#Angels Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/angels/ Data-driven reporting on private markets, startups, founders, and investors Wed, 24 Jun 2020 17:19:53 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/cb_news_favicon-150x150.png #Angels Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/angels/ 32 32 More Key Takeaways From The 2019 Seed Series Interviews: Part 2 of 2 /venture/more-key-takeaways-from-the-2019-seed-series-interviews-part-2-of-2/ Wed, 29 Jan 2020 14:20:56 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=24188 The Seed Series of 2019 had so much good advice we had to break it down into two pieces. Here is our second set of the key takeaways from interviews with leading seed investors as we move forward into 2020. Satya Patel and Hunter Walk, founders of Homebrew, lead off this article by defining a Homebrew company, Jana Messerschmidt from #Angels discusses founder terms and The Engine’s Katie Rae talks about the timeframe for patient capital. The rise of cloud and APX is explained by Accel’s Vas Natarajan, Shuly Galili of UpWest shares how to build distributed teams, and Beezer Clarkson of Sapphire Partners covers returns for early-stage funds. It continues to be a busy time in seed. Part 1 of the Seed Series key takeaways can be found here.

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Key takeaways

Seed funds are highly selective. Seed funds do not scatter their investment and hope something takes off. On average, seed funds invest in 8-20 new companies each year, but meet with hundreds and get sent thousands of pitches. Seed funds tend to have one or more sector theses about the market driving their investment strategy.

Seed folks like to stick to seed. Why? They could move up the stack, raise a bigger fund and make more money. However, seed investors like seed because it provides an opportunity for them to see themselves making a return — provided their thesis and network is strong.

Seed funds raise like it’s 2009. Seed funds prefer to raise a new fund every 3 to 4 years, unlike more recent trends in venture with larger funds raising every other year. This time horizon for raising funds is fitting since the companies in a seed fund’s most recent portfolio will take time to prove product market fit and grow their valuation.

Fun fact: Hunter Walk on theYouTube acquisition by Google back in 2006. “It was called Google’s folly. They’re spending a billion and a half dollars for dogs on skateboards. Is this even legal? The hosting and streaming costs were high. At one of the internal TGIF versions, [Schmidt] announced the acquisition. Somebody asked Eric, ‘you paid a lot of money, how do you know that was the right amount?’ Eric paused for a second and said: ‘It’s definitely not the right amount. It’s either way too high or way too low. And we will know in 10 years.’ ”

Highlights from seed investors

7: Satya Patel and Hunter Walk, Homebrew Founders

Homebrew Co-founders Satya Patel and Hunter Walk

Hunter on the market gap at venture

“I was surprised to find that the market gap at venture was returning emails, showing up for meetings [and] spending more than 51 percent of your calendar with the companies that you funded versus that next company, that next fund to raise, that next conference to speak at. We took a model that basically says we will pick up the phone, we will answer the email, we will be on the whiteboard with you.”

Satya on the three things companies have to do well

“All companies at this stage really have to do three things well: they have to build a product, distribute that product and build a team. So that’s where we spent a lot of time.”

Satya defines a Homebrew company

“A Homebrew company is one in which there is a mission-driven founder who has a firm belief about how the world should operate and a strong set of hypotheses for how to help get there. He or she has experienced the pain being addressed firsthand, has empathy for the customer and a deep appreciation for the target industry, disrupting it with love rather than contempt. The founders want to build a cap table that acts as extensions of the team, helping them increase the scale, velocity or probability of the company’s success. The company is building something that democratizes access to products, services, data or customers for constituencies and industries that haven’t had access previously. When we come across like-minded founders operating in industries in which we feel we have expertise, relationships or know-how, we think of those as Homebrew companies.”

8: Jana Messerschmidt and Katie Stanton, Founding Team #Angels

#Angels team including April Underwood, Katie Jacobs Stanton, Chloe Sladder, Jana Messer Schmidt, Jessica Verrilli and Vijaya Gadde. Photo provided by #Angels.

