Please welcome Joyce Lee, the newest member of the Uncork Capital team
It’s been a weird year. Every leader I know in tech is taking a hard look at their business and questioning previous assumptions. But if I’ve learned anything in my two-plus decades of building and investing in tech, it’s that the downturns are the best times to invest in the foundations of your business.
Along those lines, I’d like to introduce you to Joyce Lee, who joins Uncork Capital as our first-ever Head of Finance. Joyce started in early August and now leads finance for all of Uncork Capital’s fund operations, including valuations, portfolio reviews, limited partner reporting, firm-wide budgets, strategic financial planning, and fund formation.
This is a big change for Uncork. I launched our first fund fifteen years ago as a solo operation, and until recently, we were a small shop with three investors and one person in operations. I blinked and now we have 130 active portfolio companies, four investing partners and three people in operations. It’s horrifying to admit, but all this time I was keeping track of our portfolio valuations and other important numbers on spreadsheets, with the support of an outsourced finance team and our head of platform.
As I mentioned in a blog post a year ago, the firm is continuing to grow. We now invest both at the seed and growth stages with a “barbell” strategy, which means we need more and better data to help us make smarter decisions. We also needed to free up time from the team so we could each spend more time with our companies.
We decided to hire a search firm for the first time in Uncork’s history: Nicole Kelley from Beyer & Kelley. She brought us a number of excellent candidates but one of them shone through: Joyce Lee, who was VP Finance at Sierra Ventures, where she worked for fourteen years. We were impressed by her experience of running finance at another early stage firm, her knowledge of accounting and business economics, and her keen attention to detail and accuracy. (You can read more about Joyce here in her bio on our website.) It was clear from our conversations that she understood all facets of the job and would be able to improve on our processes very quickly.
Most importantly, we felt Joyce would be a terrific culture-add to our team. She’s a low-ego high performer with a gregarious personality and a positive outlook. And true to Uncork form, she’s no bullshit.
Please join us in welcoming Joyce to the Uncork family!
