Where Are All The Female CTOs?

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  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Hi everyone. I’ll let you all sort of slowly meander in, but we just want to welcome you to our webinar on female technical leadership—specifically, where are all the female CTOs? And we’re so excited for you to meet some of the rock stars in our portfolio today. My name is Meera Oak and I’m a Senior Principal on the Alumni Ventures Investment Team, and we are just so thrilled that so many of you have joined us for this really important session.

  But before we dive into the meat of this webinar, I just want to flip through some disclosures. First, I won’t read all of this to you, but I will call out that if you’re interested in seeing additional investment considerations, please visit avfunds.com/disclosures.

  So what will we be discussing today? First, we wanted to give you some context on Alumni Ventures and really the overall position of strength that we’re in as we launch this Women’s Fund. Then we’ll introduce our incredible panelists—all CTOs, as I mentioned, from our portfolio—and engage in a really rich discussion on building technical products, aligning technical and business strategy, and reviewing some of the lessons learned in their journey.

  Our discussion will also incorporate some of the amazing questions that were actually sent in advance from our audience. So thank you for that. We’re really excited to cover all of that territory with you. But with that, I will hand it off to my colleague, Brittney Wade, to kick us off.

   

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome, thanks Meera. And hi everyone. So great to be here with you guys today. I’m going to share a little bit more about AV as a fund and then we’ll kind of get into more specifics about the Women’s Fund and then we’ll go on from there.

  So starting first with AV, we are a bit of a unique VC fund in that we raise all of our capital from individual accredited retail investors rather than large institutional funds, as is pretty typical in other venture models. But since we got our start with this model in 2014, we’ve grown to become actually one of the most active investors in VCs in the U.S., per PitchBook, and as well as the third most active VC globally. We’ve raised over $1.3 billion in total capital so far, and we have over 1,300 portfolio companies. So a very massive number of companies that we’ve been able to sort of back and get behind from a capital perspective. And we only plan to continue to move onwards and upwards from here. And the Women’s Fund is a big part of that as well.

  Broadly speaking, we have about 40 full-time venture investors at the firm and we’re also supported by about 90 other full-time staff to make all of this happen.

  So what is the Women’s Fund? Like several other of our previous vintages, it’s a diversified portfolio of ventures founded or led by women bringing their talents and perspectives from promising markets, whether that’s femtech and software, fintech, deep tech, biotech, CPG, and more.

  The one thing that does set it apart is that we are only backing female founders. So I misspoke a little bit earlier, but we only back female founders in this fund. But like our other funds, this will be a portfolio of about 15 to 20 deals overall that we plan to invest in over the next 12 to 18 months. And again, as I mentioned before, this will be diversified by stage, sector, geography, and also lead investors.

  We operate strictly as a co-investor, so we don’t set terms or price rounds, but we do look for other ways to be helpful to our portfolio companies alongside that goal as well.

  As a co-investor, we look to invest alongside other established venture capital funds with sector expertise, leveraging their due diligence and term sheets while running our own disciplined diligence process independently of theirs as well before we actually seek to put in capital behind the businesses.

  We also seek pro rata rights to reserve our rights to continue to put in capital behind the business, especially for the ones that have determined themselves to be our clear winners. So we reserve about 20 to 25% of the total fundraise for that mission. And for investing on the retail side, the minimum check into the fund is $25K. This also gives you access to our syndications as well.

  Oh, and one thing I did not mention before: to date, we have 357 portfolio companies that are founded, led, or co-founded by women. And for every single one of them, we’re so excited about the potential that they have—and this fund will also only allow us to do more of that.

  Now, getting into the actual Women’s Fund team: obviously I’m Brittney. I joined AV about eight months ago. I work as a Senior Associate here on the investment team alongside Meera and our other colleagues here.

  Prior to joining AV, I was largely working as an operator in the product space, working first at MasterCard developing buy now, pay later or installment solutions and scaling them to customers globally. I then transitioned to the startup ecosystem doing similar work, but really found so much enjoyment from working with founders—especially female founders. So excited to do more work here with them and continue to back ’em.

  Our team is led by Laura Rippy, who’s been with AV since 2017. In addition to overseeing the Women’s Fund, she also oversees the Harvard, Dartmouth, and Strategic Tech Funds here at AV. We’re also joined by Senior Principal Sophia Zao, who can’t be with us here today. And we also have a broader support team as well.

  And I’ll let Meera walk through her intro and introduce herself to the audience.