Jana on founder terms

“When you’re a founder, the terms that are set are ultimately driven by your ability to negotiate. Certain founders may only get one term sheet, so that’s the deal they have to accept because they don’t have as much negotiation leverage. But other founders might go to Sand Hill Road and get six term sheets in a week; they’re going to drive the negotiation, they’re going to have lower dilution and higher valuations, and they’re going to set the terms. That’s something we talked about a lot in our group. Do women have as many options when they go out raising? Are they able to command and demand that same sort of excitement about the companies that they’re building where they’re able to drive the negotiation process and set those terms?”

9: Katie Rae, The Engine CEO

Katie Rae, CEO, The Engine

On the second thing

“The second thing I learned is that the effort you put into this and the love you show for the entrepreneurs is so fundamental to great outcomes. You really learn to trust each other, because without that trust people just block each other off and stop telling the truth or stop revealing what’s actually happening. It was so shockingly apparent to me that you have to be genuine in these relationships. It’s not a transactional business, and certainly not in the seed stage. These are early companies where a hundred things could go wrong, but only one needs to go really right to win. If you’re focused on all the wrong, you will kill these companies. That’s what I learned.

“It’s a lesson that gets replayed in almost every piece of life, whether it’s your relationship with a spouse or your children. It’s always the same lesson.”

On the time frame for patient capital

“Whatever the biggest technical risk is, you want to take that out in the first four years. That’s what opens all kinds of capital to the company, whether it’s venture capital, non-dilutive capital or project finance capital. Most funds are 10 years, which means you must be in the market truly deeply within the first four years. Otherwise, you’re not going to get to exit within 10 years. We like to have a slightly longer time frame than that, ours is up to 18 years. And that allows us to take a different set of risks in technologies that we think are really important.”

10: Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel

Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel

On the Rise of Cloud and APX

“The cloud is redefining how end users are working together and collaborating with one another. We spend a lot of time thinking about the future of work [and] the rise of new collaboration productivity systems, and how the cloud has been a major enabler for that.

“Part and parcel with the cloud is the rise of the API economy we call APX: the X means everything. What APIs do is actually integrate multiple different subsystems, so data is no longer siloed and workflows are no longer siloed. You can actually stitch together work across multiple different things. It has allowed entrepreneurs to create new cloud categories that are almost super-sets of individual pieces of workflow.

“The rise of cloud and, in particular, the rise of APIs, are big themes for us right now. We think the combination of those two is going to create a next set of cloud companies, both at the application tier, but also the APIs themselves will become interesting businesses.”

11: Shuly Galili, Co-founder of UpWest

Shuly Galili, founding partner of UpWest

On the challenges of building distributed teams

“It takes specific founders. Ultimately the sacrifice is on the CEO who has to be very communicative. He needs to create a cohesive environment, even though the team is distributed, ultimately live on an airplane, and not say ‘We’re a U.S. company, and you over there are some sort of an offshore.’ It’s actually the other way around; our goal is for our CEOs to share best practices with each other.”

12: Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director, Sapphire Partners

Sapphire Partners Managing Director Beezer Clarkson

On returns for early-stage funds

“We look to underwrite Series A funds with 3x net, and a seed fund [with] 5x net. We have to believe that’s possible. We will look at when you’ve made investments, how many of them have become a 5x or 10x return and how many of those need to be true. And who’s in the team? How big is the team and what are the team dynamics?

“Nothing guarantees you returns. We have yet to find a fund that has had a significant return, call it 5x, that has not had either a decacorn type exit or multiple billion-dollar exits. If you’re a $50 [million] or a $75 million size fund, you still need to have multiple billion-dollar exits.”

On fast in Venture

“The feeling of fast in venture is actually the growth of the companies, and not the management of the funds.”

 

Main photo courtesy of Frank Vessia via Unsplash.

 

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Roundup: Investments To Watch From Our 2019 Seed Series /startups/roundup-investments-to-watch-from-our-2019-seed-series/ Thu, 02 Jan 2020 13:43:01 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=23849 For the Seed Series 2019 we were fortunate enough to talk to some leaders in the VC world. With our final piece of the series for this year, we put together a list of startups these seed investors told us to watch.

