Welcoming Sarah Leary to Team Unusual
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Unusual blog.
Adding a partner is a significant decision in the life of any growing team. At Unusual Ventures, it is not enough to just be a great investor or operator, our team and our culture demand that you put founders and the team first. Kevin Compton, someone I am proud to call a mentor, once counseled me: “When you add a partner, you’re going to ask yourself a million questions. But at the end of the day, there is one question that matters most: Are you proud to introduce this person as your partner?”
At a time when the world could use more positive news that brings people together, we are excited to announce that early stage founders have a new world-class executive available to help. Today we are extremely proud to introduce Sarah Leary as our newest member of Team Unusual.
We started Unusual Ventures with an ambitious mission to reinvent early stage venture capital and build a firm that would raise the bar for the entire industry. Building anything of importance starts with people and a shared set of values. Sarah is a tremendous entrepreneur and human being, having co-founded Nextdoor, one of the most important and successful consumer technology companies in history. A former collegiate national champion in lacrosse, Sarah has a long history of competing and winning. She’s a master practitioner when it comes to building and growing community-driven businesses and she joins Unusual with a passion to share all her lessons learned with the next generation of founders.
Our team met Sarah and immediately connected over our shared vision to provide an unprecedented level of support for entrepreneurs and our mission of greatly improving many of the entrenched dynamics in the venture capital ecosystem. When we walked her through our approach to provide founders with hands-on help via the Unusual Method, it resonated with her desire to roll up her sleeves and get in the trenches with founders in the early years of their journey. Equally important, she wholeheartedly embraced our intentional approach of working for HBCUs, hospitals, and foundations as LPs because she shares our passion for creating value for institutions that will help make the impact we want to see in our communities.
Sarah will partner with Andy Johns to continue to build out our consumer practice and will focus specifically on investing in opportunities that tap into the power of community, marketplaces, and social networks. She also will work with Andy to scale the consumer side of our Get Ahead Platform (GAP) and Unusual Academy. Sarah is a product and company builder, and will be a fantastic coach and partner for founders.
We could not be more proud to say we are shoulder to shoulder with Sarah Leary. The venture capital community just got a whole lot better with Sarah in the game and we can’t wait to see the impact she will have on our founders and the industry more broadly.
Onward!