   

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Thanks Brittney. I appreciate it. We have such a rockstar team—it’s just a joy to be a part of it.

  Background really quickly: I previously worked at Yale University for a long time, initially on the endowment finance side, and then later in strategy and ops for the university doing a multitude of things—but the bulk of which was thinking about how to integrate tech infrastructure into the university ecosystem.

  So I helped launch an ERP implementation, new business intelligence tools, and the like. Then I helped launch a couple of businesses out of a venture studio based in New York and then joined Alumni Ventures in 2020. And so it’s been a really incredible ride so far. I’m really excited about this next chapter in the story.

  With that, I’m going to kick into a bit more on why we’re actually doing this, which was almost like a duh moment. But in many ways, we have so much context that you can imagine the solid foundation that we’re building on as we launch this Women’s Fund.

  Before launching, our whole team really did our homework here. We found that female leadership resulted in stronger performance, with women delivering higher revenue and more than twice as much per dollar than those funded by men. I’ve seen this in the portfolio companies that I’ve worked with—female founders exit faster and maintain greater capital efficiency versus the rest of the market.

  And finally, female-founded startups align really well with Alumni Ventures’ strategy of bringing diversity across sectors and stages, as Brittney alluded to earlier. So this research really helped us answer the “why” on why we should really launch this fund focused on female leaders and why it should really exist in this ecosystem today.

  Brittney walked through a lot of the structure of the fund, but really it’s these stories that got us super excited about the launch. We wanted to give you a teaser on some of the portfolio companies that could have been included in the Women’s Fund had it been started earlier. And candidly, there were way too many to choose from.

  But we wanted to go ahead and highlight a couple stories just to illustrate the breadth that we intend to cover. So maybe Brittney, I’ll let you kick things off.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, sure. So I’ll talk a little bit about Praxis Labs, which is down there to the bottom right. Praxis Labs, as you see there, is an immersive learning platform that embeds equity and inclusion training throughout the employee lifecycle.

  They are backed and founded by Elise Smith, who is a fantastic founder who has used this technology to launch with corporate customers such as Uber, Google, and Etsy to really help them close the gap on their diversity training for their employee base. She’s already closed $19 million so far, and we actually invested in Elise’s Series A round alongside Northwest Venture Partners, Emerson Collective, and SoftBank.

  So that really just gives you a sense of one of the amazing women that we’ve been able to back so far and the work that we’ve been able to do. And I’ll let Meera talk a bit about Carry1st as well.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, we wanted to paint the spectrum a little bit and I think Carry1st is almost directly just a little different than Praxis Labs.

  Carry1st is a payments and gaming company based in Africa, and Lucy Hoffman and her co-founder Cordell are tackling a pretty enormous opportunity as the leading mobile gaming publisher and digital commerce platform in Africa.

  Just for a bit of market context: the average age in Africa is 19, and there will be more smartphones in Africa in five years than in Europe and North America combined. So it was such an interesting inflection point for the company, and we were really pleased to see a leading specialty gaming VC in Bitkraft bring a really supersized check to the round, as well as a16z—the prior lead investor—investing double pro rata.

  So sort of just intentionally exemplifying how we track really strong conviction amongst other lead investors and how that strengthens our own conviction in opportunities.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Great. And so with that context of Alumni Ventures and the Women’s Fund, we wanted to frame our discussion today around female technical leadership.

  Part of the story isn’t new for our audience, likely. There’s historically been a challenge in finding women in senior roles in STEM. Last year, women represented only 28% of STEM professionals in the U.S., and for the time being, women represent only 15% of software engineers in the U.S.

  But despite this doom and gloom sort of picture, when Brittney and I and the team combed through the data, we were actually not surprised to find that female technical leaders have been at the helm of some of the most important companies in our history—Etsy, Expedia, Johnson & Johnson—and that’s candidly all we could fit on this slide, but there are more.

  But with these giants in our sight, I’m really pleased to introduce the next generation of female technical leaders.

  With that, I’m going to segue now into our panel, and I would love to invite our esteemed panelists on screen: Leila Deravi, Alison Berkland, and Maria Tilia.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Hello ladies. Great to see you.

   

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome. Great. Thank you guys so much for being here. It’s such a joy because we could never do your intros justice. I would really love if each of you could introduce yourselves—and Leila, maybe I could start with you if you’re comfortable.