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To quickly recap, we talked with Accel, #Angels, BBG Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, The Engine, Floodgate, Homebrew, Lerer Hippeau, NFX, UnCork Capital and UpWest.Here is the customized Crunchbase Pro list of organized by last equity funding amount from smallest to largest.

Vas Natarajan: Partner, Accel

Natarajan pointed to , a site reliability engineering platform that addresses those instances when a company’s site goes down, potentially costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.

led the seed in 2018. Blameless raised a in March 2019 led by Accel and .

“What Blameless is building is a command and control for engineers, DevOps leaders, product leaders to be able to collaborate by Slack, pull in all the relevant metrics that they’re seeing from different infrastructure monitoring problems, and then push fixes as quickly as possible.” said Natarajan.

Secondly is , a data privacy technology company that raised a in April 2019 from Accel.

Every technology company needs to know where their users are logging in from around the globe, and the laws of that country. “That is a whole set of infrastructure solutions, and front end consumer facing tools that Transcend will build and sell for any company,” said Natarajan. “If you go to privacy.trulia.com or privacy.hoteltonight.com, I as an end user can see your privacy policy, I can log in and see what data you’ve collected on me and then I can hit delete. Transcend powers all that.”

Jana Messerschmidt and Katie Stanton: Founding Team #Angels

The #Angels founders have their eyes on , a marketplace that matches celebrities with consumers for personalized video shoutouts. Cameo raised a $50 million Series B in June 2019 led by .

“The consumer will script what they want the celebrity to say. So it could be a happy birthday message. It could be an engagement message. It could be congratulations on your job promotion. Whatever you want it to be. And then the celebrity decides whether they want to fulfill it. The celebrity also sets their price. You have everything from cameos for $25 all the way up to slots charging a few thousand dollars,” said Stanton.

Next is that helps women track their fertility at a fraction of the cost. Modern Fertility raised ain June 2019 led by of . “They’ve helped demystify fertility, and giving you more power towards understanding how fertile am I right now?” said Stanton.

Susan Lyne: Co-founder, BBG Ventures

“ is a marketplace for very large farms to sell the 30 percent of produce that gets ploughed under, because it doesn’t meet cosmetic standards for grocery,” said Lyne who invested in its seed round. Full Harvest connects large farms to food businesses. led its in August 2018.

Then there is .

“GoTenna allows you to send a text message and your location when there is no wireless coverage, no cell coverage, nothing. It was really developed initially for rock and roll concerts, and off-grid sports,” said Lyne. Since its early days it has been adapted for more critical use. “It’s just a great communications protocol that allows anyone to communicate in a disaster.”

Lyne invested in GoTenna’s seed round back in 2013. Most recently it has raised a in June 2019 led by .

Ted Wang: Partner, Cowboy Ventures

is an AI platform for accounting firms to automate routine tasks.

“What you’re really stopping humans from doing is reading and typing. This makes people more effective in their jobs. I can’t imagine anyone is going to be unhappy about not having to do that,” said Wang.

Vic.ai raised an in September 2019 led by .

“ is a company that currently has a product that looks at your job postings, and is able to analyze the text of the job postings and help you to write them in a way that they’ll be more effective,” said Wang. “You can send a posting through the Textio system, and it will send you an augmented version of the same text with suggested changes or highlights.”

Textio raised a in June 2017 led by .

Katie Rae: CEO, The Engine

“ is miniaturising a fusion plant with an invention that allows them to get to net positive energy,” said Rae of this fusion energy company built on top of decades of research. “We believe what they’ve invented will allow you to get there. If that’s true, you basically have endless clean energy. This is a team that has already proven out a bunch of the most significant milestones, and will continue to do that over the next two to three years.”

Commonwealth Fusion raised a in June 2019 led by , with , , and along with other investors.

Next up is , a company that develops technologies to engineer human primary cells and iPSC’s for both discovery and clinical manufacturing of advanced therapies. According to Rae, “They looked at the biotech industry and asked, ‘Why are there PhDs basically injecting things into cells?’ Would there be a way to speed this up in the biotech industry by ten thousand X?”

