.