  Leila Deravi, Co-Founder, CTO @ Seaspire Skincare:
  Yeah, that sounds good. So yeah, nice to meet everybody. I’m Leila Deravi. I’m an associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern, and I’m also the co-founder and CTO of a sole woman-founded startup, Seaspire Skincare, which I think based off of all the information that was given before, one other stat that’s important to throw in there is that only 2.5% of all startups are founded solely by women.

  So I’m always really proud to bring up that stat.

  At Seaspire, what we do is we are trying to build safer sunscreens. There’s a lot of toxicity involved with everyday, daily-use sunscreens and even recreational ones, and we’re really trying to completely disrupt the industry, which has been paralyzed with innovation for a long time. So that’s what we’re doing.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome. I think Allison, if you wouldn’t mind going next, that’d be great.

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  Yeah, no problem. So I’m Alison Burklund. I’m one of the co-founders of Nanopath. I also have a female co-founder. Our company was spun out of our PhD work at Dartmouth, so we were actually working in the same research lab, hit on a cool new diagnostic technology up at Dartmouth, and have been in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the past three years developing the technology.

  Really high level—we’re working on molecular diagnostics for women. So, can we deploy better—by better, I mean faster, cheaper—diagnostics at the point of care to characterize infectious diseases that predominantly affect women? So UTIs, vaginitis, STIs, things of that nature.

  We’re doing this using a super cool new technology—happy to chat about in more detail further on the panel—but that’s a little bit about us.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome. Last but not least, Maria.

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  Hi, thanks so much for having me. So I’m Maria, I co-founded Canvas with my co-founder, Kevin Albert. And yeah, we’ve been founders for almost seven years now, and what we’re doing is we’re bringing robotics to the construction industry.

  Really what drives us is that it’s an industry that hasn’t had really any tools. And so we’re trying to bring better tools to improve the working conditions for people who are in this industry. It’s a huge, underserved industry, and we’re based in San Francisco and excited to tell you more during the panel.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome. And with that, I think we’ll cut the slides so we can see all of our wonderful faces. And Brittney, maybe you can kick things off for us.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, for sure. So great to meet all of you guys, and so excited to get into the discussion.

  Maybe we can start with: What inspired you all to pursue a technical career? So maybe Alison, we can start with you, and then Maria, then Layla. Would love for you all to chime in here. But yeah, I would love to kind of know the background there.

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  Yeah, this is always such a tough question to put the pieces together. It seems like the other panelists agree.

  So when I think about it, I really think it comes down to my desire to make an impact. I really wanted to make some type of substantive change in the world throughout my life, and I thought science was a good vehicle to do that. I was really drawn to biology from the jump, ended up getting a degree in chemical engineering—I couldn’t choose between chemistry, biology, and physics, so I kind of combined it all.

  But I think the goal was really: How do we utilize science and engineering to impact the world around us in a positive way? And obviously it’s fantastic I’ve landed at a company that is trying to improve the health of women. I couldn’t think of a better outcome.

  So yeah, I’m hoping to learn from the other panelists how they chose their career path. This is always a challenging one for me.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome. Thanks. Maria?

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  Definitely would agree with Alison.

  Just thinking back, for me it was growing up always wanting to fix things. I was the one following my dad saying, “I’m going to fix things with you.” I was born and raised in Mexico, and in the town that I grew up in, it was an industrial town. The big industry was automotive, but the other big industry was jeans—like denim jeans.

  And I remember touring factories with my dad, which is one of those really cool things that I got to do, and seeing a ton of automation and awesomeness in the car manufacturing. Then he took me through the jeans factory and I was like, wait—what?

  And funnily, it was also the women who were all in the jeans factory, and they’re all clenched over their sewing machines. And I was a little kind of pissed off, and I told him this. And he was like, “Well, then you gotta make better solutions.”

  And so from an early age, he told me, “Engineers make solutions.” And that led me to go and eventually discover robotics. I ended up doing FIRST Robotics in high school, and it was kind of that, “Oh, okay, I developed something to fix this game. Let’s take that further.”

  And it just continued to surprise me as I learned more and more how many industries we’ve been like, “People are good enough to do that,” even though it’s a really dangerous job that we’re putting them in.

  So that really was the motivation—to study and go through and say, “I can’t find the solution out there; it’s my turn to make it.” Love that.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Layla, do you want to—yeah, certainly last but not least, Layla.

  Leila Deravi, Co-Founder, CTO @ Seaspire Skincare:
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.

  Okay, so how did I start my technical career? I’ll say—so I’m a professor of chemistry, right? I wouldn’t say I ever—chemistry is my passion, my only living reason for being around, because chemistry is really hard.