Kytopen raised a in May 2019 led by and .

Iris Choi: Partner, FloodGate

has built software for simulation testing of autonomous vehicles. Applied Intuition raised its Series B of $40 million led by in September 2019.

“Instead of physically having to run autonomous vehicles in Arizona in a quarantined off area, you can do billions of test runs, in various scenarios, using software. There is a benefit to having a mutual third party, instead of everyone building it in-house whether you are an OEM or a rideshare provider. This is only going to become increasingly necessary in the future,” said Choi.

Another company worth watching is , which offers business owners a simple procurement app for their daily supplies, reducing time spent on managing their inventory, and helping lower waste. Cheetah last raised its in October 2018 led by and .

Satya Patel and Hunter Walk: Homebrew Founders

“ was started by two brothers, one who was a Navy Seal and the other who was an engineer at MIT. And the brother who was a Navy Seal came back for his tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he came to the realization that none of his colleagues, fellow soldiers died in battle,” said Patel.

“They died when they were doing reconnaissance into areas where there was no information about the building or the terrain that they were going into. And it seemed crazy to him that that can’t be solved in some different way. And so he got together with his brother, and they decided to build a company called Shield AI, which is developing fully autonomous drones for the public sector. These drones can by themselves navigate into buildings and caves. Collect intelligence about what’s going on inside through thermal cameras, regular cameras and then communicate that back to people who can do analysis on it,” said Patel.

“Shield AI is a company that has such a powerful mission around ensuring the safety of civilian and military lives.”

Shield AI raised a $25 million Series B in August 2019 led by .

Also on his radar is , which creates software infrastructure for any software company to become a payments company. Finix raised a in July 2019 led by .

“We think of it as democratizing access to a financial services infrastructure, helping a whole generation of software companies create more value for themselves and their employees and their customers,” said Patel.

Eric Hippeau: Co-founder, Lerer Hippeau

is an AI powered app for personalized health information

“They can answer pretty precisely all your health questions. If you use the app then you have the choice of very quickly getting on in a telemedicine way talking to an experienced doctor,” said Hippeau.

“It’s also a B2B business where you’ll see it appear at the front end to a number of different kinds of service providers, who would rather have something like this, as the first point of contact. It might be a hospital or it might be a clinic so that they can better direct the patient to the right service,” said Hippeau.

K Health last raised ain December 2018 led by , and .

Also up is , which automates retirement plans for small to medium sized companies. “They basically offer a very easy, low cost for SMBs. It’s really low cost,” said Hippeau. “They do all this hard work for about $8 per employee per month. And so they now originate a huge percentage of all new 401K plans in the United States.”

Guideline raised their in December 2018 led by .

James Currier: Co-founder, NFX

New York-based centers on financial products in the real estate sector.

“They allow people to buy residential houses for cash,” said Currier. “Ribbon gives the cash for two to eight weeks for the transition to take place and then the home buyer gets a mortgage. It really helps when you want to buy a home before you sell your other one.”

Ribbon raised a led by in October 2019.

is the largest repository of in the world, for disease detection. “They’ve created a platform play, and then they’re working with pharma and agricultural companies to develop diagnostics and therapies to edit change in a responsible way,” said Currier.

Mammoth Biosciences raised its in June 2018 led by the .

Jeff Clavier: Founder, Uncork Capital

“ is a hardware company that makes air purification technology for allergy, asthma or respiratory disease,” said Clavier. “It has a huge potential market. When you think about pollution in India and China this is a big market.”

Molekule raised their in November 2018 led by .

Another on the watchlist is , a chat inbox for teams. “Companies can aggregate a bunch of email, text accounts and any communication into one single chat inbox where teams can collaborate and have way more efficient customer support,” said Clavier. Front raised a led by in 2018.

Shuly Galili: Co-Founder, UpWest

is a company automating accounts payable to decrease time spent chasing invoice approval. Stampli raised a in October 2019 led by .

