🤠 Welcoming Jillian Williams to Team Cowboy! 🤠

We’re thrilled Jillian Williams has joined Team Cowboy as a Principal on our investment team. She is our first Cow-lleague based in NYC and our first financial services-focused team member. Jill will deliver sleeves-rolled-up, hands-on help, world class advice, and our extensive connections to early stage tech startups, with a focus on investing in fin-tech and beyond (we work with a wide range of startups at Cowboy, so Jill will also work with SaaS and consumer companies).

We met Jill through a careful search. We were looking for someone with a passion for and experience working with early stage tech startups, and expertise and credibility in financial services (an important and growing area for future Cowboy investments). And, someone who is beloved by founders, has great judgment and strategic thinking, and has a special sauce of independent thinking with a community and service orientation, confidence and humility, urgency and patience, humor and empathy.

Anyone who knows Jill will vouch she is all this and more. We are so energized by our conversations about the future of fintech, shared lessons learned, how to be of best service to founders and early stage teams, and about the culture and the work we do at Cowboy. Jill has also been shaped by her experiences as a NYC kid from a close-knit, entrepreneurial family, Yale grad, Goldman and Barclays financial analyst and five years of investing with the team at Anthemis Capital, incredible fintech investors.

Founders, co-investors and colleagues Jill has worked with emphasize her ridiculously high intelligence, wisdom, hustle and humanity. We were not surprised by comments like “honestly she is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with and yet so humble”; “I’m older, but she is wiser”; “she is grace under pressure”; “her pace is incredible”; “I would almost call her one of my co-founders’’; and “she asks the tough questions the best investors should ask, and she’ll also ask, ‘how are you doing?’ — she really cares.” She’s also on the NYC Board for BLCK VC, a non-profit to support and accelerate success for black investors in VC, a mission and community of which we are big fans.

If you’re working on an early stage startup focused on innovation in the financial sector, for consumers or businesses — or, you’re working on a software startup looking to layer on financial services like payments, insurance or credit — we would love to meet you. Jill can be reached at Jillian@cowboy.vc; on twitter at @JillWillNYC; or you can always send us an email to hello@cowboy.vc.

Please join us in welcoming Jillian to the Cowboy Posse!