  So when I started college, I was like, oh man, I was never the best student. I was never at the top of the student [group], but I really, really, really was drawn to research. And I think that was sort of my moment when I was in college—that I was like, I like research. I liked the creativity that research gives you, and I like the technical foundation that something like chemistry can provide you to answer and ask really targeted questions that people just don’t know the answers to.

  As I dug around into what does it mean to be a chemist, I started thinking about, oh, if you learn more, if you get more opportunities through advanced degrees and postgraduate work, you can get more opportunities to explore and to innovate and to build teams and environments to answer questions that people have never been able to answer.

  And so that’s kind of what catalyzed my interest in really digging deep and diving deep into a technical career in chemistry. And then from there it was like, how can you—and it’s things like impact, and then transforming industries and thinking about how can you build teams to impact—all of the above.

  I think all that starts to grow and build and then snowball, and you just kind of have this ecosystem around you where it’s really incredible and very motivating.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  That’s incredible. I love that you guys all started from different places and at different points in time, but you all kind of coalesced around wanting to build something, have an impact, make a solution, and ended up having a technical career.

  So I think that’s awesome, and it’s such a great segue into our next question.

  So would love to dig into: How do you approach team building and building a positive work culture within a technical team?

  I think especially since you guys are women—and there’s oftentimes not very many women—I think that makes it an even more potent question as people may think about entering those careers themselves and kind of getting your perspective on those pieces as well.

  Oh, so sorry—didn’t say: I’d love all of you to answer this question, and maybe we can start with you, Layla.

  Leila Deravi, Co-Founder, CTO @ Seaspire Skincare:
  Okay, awesome. So this is a really, really interesting question, because you could answer it from multiple different points of view.

  So how do you build a team? First of all, you want to find where you’re deficient as a person and as a technical leader, and you want to build and bring in people to help reinforce that. So it’s sort of like building a building—you gotta have the beams, you gotta have the concrete, you gotta have the… I don’t know what else is in buildings, but you get my analogy.

  But you need to bring it all in to be able to create the strongest network and cohort of people possible to deliver whatever X function that you want to.

  But when you answer that team-building question as a woman, that’s a very different answer—because God forbid you’re a woman with a personality. I think then you get kind of pigeonholed into places where maybe people don’t take you seriously, or people are thinking that you might not be good enough or able or technical enough to be able to solve these problems—these very hard problems that you’re trying to solve and bringing the teams in to solve these hard problems.

  So it is a really interesting balance and dynamic between: How do you build the right team? How do you build the right credibility? And then how do you catalyze growth in those spaces? But it’s interesting.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing that, Layla. I would love to go to you, Maria, next.

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  First, I a hundred percent agree with Layla.

  One of my reflections was—don’t be afraid of seeing what your holes are, but filling them, right? I think there’s a little too much… Men are particularly good at this—“I know everything.” And then it’s just not going to help your company and your business, and you’re not going to have that impact.

  And that took me a while. I think I came in a little bit with armor. I didn’t want to be thought of as not knowing enough. But then just realizing—you know what? It’s even better if I have a team that basically does cover all the holes.

  And one of the ways that I fostered positive work culture was being honest about that and started being more open with my team and saying, “Look, you are the expert on this. I hired you for this reason. Give me your voice. I want to hear it.”

  And I think showing them that I was willing to admit that hole led to the team being more like, “Oh, maybe a design review would be a good idea because I might not have caught this.”

  So it became this culture of being honest about your own strengths and weaknesses and people being able to do it—but it had to be modeled. If I acted like I knew everything and told people to be open and collaborate, people do what they see.

  And so that was a big part for me. Back to Layla’s point, it took a little bit of balancing. I still wanted to portray and show my strength, but being able to say to my team, “Look, I don’t know everything. I hire you to tell me when I don’t know everything. And work together. And I expect you to do the same thing.

  And if you act like you know everything and then there’s a mistake, that’s a problem. But if you bring it to the group and we all help you—and then there’s still a mistake—[well], we’re doing new, crazy things that nobody else has done. So likely there will be a mistake. That’s different.

  Right now, we’re all behind you. Everybody’s going to want to help you get it through the finish line—versus this kind of individualistic side.

  So it does take some effort, but for me, a big thing was modeling the behavior I wanted to see and being okay with that vulnerability, to be honest.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, no, I love that word—vulnerability. That was kind of what I was noodling around as you were talking. I was like: being able to lower your guard and have some humility, I think, is the key takeaway that I had between you and Layla.