“They’re dealing with customers who have thousands and thousands of invoices, are inundated with paperwork, with a paper trail, with not knowing where the invoice started, and when is it going to be paid,” said Galili. Customers include retailers through to companies that have many outsourced vendors.

Also up is , a cybersecurity startup that addresses the risks in a company’s IT systems. CyCognito recently raised an funding in Nov 2019 led by .

“The attack surface has changed because it’s no longer just the technology that is on your laptop. There are many ways that servers, mobile technologies, customer lists and credit cards are being exposed today,” said Galili. CyCognito monitors these shadow risks an IT team might not be aware of to minimize exposure to attack.

Pro Tip. Crunchbase Pro subscribers can save this to their account to track changes over time, and get alerts.

To Note: Some of the investors mentioned in this article are

Illustration: .

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Seed Series: #Angels Founding Team Members Jana Messerschmidt and Katie Stanton /venture/seed-series-angels-founding-team-members-jana-messerschmidt-and-katie-stanton/ Thu, 19 Sep 2019 16:00:41 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=20501 Next on The Seed Series we talk with two founding team members from — and . We talk about balancing angel investing with day jobs, the gap table and other interesting topics. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Gené: Welcome to the #Angels founding team’s Katie Stanton and Jana Messerschmitt. All six founding angels met at Twitter. What was the momentum for creating #Angels?

Jana: After the IPO, one night over cocktails, we shared different tidbits around angel investing. We realized pretty quickly that we were very fortunate to come out of Twitter to see lots of entrepreneurs, and companies that were about to be formed. We decided it would actually be really fun to form this group or collective. Founders get to tap into the operating experience of all six of us. We all ran different parts of organizations and teams at Twitter across a wide variety of areas. We would also be able to take our deal flow and multiply it times six. Working at Twitter together, we built up a tremendous amount of trust. And so we wanted to be able to extend that into angel investing.

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Gené: You all have day jobs outside of #Angels?

Katie: Our day jobs have actually made us better angel investors. It helps us with with operating experiences across product, legal, marketing, and PR. As an investment collective you can put in as much time as you want. You can slow things down, you can dial it up when you need to. We joke that we’re just winging it as angels.

Gené: Do you have a fund structure?

Jana: We invest personal capital. In some cases all six of us might write a check that goes into a company and other cases it might just be one or two of us. Flexibility is really important because at different moments in time with our operating gigs, we might have conflicts of interest. We might be busy with our operating career and we might not have time to look at deals closely.

Katie: A couple of us have been lucky enough to be scouts, which means working with different VCs that give us the capital to further invest in companies. This is a great way for other women, who may not have access to capital, to participate in this economy. The firm can extend their eyes and ears on the ground to different deals and different networks. It’s great for that angel investor who can learn, and have that practice with that capital. It’s great for the founder to reach a wider group of potential investors.

#Angels team including April Underwood, Katie Jacobs Stanton, Chloe Sladden, Jana Messerschmidt, Jessica Verrilli and Vijaya Gadde. Photo provided by #Angels.

Gené: How does scouting work?

Katie: They’re all a bit different. A VC firm will work with a particular scout, they’ll negotiate terms. That scout will find the different investments and ultimately will make the decision to invest or not to invest, maybe putting together a lightweight deal memo. That scouts name is typically on the cap table of that company.

Jana: scout program is pretty widely talked about. It’s a mix of founders, operators, and just people who are well-networked, and who have a sense of deal flow. I think that’s the primary driver for a lot of venture firms for their scouts programs is how do we get into networks, into companies that they may not necessarily see at this stage.

Gené: Two of #Angels team are partners at venture firms. Jana you are an investing partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Jessica Verrilli is a general partner at GV. How does that fit with your angel investing strategy?

Jana: #Angels was such a big driver for me to get into venture. It was a great way to try investing, understand what it’s like to work with founders, to come to a consensus on whether you’re excited about something, to get into the right networks. And so through the process of #Angels, I got to know a lot of different venture firms. It ended up turning into an opportunity for me to join . I am nine months in so still early. Jessica had been an associate at , earlier in her career right after undergrad. Then she ended up going back into venture, having understood a lot more through the #Angels experience.

