Why You Should Never Skip Breakfast — or, Welcoming Amy Saper to Uncork Capital
For the past year or so I’ve been on a bit of a quest: to find Uncork’s final missing piece on the investment team. We wanted someone with startup investing experience and who could bring complementary skills and networks to our team, but other than that, the boundaries were wide open. I met with dozens of smart, experienced, impressive people, but nothing felt quite right… until one foggy spring morning at Zazie, my favorite breakfast spot in San Francisco (also, apparently, Adele’s).
At one point, I looked past the plates of scrambled eggs and enormous bowls of coffee at the fast-talking, sharp-thinking, wide-beaming person in front of me and thought: “This is it.”
Today I’m proud to announce that Amy Saper is joining Uncork Capital as a Partner on the investing team, where she will focus on supporting seed-stage startups, primarily in B2B software and fintech.
Uncork is growing at an unprecedented pace. Earlier this summer we announced that we raised $400 million across two new funds, Uncork VII, a $200 million seed fund, and Uncork Plus III, a $200 million growth fund dedicated to follow-on support for breakout Uncork companies. We have also been expanding our team to better serve our founders: Last month we hired our first associate, Sarah Du; last fall we hired Joyce Lee, our first head of finance, and Adriana Roche, our first head of talent; and prior to that, we brought on Tripp Jones and Susan Liu as investing partners.
For the past nineteen years, Uncork has consistently invested in outliers and out-performers who use technology to solve real problems for real people and real businesses. It is also the way we think about our team.
Amy Saper is an uncommon find. She has demonstrated operational excellence in senior product marketing and product management positions at early-stage, hyper-growth startups that have fundamentally changed the way the world communicates (Twitter), travels (Uber), and conducts commerce online (Stripe). She’s a rare combination of self-starter and team player — someone who has traveled to far-flung locales such as Saudi Arabia and Singapore to open new markets, as well as launched and led thriving communities.
Amy’s experience includes four years at pre-revenue Twitter, which she joined in 2010, and where she worked with then-CEO Dick Costolo through Twitter’s IPO in 2014. While there, she built products for advertisers and developers and helped the company expand overseas. At Uber, Amy worked in product management on Uber for Business. She then earned a degree from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. After graduating, she met Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison, and worked on their team for three years in a cross-functional role blending product management and marketing for Stripe’s Connect, Billing, and Atlas products. After leaving Stripe, Amy became a venture capitalist and joined Accel as Partner. She led the firm’s investments in Beam, Complete, Gamma, LogicLoop, Sprinter Health, WellTheory, and a few companies in stealth.
As you might imagine from her background, Amy’s network is phenomenal. The quality of operators coming from Twitter, Stripe and Uber, as well as the people Amy studied and worked with at Stanford GSB, Stanford undergrad (where she was a Mayfield Fellow), and Accel, are an inspirational bunch. Amy has also spent three years lecturing about entrepreneurship at Stanford and created a burgeoning Women in Product community, further expanding her access to exceptional talent.
At Uncork, we invest in teams and products that improve the infrastructure of how companies create software, build companies, and change people’s behaviors and industries. Amy’s combination of skill sets, experiences, networks and character traits make her uniquely qualified to join the Uncork team on our mission to partner early, help with the hard stuff, and stick around. Really.
Welcome, Amy!
