Providing Military Officers an Opportunity to Serve in Venture Capital
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is widely known in the venture capital (VC) industry as one of the top global firms. However, what is not commonly known is that it’s one of the few VC firms that is giving back to those serving in the U.S. military through a collaboration with the Shift Defense Ventures program. Shift’s Defense Ventures Program is an eight-week long upskilling fellowship that identifies emerging innovators from the U.S. military and facilitates immersive tech industry experiences at venture capital firms, incubators, and startups across the United States.
For the 8-week program, two lucky and highly talented military officers were selected to be placed in NEA in the Fall 2021 cohort 07- myself, Maryam Khazraee, a Lieutenant Commander from the United States Public Health Service, and Caitlin Diffley, a Lieutenant Colonel from the Space Force. We both have unique and specialized backgrounds yet share a common thread of military leadership and the mission of protecting and defending the United States.
We were fortunate to have exposure to many members of the NEA team, representing various sides of the venture business, from investors, to operators, to portfolio services-however, I am especially grateful to those serving as direct sponsors of the Shift program at NEA: Carmen Chang, General Partner & Head of China; Andrew Schoen, Partner; Henry Magun, Associate; and Shanna Hendriks, Director of Business Development; were generous with their time and support to create this partnership with Shift. It was great to see how open and willing everyone at NEA was to take us in quickly to learn about venture capital and allow us a front row seat for all the investing and company building action.
I’ll share the perspectives, parallels, and learnings extracted from my fellowship program with a focus on three main points: leadership, time, and long-term views.
1. Leadership is crucial to any organization
Military leadership is the process of influencing others to accomplish the mission by providing purpose, direction, and motivation. Being in the military, we are trained to be strong leaders with a high focus on developing our teams, structured organization levels, and achieving our mission. Finding a solution to a bewildering problem or achieving a seemingly impossible task often demands an indomitable will to keep going and ability to search for the answers of missing or hidden pieces. Flexible thinking and the ability to reconfigure an approach, rather than doggedly sticking to one that’s not working, must accompany such tenacity.
There are similar tones within venture capital-one must be flexible in thinking with the ability to quickly adapt, learn, and synthesize trends and market data to imagine the future when making decisions on when to invest, how, and why. However, what is the essence of leadership? What does this really mean? The essence is people. It’s looking out for your team, it’s growing your people, and inspiring them to do things that they think are impossible.
When I got deployed in March 2020 to lead a COVID-19 testing station in Dallas, Texas, I had no idea what to expect. I remember getting on a 747 Delta flight and being one of three people on the entire flight. I remember stepping into the airport and driving on the once traffic-filled highways of Dallas, only to be shocked by their emptiness. When I finally got to my team, we all worked quickly to get me up to speed on our mission-designing and helping to lead a testing station with the capability of testing 1,000 patients per day, every single day-nonstop. In the months that followed during this deployment, I made sure to always look out for my team. If I saw someone beaten down, exhausted from working 5–8 hours straight without a break to use the bathroom or eat/drink, I would jump in and say ‘take a break, I got it.’ Seeing some of my team members exhausted from working nonstop day in and day out for months, up to 16-hour days without a single day off, I would run to get Starbucks drinks, payout out of my own pocket to lift their spirits. It was worth it, seeing them smile, and be able to take a moment to relax-even if only for a few fleeting minutes. During that deployment, I learned the importance of ensuring my team is taken care of, but also how others look to me as the leader, to serve as a model of strength, direction, and unwavering commitment to have their backs.
There were many parallels drawn during my fellowship program at NEA. I was brand new, didn’t have any true venture capital experience outside of the courses I took at University of California Berkeley, Techstars Cofounder Brad Feld and Techstars mentor Jason Mendelson course Venture Deals, and the relative books you can find at your local library. Despite my lack of direct experience, the NEA team graciously took me in, allowing me to learn from the best.
2. Time is scarce, yet building relationships takes time
When you’re on the field, time is scarce. You must act immediately. Yet, truly making an impact and meeting mission objectives takes time as we rely on others. This highlights why relationships are so important. In the military, we are lucky to have a natural camaraderie and trust among each other-it is innate and ingrained in our culture to help and support each other. For those considered weaker links, we prioritize our responsibility to train, improve, and ensure no one is left behind.
Venture capital is truly a relationship business. There is much emphasis on perception and prioritizing a positive, transparent, and confident display. It was interesting how much time- although so scarce-was taken during meetings to build up relationships, to get to know others, and put forth the energy to maintain and strengthen these connections over time. This surprised me mainly due to culture shock. Through my government and military experience, I am accustomed to agendas, and mission-driven, hyper-focused meetings where every minute is carefully utilized, pre-planned, and outlined.
3. Long-term mission views
Venture Capital is a long-term game. Not just in terms of the time it takes for companies to provide value to the market utilizing their product or service, but also long-term with respect to the investments that empower these companies to build and execute their solution. The entire startup-investor ecosystem is built upon a premise of partnership that lasts several years (typically 8–10 years)-the average cycle of a venture fund. These commitments can be difficult to endure and are similar to my experiences working in the government where policies, procedures, and missions that we plan out with the hope of making a positive impact, may not be fully known until decades later. Working at the Food and Drug Administration as an oncology regulatory project manager, the applications and cancer therapeutics being tested, tried, and studied for decades even through the gold standard of randomized controlled trials, may not realize their true benefit in the marketplace until they’re finally there. Sometimes newer therapeutics come out that beat the current development-the market opportunity came and went, and the company was too late. Other times it’s having too much toxicity or a lack of efficacy. Whatever the reason is, despite all the planning, studies, and research- sometimes it just doesn’t work out.
I witnessed how this long approach, which may include many failures along the way, has parallels in venture capital as well. Whether co-founders with divergent views on the future of a company, forced liquidity decisions driven by unfavorable markets, or even situations where a company was heavily capitalized but there was no longer a clear path to success and the difficult decision to wind-down had to be made. Of course, there were inspiring instances where companies made successful pivots and/or worked through challenges, but there were also instances where ample time and funding instead resulted in lessons learned.
It is critical to focus on the long-term view, and not lose sight of the impactful visions that can only be achieved with some trial and error along the way.
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Overall, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity that NEA has provided me, along with my past and future Shift colleagues. It truly gave me an inside look on how one of the most experienced global venture capital firms operates, and how their culture serves them well in their long-term views of success. I can’t wait to jump into the venture capital space myself to help society innovate and move forward, specifically in the healthtech space. I believe this is an area with a tremendous opportunity to utilize more AI technologies to help patients and make healthcare more convenient and affordable for all through smarter applications of health insurance plans.
Very Respectfully,
Maryam Khazraee
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
