Women in Venture Capital: How to Enter the VC World
Today is a great day to talk about outstanding women in VC, and also give some useful tips for women on how to become a part of the VC industry. I grabbed a list of general or venture partners, but there are many more who are lawyers, financiers, HR or PR leaders, etc. There are not many and I don’t want to elaborate on why the situation is like that. In this blog post, my purpose is to review some leadership stories about the most remarkable women in venture capital as well as to describe some patterns on how to start a VC career for a woman.
Female Partners at the VC firms and Angel investors
Mary Meeker
Founder and General Partner of Bond Capital
When that story ran in December 1998, Meeker was the Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. After a long run as the Street’s most influential pundit on all things Web, she left Morgan in 2010 to become a partner at the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Meeker launched a new group focused on investing in late-stage private companies and took stakes in businesses like Waze, Square, Lending Club, Ring, NextDoor, DoorDash, Pinterest and Peloton. In late 2018, Meeker left Kleiner to start Bond Capital, which launched with a reported $1.25 billion fund, and continues to invest in late-stage technology companies. In 2020, she was listed as the 84th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. Each spring, Meeker captivates Silicon Valley with her famous Internet Trends report, which details her tech predictions in 200 data-laden slides.
Kathy Xu
Founding Partner of Capital Today
Kathy Xu launched Capital Today in 2005 with the goal of helping Chinese entrepreneurs with “three weapons”: brand-building, team-building, and building culture and better ways to track performance. Xu turned a $29 million check into Yifeng Pharmacy Chain in 2008 into returns to her firm of more than $700 million; the July 2019 IPO of Three Squirrels Snack Food returned more than $500 million after Xu led investments in 2013 and 2014. Other notable outcomes for Xu include Bestore Snack Food Chain, which went public in February 2020 — Capital Today was its only investor from Series A to Series C — and Meituan Dianping, which Xu backed through Dianping and again post merger, for a combined investment return of more than $1 billion.
Rebecca Lynn
Co-founder and General Partner, Canvas Ventures
Rebecca Lynn co-founded Canvas Ventures in 2013, spinning the firm out of Morgenthaler Ventures, and has been named to the Forbes Midas List five years running and was included in a Top 20 VC list by the New York Times in 2016. Rebecca has demonstrated consistent conviction around fintech, digital health, and consumer products, and she brings unique operational expertise in marketing and recruiting to support her companies as a venture capitalist. Canvas Ventures has raised a total of $785M across 3 funds, their latest being Canvas Ventures 3. This fund was announced on Dec 15, 2020 and raised a total of $310M.
Anna Mason
Partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund
Anna Mason was one of the few female traders at Lehman Brothers when the 2008 financial crisis hit. Though Lehman didn’t survive, Mason’s experience of being in the minority stuck with her. While roughly 75% of venture investments are made in Massachusetts, New York, and California, Mason is hunting for promising seed-stage venture startups in areas of the country that other investors have long overlooked. Mason leads the fund’s well-known road-trip bus tours across the USA, and is known herself for being an ace networker. In July, James Murdoch invested in the $28 million Series C round of Revolution portfolio company AppHarvest, following an introduction to the firm by Mason. Her other checks have gone to the likes of St. Louis swimwear company Summersalt and Pryon, a Raleigh-based work-automation firm. The seed fund’s investors include Jeff Bezos, Meg Whitman and Ray Dalio. And she is under 40!
Arlan Hamilton
Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital
Arlan Hamilton is an investor and the founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital. In May 2020, Hamilton released her first book from Penguin Random House entitled It’s About Damn Time, which is based on her personal journey into entrepreneurship and venture capital. In 2018 she was included in the Fortune 40 under 40 list for her activities to close the funding gap for women of color, who receive only 0.2% of total VC dollars.
Nisa Leung
Managing Partner at Qiming Venture Partners
Qiming Venture Partners is one of the leading investment firms in China which currently manages over USD 5.9 billion in assets and investment in over 380 companies. Prior to joining Qiming, Nisa Leung was a co-founder of Biomedic Holdings with operations and investments in medical devices, pharmaceuticals and health care services in China. Nisa was Venture Partner of PacRim Ventures in Menlo Park, and was previously with Softbank/Mobius Venture Capital. She weeds out entrepreneurs “who want to make a quick buck” and instead picks early stage firms with long-term vision, especially in healthcare. The strategy has paid off with a trio of recent IPOs including Chinese vaccine maker CanSino and medical device maker Venus MedTech in 2019 and U.S.-based Schrödinger, which makes chemical simulation software, in February 2020.