  Alison, anything that you’d add here?

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  I really want to echo that sentiment. I think one of the most challenging things about leading a technical team—I’m an individual who has never put out a product, I’ve never brought a product to market. I’ve been in research my entire life, so luckily I’ve hired people that know a lot more than me.

  But it’s that fine line between: how do I be humble enough that I’m acknowledging that you’re the expert, I’m not the expert—just as Maria said—but still assert some level of authority, which is very challenging as a woman. I’m a young woman.

  Funny story actually—I went to an orthodontist yesterday for my overbite, and they said, “We recommend braces.” And I said, “That’s not going to work. That’s not going to work in my field of work. I’m sorry. I’ll get a whole set of new teeth before I, as a founder—a fairly young founder and a woman—put on a full set of braces.”

  So anyway, I’m digressing, but it’s challenging. The line is very, very challenging to find. I think it’s something myself and my co-founder are still actively working on, but we always err on the side of humility.

  And team—our team of 14 people—has quickly become the most stressful aspect of our jobs because we’re so concerned that they’re happy. We really want to build a company where everyone is excited to come to work every day. We understand our team is crucial to our success, and I think that comes through in the way we’re interacting with them—or at least we hope it does.

  In addition to the technical program management, we want to make sure these individuals are growing on an individual level. So, opening up to opportunities that extend beyond technical leadership—even if that’s commercial experience, if that’s intellectual property, if that’s regulatory—kind of leaning into where these individuals’ interests are so that they feel like they’re not only growing in their niche technical skillset, but also in other areas of the business.

  I think that’s one of the really cool things about joining a startup. And I think you draw individuals that want to learn a lot of things to startups. So we’re trying to capitalize on that and hopefully provide a lot of interesting experience where we retain talent and help some people grow in their career along the way.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  I love that. It almost sounds like you’re trying to also empower your team alongside being humble leaders yourselves—of being like, “You are the expert, and what do you want to learn? How can we make sure we’re filling those gaps and always supporting you the best way we can?”

  So I love that. I would work for any of you—I love all those answers.

  Sticking with the theme of humility though, my next question for you, Maria, is around complex technical problems.

  So can you share an example with the audience of a time where you faced, with your team, a complex technical problem and the solutions you guys implemented to get over the hurdle?

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  Sure. I’ll be honest, I was like, “Oh my God, there are so many to pick from!” But one that I thought exemplified the challenge that robotics brings is—we finish drywall. So basically you make drywall look like a solid wall, even though it’s made of pieces.

  And so the robot has to do all of these things: applying the material and removing it. In particular, sanding the material is really difficult. It’s very soft. And on top of that, we’re in an active construction site. So it’s not something like automotive where you can control everything around it. We had to deal with all of this error.

  So we were looking at this like—how do you see on this thing that’s softer than mud when it’s dry dirt that would easily scratch, but you don’t know exactly where you are? It’s like the worst dream of a roboticist.

  And what we did is we said, “Okay, it’s a multidisciplinary problem. We need to get the whole team involved.” And whenever we face one of these, we try to do two-week sprints just to make sure that something so big doesn’t become something that takes six months to solve. We say, “Look, we’ve got to see some progress, so let’s tackle a little piece at a time.”

  So we really divided it and said, “Software team—you need to figure out how to tell us closer to where we are. We need to know this.” So they basically used our 3D LiDAR to detect where the wall is relative to the robot, which is super important because you need to know that measurement.

  Then we said, “Okay, hardware team—we have this super sensitive sensor that we need to install into our robot so that we can have the force feedback.” And they were like, “Alright.” So they had all these constraints to work with.

  And then we also have a process team. We said, “Okay, well you’ve got to learn how people sand this—because we’ve got to do something very similar.” So they had to watch and understand what it was that people were trying to do, and then find a way for a robot to do it.

  But it was really that breaking it down. And then, like I said, really taking it a chunk at a time. Sometimes it can feel so overwhelming and you can start being like, “Well, that would never work.” You haven’t even developed it, but people are already like, “That’ll never work. That’ll never be used by an operator.”

  And we just say, “Alright—what’s the goal this time? Let’s demonstrate that it can be done. Next one’s going to be: how do we get the user involved? Next one’s going to be: alright, let’s try all the crazy geometries that we have.”

