Congratulations Aubrie!
Changing the venture industry one partner at a time.
Earlier today, our XFactor Ventures Investment Partner Aubrie Pagano announced that she had joined Corigin Ventures as a General Partner as they launched a new fund. We are beyond excited for her and thrilled for the Corigin team for landing such a rock star!
One of our core observations, when we started XFactor in 2017, was that many early-stage venture investors draw their new investment team members from the ranks of former venture-backed founders, and ideally those with some prior investing experience with a fund or as an angel. This makes sense as former founders have unique insights into market opportunities, have learnings from their own entrepreneurial journey they can share, and bring a high degree of empathy for new founders. But, if 85% of the companies that receive venture funding have male-only founding teams, this hiring strategy perpetuates the industry’s gender diversity problem and leads to more men becoming investors. Our hopes for XFactor was that in creating an investment partnership comprised exclusively of female founders, with each having investment decision making authority, and a platform for the cross-pollination of ideas across our team, was that we could accelerate the learnings and put our team in the position to find full-time, senior, investment roles should they so desire.
When we first showed up on Aubrie’s doorstep to ask her to be part of the XFactor investment team she had all the characteristics of a great investor: whip-smart, wildly curious, well regarded, and superbly networked (credit to Anna Palmer for seeing her potential!). But other than investing blood, sweat, and tears into her own company, Bow & Drape, she had never made any investments in other companies. That said, she threw herself into XFactor and led investments such as Tinted, maude, Balloon, Choosy, Shiru, and other companies across a range of sectors. She mentored founders, was on speed dial as they confronted issues, and dug in on a range of opportunities for each company. As a Bow & Drape shirt would say, the venture industry “had her at merlot”. As a result, on the heels of the sale of Bow & Drape in late 2019, she was able to leverage this expertise and experience — leading investments, reviewing the 1000s of opportunities seen by the entire XFactor team, and being part of all 47 companies we have said yes to — into joining Corigin Ventures where we have no doubt she will hit the ground running and be wildly successful!
So congrats to Aubrie, and thank you for paving this path that we are sure others of us will walk down later!