Margit Wennmachers
Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Margit Wennmachers is best known for her ability to create market-leading brands, Margit is a16z’s chief marketer, advising the firm and entrepreneurs on their communications and marketing strategies. In 1997 Margit co-founded The OutCast Agency, in 2010 she joined Andreessen Horowitz as an Operating Partner. Margit being the architect of the firm’s media strategy in her blog post said the company plans to create a stand-alone media entity and named the new executive editor: Maggie Leung, a former journalist (Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN). According to a number of technology reporters, the firm has largely stopped cooperating with the media, even off the record. Andreessen Horowitz already publishes news and articles on its website, and it has a well-regarded podcast hosted by Sonal Chokshi, a former Wired editor. The new tactics appear to be part of a massive campaign drawing much more attention to Andreessen Horowitz than ever before.
Theresia Gouw & Jennifer Fonstad
Founders of Aspect Ventures
After leaving Accel, Theresia Gouw co-founded her own firm, Aspect Ventures, with another female star of venture capital, Jennifer Fonstad. Prior to Aspect, Theresia spent 15 years at Accel, where she was the firm’s first female partner. She began her career with Bain and Company after spending a year teaching math to high school students in sub-Sahara Africa. She graduated Cum Laude from Georgetown University and holds an MBA with Distinction from the Harvard Business School. Their headquarters in Palo Alto, California, just happen to be in the very same office where Theresia marched with her colleagues to present Mark Zuckerberg with an offer (Accel was one of Facebook’s first venture investors). In January 2018, Aspect raised a $181 million second fund with the backing of Melinda Gates and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. Fascinating story of a woman most people had never heard of, who started out flipping burgers at Burger King, and who now has a net worth of more than $500 million.
Natalia Vodianova
Angel investor
In addition to being a model and philanthropist, Natalia Vodianova now can absolutely legitimately be named a tech investor as well. Over the last few years, Russian angel investor Natalia Vodianova has managed to invest in more that 20 startups alongside her partner in the endeavor Timon Afinsky, through a France-based company called Supernova. The investments include a sleep app Loóna, a simplified legal contract app E-gree, an AI-driven yoga assistant Zenia. There’s also Little Tummy, cold-pressed baby food; Wannaby, an AR-driven shopping app, and 3Dlook, mobile body-scanning tech for fit, among more than a dozen others. It all started with Elbi, an app the two launched several years ago that turned the idea of social media “likes” into $1 charitable donations.
Karen Drexler
Angel investor
Karen Drexler currently serves Sandstone Diagnostics (Sandstone’s Torq family of systems enable the point-of-care preparation of high-quality plasma from capillary blood draws and venous blood draws) as the CEO and board member. She is also a member of the board of directors at ResMed and a founding member of Astia Angels. Prior to this, Karen spent over six years at Hygieia working as the chairman of the board. She is also co-founded Cellscape Corporation and was the CEO of Amira Medical for over five years. Karen received her MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and her BSE in chemical engineering from Princeton University.
How to start a career in VC
All the stories above illustrate that there are really a lot of different ways to become a venture capitalist — you can either begin from an analyst position at Morgan Stanley or become an impact VC investor after a successful model career. Marketing and PR is also a rather popular domain from which you can boost your career. There are also several examples of women who were entrepreneurs, bankers or consultants at the beginning of their way to venture.
BSE in chemical engineering or MBA with Distinction from the Harvard Business School—the education can be very different, but expertise is the key. In venture capital you can become a venture partner if you are a professional in your domain, which could be science, technology or even marketing.
To sum up, some become partners after years of being inside the ecosystem either by promotion or by organizing their own venture firms, and some of them just jump into this incredible tech world with their previous very diverse expertise and inspiring missions. Chose your own path.
Venture capital firms investing in women
Here is the list with over 320 VC firms, accelerators, angels and angel networks who support female founders prepared by Founders for Change movement. The FFC Diverse Investors List is a resource for founders and the tech community to more easily find VC investors from diverse backgrounds. The list marks the first time that founders will be able to create investor target lists using resources that include investment stage, sector and diversity — all in one place.
Leta Capital is also investing in female-founded startups, in our portfolio we have Devar, an intelligent assistant in the kids’ development that aggregates all the required educational content, founded by Anna Belova, and Cerevrum, VR training platform for improving soft skills using the Natural Experience Learning System (NELS) method, founded by Natasha Floksy.
So don’t hesitate to contact us. We at Leta invest in post-revenue IT & tech startups founded by Russian-speaking entrepreneurs, who operate internationally. We invest on average $500k up to $5M and look forward to hearing from you! Feel free to send us your deck via the form on our website or contact our Associate Alexander Zemlyak or Senior Analyst Anton Shardin.