  And so that’s really been a key for us—breaking it down and making sure all the groups… we call it “spreading the pain,” right? Everybody has to solve a little bit of it in order for us to move faster.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, no, I love that. I think breaking down any big problem is always my first go-to—of “Okay, break it up into pieces,” as opposed to taking it on all at once. And then it feels very overwhelming.

  And I feel like that’s where someone started—before they could even make a robot, let alone make a robot do drywall. So I love that you guys are approaching problem solving that way.

  And actually, that kind of dovetails into my next question quite well.

  I would love to hear from all of you on: What emerging technologies do you find most exciting or promising?

  I feel like there are so many that we’re always hearing about—AI or robots or whatever the next thing coming around the corner is. So I’d love to hear all of your perspectives on this.

  Would love to start with you, Layla.

  Leila Deravi, Co-Founder, CTO @ Seaspire Skincare:
  Okay, awesome. Yeah, so I’m a fundamentalist at the end of the day. And I think that’s part of—when you’re a chemist or a hard scientist, that’s kind of where you end up resonating.

  So for me, when I look to what makes me excited about science and technologies that are emergent, it’s a little bit of a different perspective. I’m really interested in how biology works. I’m really interested in overcoming technology and performance and health concerns and gaps within the consumer packaged goods industries.

  So things that really resonate with me in thinking about the next generation of products and transformative technologies for CPG industries are: to look at biology and to look at how biology works.

  So that can be synthetic biology schemes. It can be considering different types of biosynthetic pathways—so, looking at different chassis to be able to create new materials.

  These industries are in desperate need of new design solutions to overcome some pretty critical challenges. And I think that technologies aimed and geared towards overcoming those are really, really key things that I look out for in particular.

  At Seaspire, we’re kind of paving the way with one specific raw material that’s inspired by how cephalopods camouflage. And we are bringing to market now a compound that we’re calling XantheKrome that is exactly designed to do that.

  So we spent a lot of time in the research lab looking at: how do cephalopods camouflage?—and taking design principles from nature and then inputting those into a pipeline for new discovery in CPG industries, specifically for skincare.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  That’s awesome. We love that. We love skincare, so that’s great to hear.

  Alison, what about you?

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  Oh yeah, I would just echo—that’s incredibly fascinating.

  For me, and this is obviously a bias to my space, there’s so much interesting emerging fundamental research in the women’s health space.

  Finally, people are taking notice of the huge amount of biology—and fundamental biology—we don’t understand when it comes to everything from maternal healthcare to vaginal microbiome to cancers that predominantly affect women. It’s just so understudied.

  And so finally we’re getting this infusion of capital into both academia and into industry as well—which is long overdue.

  Two weeks ago, Jill Biden was at our facility. She announced a $100 million investment—which I think is a little low, to be quite frank—into women’s health through the new program ARPA-H.

  But I’m just really excited to see the biology catch up a little bit so that entrepreneurs can really capitalize on that biological understanding and begin to create products—diagnostics, therapeutics—that evolve around that new scientific understanding.

  Laura Rippy, Managing Partner @ Alumni Ventures:
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  Okay—back to the presentation.

  Brittney Wade, Senior Associate @ Alumni Ventures:
  That’s awesome. And Jill Biden’s always— even if it’s a small check—it’s always nice if she comes through, right?

  Maria, what about you?

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  Well, somebody had to say AI—can’t leave it out from a roboticist.

  But in all honesty, though, I think it’s not necessarily what you hear around ChatGPT or things like that—although that’s pretty interesting, fascinating.

  But for us, it’s: how can this AI—in particular, the development of new models and honestly the computing power that is coming along with them—help us work more in the real world?

  One of the things I’ve mentioned is we’ve been great in the factories because we control everything, but we struggle with the fact that even though drywall seems like the most common thing—it does look different everywhere.

  So we are looking at these new AI models and computing to be able to tune our models overnight. We call it “robot dreaming,” but it really is what is required.

  We can take inputs and say, “Okay, we had some errors here in detecting these obstacles,” but now that we had that positive reinforcement—or negative reinforcement—let’s rerun our model specifically for this site.

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  And I think that’s just something that, computing-wise, wasn’t possible before. If you had one model, you were just lucky and happy to have that. And here, the fact that we can tune those models—make our robots smarter for that specific site, maybe even the user preferences, like “Hey, this user always seems to do this over and over”—changing. Now let’s tune this to work for them, rather than them having to live with this generalized model.