Gené: Is there a conflict doing #Angels and investing with a fund?

Jana: I think it’s pretty complimentary. #Angels is a valuable source of deal flow. We see so many interesting opportunities. LightSpeed is a little bit further downstream. They’re going to write much larger checks. We do everything from seed, all the way up through growth investing.

Gené: How much do you typically invest per deal? And how do you compete to get into deals?

Katie: Across all the deals that we’ve done, I would say the most common check size has been $25K, sometimes we’ve done $50K. The most we’ve ever done is $200K where we have a lot of conviction in the deal. That’s per person. The large majority have been seed and Series A. Because of our network, from time to time we’ve gotten access to these breakout deals. We’ve invested in , , , and when they were a little bit further along.

Gené: How do you get into them at that late stage? There’s a lot of competing dollars trying to get into those successful companies.

Katie: I think across all six of us we have relationships with many of those founders, or CEOs, or even some of the investors who are looking at not just capital because they get capital from a lot of places. That added value comes from our different experiences, in product, engineering, legal, international, and go to market strategy. Many of them were also looking for more diversity on the cap table, knowing that they had a lot of catch up work to do in terms of bringing diversity to their teams, to their executive teams, but also to their capitalization tables.

Gené: You are interested in getting more women on the cap table of successful startups. How do you make that happen?

Jana: Even though women are making gains in terms of representation in tech, we think that they hold just a fraction of the equity. from Carta reached out and said, I’m sitting on a bunch of data, do you guys want to work together? What came out was that even though women make up a third of employees at tech companies, they hold just value. So that’s a jarring statistic. If you think about what happens then with the wealth generation from these tech companies. It’s what shapes what products get started, and which companies get started, venture funds, angel investors or who has the ability to fund politics, and philanthropic endeavors. We thought that this was a watershed moment for the industry, the first study of its kind.

You have to get more women into the roles that take up the chunks of the cap table. So what are those roles. There’s four major areas. Number one is obviously founders — women still only get 2 to 3 percent of all venture funding. Number two is early employees. These tend to skew to the engineers, because you need people to build products. We need more women in engineering, hired for that first 10, 50, 100 employees. Number three is executives at companies. We need more women in executive roles. And then investors. That could be angel investors, check writing partners at firms. Those are the ways that we start to correct the gap.

Katie: Women on average makes 79 cents on the dollar. But when you factor in the equity involved, it goes to about 47 cents. When we started to angel invest, no one ever asked about who’s on your cap table. Are there women on your cap table? Are there people of color on your cap table? And increasingly we’ve seen founders approach us and say deliberately we have only male investors, we want to diversify our cap table. Would you be interested? That’s a change of mindset, which we think is very important.

Jana: In almost every deal that venture firms structure, there’s usually some amount left on the cap table for strategic investors. And so whether that’s individual angels, or maybe it’s a corporate. Now being a professional investor as well on the venture side whenever I’m doing a deal, I’m often saying, who are the other diverse investors that I can bring along?

Katie: Sometimes you can invest in a company with as little as $5K. You can add other value. You can be an advisor to those companies for free, and they will pay you to deliver some expertise that you have. We host these programming events called Angels Access. We will partner with a different VC firm, or another organization to host something around negotiations, around crypto, to help demystify what it means to become an angel investor.

Gené: Have you worked with any of the angel groups out there?

Jana: There’s a group out of Facebook called . They are a group of ex-operators out of Facebook that we’ve worked with quite a bit. And we work with a ton of pre-seed, seed stage funds. You’ll continue to see more of this trend especially since 2019 has been a year rich with tech IPOs. There is an amazing alumni group from Uber that we’ve done some co-investing with. You’ll continue to see more and more companies IPO, more operators who have liquidity to invest.

Gené: Were these groups inspired by #Angels?

