My Venture Capital Career Path
Now that you have the background, let’s dive into my venture capital career path. After I graduated, I started my legal career as an Associate in O’Melveny’s Newport Beach office. I was originally planning to start in the firm’s San Francisco office, but my grandmother was in the end stages of her battle with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and I needed to return to southern California to be closer to her. The firm granted my request with no questions asked and I am forever grateful to them for doing so.
On the positive side, the Newport Beach office was home to Tony Wang, a partner with a venture capital practice. Tony needed junior associates for his venture deals, and I was staffed on many of his deals. On those deals, it was just me and Tony. This meant I was “drinking from the fire hose,” as Tony would say, but it also meant I got a ton of substantive experience in venture deals as a first-year associate. At the time, we were only representing investors in these venture deals. I decided that I really wanted to get experience representing startup founders and began to think about where I could get that experience.
My brother was living in Seattle at the time, and I was excited about the possibility of moving up here. I had no desire to move back to the Bay Area and Los Angeles did not have a big tech scene at the time (funny enough, the week I started at Fenwick, they announced that they were opening a Santa Monica office. I interviewed with several firms in Seattle, but ultimately chose to join Fenwick & West because I met Steve Graham and Michael Esquivel. I was excited to see extremely successful people in the partnership ranks that looked like me and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn from them.
Fenwick was amazing. I got a ton of substantive experience early on. I was often punching above my weight, so to speak, and quickly gained the trust of the partners that I worked with. While I loved the work that I was doing, I did not love the amount of work, endless client demands, and I decided that I was ready to jump into a startup operator role. AngelList had a role posted for a venture operations counsel that was open for a couple of months and I eventually decided to pull the trigger and apply.
Luckily, I received an offer to join AngelList and ended up being part of the team that built out their fund administration arm, Belltower. I was employee #9 and joined 7 months after the business launch. I’m pretty sure AngelList was less than 25 people total at the time. My mindset going in to AngelList was one where I was going to say yes to every opportunity that came my way and this strategy paid off. I got to do a little bit of everything in the business and my role expanded a ton. I was on the core team that launched Rolling Funds and we scaled the business from customer 1 to 125 by the time I left AngelList.
While I was at AngelList, the pandemic hit, and I suddenly found myself with a ton of free time. I decided to fill this time by getting an MBA at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business and launching Fuerza Ventures with Sebastian and Nicole. The decision to start these two ventures is something I’m really glad that I made because the MBA allowed me to go deeper in entrepreneurship and venture capital and I got the opportunity to work at Pioneer Square Labs. Through Fuerza, I was able to invest in underrepresented founders at the earliest stages of their company and I also got to build my deal pipeline, which allows me to angel invest in companies when we’re unable to invest through the fund.
I was really burnt out after leaving AngelList because going from zero to one is extremely hard and takes a mental toll. I decided I wanted to pivot to partnerships and business development. I joined SVB’s Access to Innovation program where I had the opportunity to establish partnerships that helped bring more Black, Latinx and Women founders, investors, operators and board members into the venture ecosystem. I loved that job and we were able to launch partnerships with organizations including BLCK VC, LatinxVC, HBCUvc, Graham & Walker, BVCC and Zane Access. Unfortunately, you can’t work at SVB and run a venture fund for obvious regulatory reasons and my time at SVB was cut short because I had an obligation to my LPs and my portfolio companies.
After leaving SVB, I joined Microsoft’s Business Development team. Honestly, this was probably the biggest mistake of my career as Microsoft was just not the place for me and I encountered racism at a level I’ve personally never experienced in another work environment. The positive was that I learned a ton about API integrations, including what an API even is and I also learned about how Big Tech approaches business development, which is much different than how startups approach business development.
My tenure at Microsoft lasted all of six months as I got the opportunity to join Carta’s law firm business development team where I’d get to build relationships with attorneys, paralegals and legal assistants and make sure they have all the resources they need to effectively utilize Carta’s platform. Carta was a ton of fun and I got the opportunity to demo Carta’s Pro Forma product to our attorney partners while the product was in beta. This allowed me to scratch my product itch again, which is something I really missed from my time at Carta.
I was happy with my role at Carta and really loved the team, but I missed my zero to one life. In the fall of 2022, I was recruited to join Dori and spent two months interviewing with the team, board, and advisors. In December, I got an offer to join the team as Head of Business Development and I jumped at the opportunity. I’m employee #6 and the first business hire. I get to lead GTM, Business Development, Sales, Marketing and serve as an SME for the product team to make sure that we’re building tools that founders, VCs, lawyers and accelerators love. It’s a full circle moment for me and a culmination of all my experience. I couldn’t be happier to be part of this amazing team and I’m ecstatic about what we’re building.
Thanks so much for tuning into my venture capital career path and I’m excited to continue sharing with you 🙂
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