  So I’m super excited by just the speed that that’s developing. And even though it’s kind of in a little bit of a different space, I think the benefits will benefit us—well, robotics. And so I’m just excited to continue to implement it and kind of take it to a place where we can get better solutions to people quicker.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, the topic areas that you guys all just sort of covered inspire a new set of deep dives that I think we all need to go into—just on the amazing technology that’s coming out.

  And I think it kind of again dovetails into the next question, which is: I feel like every day we’re inundated with a new announcement, a new release. And I know Maria, you just touched on AI, but to Layla and Alison’s point, there’s so much new technology coming through in so many disciplines.

  And I think Alison, I would love to pick on you just to talk about how you’re thinking about evaluating and deciding on the adoption of new technology for the org when you’re inundated with a whole slew of different options. Just curious how you’re thinking through that decision-making.

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  Yeah, it’s a tough question. I think I would say in general, we’re listening to what our team is asking for. I think, of course, a little bit is coming from the top down, but in general, it’s our team coming to us and saying, “Hey, we need this microscope,” “Hey, we need this piece of software.” And then it’s a request for a landscaping of options.

  But the calculation in my brain is—say we want to buy a $100,000 microscope—is a person more worthwhile? Should we hire a person? Is that a better way to move quicker? Or is it that microscope?

  And so that’s how I’m thinking about it. Is more people going to move us faster, or is the microscope going to push us faster? That’s the calculation in my brain.

  I think particularly relevant for us is the use of external contractors versus hiring internally. I think that’s a constant conversation of what makes the most sense. And the general finding to date is: employees always do a better job.

  But if you want to parallelize work—and maybe de-risk something that’s lesser of a question mark—the external contractors can do a mediocre job. No knock on them. But yeah, that’s been a frustrating process we haven’t quite figured out yet.

  I think that’s the more challenging question that we grapple with on a day-to-day basis—whether to do the work internally or parallelize with a development partner externally.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, that’s great. That tradeoff of personnel versus actual tech adoption—that seems to be what came through. And I think it lends itself into the broader business question of the company.

  And maybe Layla, I’ll pick on you for this one—but I’m curious what role you feel technology leaders should play in shaping the overall business strategy.

  I know Alison, some of your examples touched on that, but curious Layla if you’ve had to grapple with that as well.

  Leila Deravi, Co-Founder, CTO @ Seaspire Skincare:
  Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting question, because in many regards, a pure technologist or somebody in the CTO or CSO role—their voice has to be heard.

  But are they the ones that are going to be making the most informed business decisions for the company? Probably not.

  Because our priorities are focused on the technology, on the science, on pushing the technology further—whereas you need somebody dedicated—this is just my opinion too, and others, I would actually really be interested to hear what others think about this because it’s a point of contention.

  Are the tech leads the business development people? No. In my opinion, they’re not. Because you need somebody focused on monetizing or waving the flag of the technology to the masses—to be able to get customers and engage them.

  And at the end of the day, it’s a different dialogue, and it’s a different set of priorities, and it’s a different task list than somebody who’s focused and dedicated toward developing and pushing the technology forward.

  So your voice is heard—but you’re not the lead—is what I’m trying to say.

  Which… I don’t know if that answered your question at all, but—

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  I think you touched on it. But to your point, Layla, I’m curious—Maria and Alison, based on the orgs that you’re operating within—does that resonate? Does that challenge some of the structure you’re dealing with?

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  Well, I think one of the challenges is that we’re all co-founders and CTOs. I think the co-founder part makes it so much tougher, because part of that is that we’re not just leading the technical team.

  I do agree with Layla, and it resonates with me that at the end of the day, it’s back to admitting what your role is—especially if your co-founder is the CEO.

  There is a little bit of this “whose responsibility is this?” So I’ve always thought of it—my role is to make sure that I am presenting the technology to that group of people, like our leadership team—that they understand how it plays.

  I want them to use their skills and expertise. In sales—I would never want to be doing sales—but they need to understand it in a way.

  And so I can’t just sit there and be like, “blah blah blah blah, this and that.” I have to think: okay, how do I get them to experience it? And that’s where my voice can really resonate.

  Also, I’m just one person. But if I educate them well enough in the technology, then in every meeting, every customer call—I’m there, because they understand it.

  So I think it is important to know what your role is—that you do need to drive the technology. But you also have that constraint of educating people.

  And at the end of the day, you’re part of the leadership team, so you have to understand the other constraints that other people are bringing forward.

  But I will say—complicated when you’re the co-founder. Because then your role is also to make sure that the company succeeds. So you do have to step a little bit more into it, I think, when you’re a co-founder.