Katie: We were so thrilled when launched bringing so many women in venture together, sharing, not just deals but approaches and building community. Having more insight about how other firms perform. I am a principal. How do I become a partner? How much carry should I expect? To be able to ask questions and push the industry forward.

Gené: What have been the key learnings for you as a group?

Jana: We’ve now invested in 120 companies. We’ve done a bunch of consumer because a lot of us have ties to consumer companies. We’ve actually done quite a bit of enterprise, because we also do have that expertise. One of our #Angels, was the chief product officer at . I worked quite a bit on Twitter’s enterprise business. Katie was the CMO of a genetics company called , so she is our healthcare expert. We invested in a few companies in aerospace. Why not invest in rockets? We invest across multiple different industries, multiple stages. A lot in Silicon Valley, but we have portfolio companies in LA, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Boston, and New York. We have one in Latvia, but not that many internationally. 40 percent of the companies have a female founder or CEO.

Gené: What’s next?

Katie: Becoming great investors and ultimately getting more women on the cap table of successful companies. And I think we want to show progress, pushing the industry forward to close that gap. There are other studies that we think could be informative. What are the root causes of that gap? For example, if you look at all seed stage funds and valuations, do valuations of companies founded by women skew less. I have an offhand observation at the most recent demo day with Y Combinator is that female founded companies that I saw were valued much lower than the male founded companies. Is that a source of part of that disparity?

Jana: When you’re a founder the terms that are set are ultimately driven by your ability to negotiate. Certain founders may only get one term sheet. So that’s the deal that they have to accept because they don’t have as much negotiation leverage. But other founders might go to Sand Hill Road and get six term sheets in a week. They’re going to drive the negotiation. They’re going to have lower dilution, higher valuations, and they’re going to set the terms. And so that’s something we talked about a lot in our group. Do women have as many options when they go out raising? Are they able to command and demand that same sort of excitement about the companies that they’re building where they’re able to drive the negotiation process and set those terms?

Gené: Are there a couple of companies you are excited by?

Jana: So one is , the scooter company. If you just look at product market fit for consumer companies over the last five years, scooters and micro-mobility, it’s one of those incredible companies with consumer product market fit. Both Bird as well as Lime are working on the unit economics and really trying to figure out how to scale this business. When I first talked to the founder a few years ago, it was just so exciting to be part of that journey because it’s completely changing the way that people get around.

Gené: And what stage, did you get involved in Bird?

Jana: I was an angel in Bird a couple of years ago. To see a physical product in the real world — scooters parked on corners. It is constantly reminding people that this is a way to get around your city. Because consumers love the experience so much they are sharing it on social media. It’s a bit like you’re flying. You don’t have to spend marketing dollars to get consumers.

Another company that we were both excited about is a company called . Most of our deal flow comes through people we know, the founders, or maybe other investors, or people in our network. This was one I randomly saw in the wild on social media. A friend of mine was using Cameo to propose to his girlfriend using the stars of the Bravo show Vanderpump Rules. How did they get these videos from these “celebrities”? I started doing research on the company and dmning the founder on Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s a marketplace that matches celebrities with consumers. The consumer will script what they want the celebrity to say. So it could be a happy birthday message. It could be an engagement message. It could be congratulations on your job promotion. Whatever you want it to be. And then the celebrity decides whether they want to fulfill it. The celebrity also sets their price. You have everything from cameos for $25 all the way up to slots charging a few thousand dollars.

The reaction videos that you get from people are, how did this happen? Is this real? How do you know this person? It’s one of those consumer products where you have virality in so many ways. You have the receiver of the cameo who takes and shares it on social media. You will also have the celebrities promoting it because this is a great way for them to make money.

Katie: Another company is . We saw that at seed and we love the idea of more products and services giving women more agency over their health. Fertility has been sort of a taboo issue. When I was trying to get pregnant, no one ever talked about it. Am I the only person not getting pregnant immediately? They’ve helped demystify fertility, and giving you more power towards understanding how fertile am I right now? What are my options? The two female founders are incredible. They recently raised their Series A from at , which is a perfect person and team to be able to bring that forward and reach a larger audience.

Illustration: .

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