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  Yeah, we’ve taken a very different approach—and I think it’s very nontraditional.

  So myself and my co-founder—we met in the lab. We were both PhDs. We were co-inventors of the core technology. We both have an equally fundamental understanding of what’s going on.

  We actually started the company as a learning opportunity. We were like, “Let’s write some grants, let’s write some SBIRs, see if we get any traction.”

  And so we’ve kind of taken the same approach as co-founders—to learn as much as possible.

  We’re drawn to different aspects of the business. We’re both heavily involved in the technological development, as we’re both familiar with the technology itself.

  But, for example, I’m really interested in intellectual property, and my co-founder is really interested in business development and revenue models.

  So I think we’ve kind of split the work according to our interests. But most large decisions are made together.

  Some people appreciate that, some people don’t. But I’ll say—for our board, they effectively treat us as co-CEOs—which is a trigger word for many—but that’s how we operate, and that works for us.

  So we’re just going to keep doing what works for us.

  But I do agree—definitely as co-founders, and also external-facing, we need a strong technical lead within the organization.

  So we’ve hired those folks to really guide the internal technical team while we’re out raising money, or whatever we’re doing.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah. No, I hear the structural diversity amongst the three of you, and also how you’re essentially trying to be responsible for the technical aspects of the team while also maintaining your leadership role—which is complicated.

  But I mean, it’s really inspiring to hear your stories. And I think one thing Brittney and I really wanted to hear from all of you was: Given your backgrounds, given the bios that you walked through at the beginning of this discussion, you’re all incredibly accomplished.

  And I’m sure this is a tough question for all of you, but I would love for each of you to share a specific professional achievement or project that you’re particularly proud of.

  And Maria, maybe I can start with you on this.

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  Definitely a hard one. But as I was thinking about it—it’s a very new thing—but I just joined the board of a nonprofit called StreetCode Academy.

  And what really excites me is that having done all the work and becoming a tech leader, then they reached out to me, and it was just kind of a really great recognition.

  But then learning about them—they really approach it in such a cool way where they think about: it’s not just giving people a class in coding and “Oh, you’re all set.”

  But they think about: how do we change the mindset of the community? And this is underprivileged, minority communities.

  How do we change the mindset so that they want to get their kids into tech? How do we give them skills? That’s the more typical part—the class.

  But then they also do the access, which I think is really cool. So they’re really thinking about: How do we get them externship opportunities and things like that?

  People with affluence—usually it’s like, “Oh, my mom’s friend is blah blah blah,” and they get the internship.

  So it’s just been a really cool part—to be recognized as a leader who can help this amazing organization move forward.

  So I’m just really excited about that right now.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, that’s fantastic.

  Alison, I would love for you to go as well.

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  Yeah, it’s hard to point to something specifically, but I will say: really early on in the business, there were huge technical hurdles.

  It was very defeating. It was a constant fight to figure out how to solve the problem. So I am proud of our team for pushing through that to a place now where we’re getting fantastic data.

  But it wasn’t always so bright. It wasn’t always so easy.

  So I am proud of the entire team for sticking with it, and I’ll look back on that and be like, “Yeah, that was super tough—but huge achievement.”

  We stuck with it, and we got through it. So I’m super proud of myself and the team on that point for sticking with it.

  About eight months of trying to get a sensor from $400 to cents—and we accomplished it. But it was a long eight months to figure out how to make this at cost.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  That’s incredible. Yeah.

  Layla, maybe I can hand it off to you.

  Leila Deravi, Co-Founder, CTO @ Seaspire Skincare:
  Yeah, sure. I think mine is really similar to Alison’s comment.

  When we started working in this space, we were literally dissecting squid—like squid from Cape Cod—in our lab and trying to figure out: What are these small molecules? What are they?

  We were working with one or two milligrams of material, looking at assays and trying to figure out function.

  And then when we spun out Seaspire in December 2019, we went from single milligrams to now multiple kilogram scale of this product.

  And we have a pathway now for the chemistry to be able to scale beyond that.

  It’s been incredible to see where we can go and how we can build this into the future of sun care in particular.

  And I will say—coupled directly into those professional milestones of being able to scale a product from the bench to a manufacturing level—is doing so with the vantage point of being a woman in science, and coupling in everything associated with that.

  At the same time that we were building out and spinning out this company, I also had two kids. It was also COVID.

  So every single one of these things is kind of coupled in together to make this most amazing, incredible, absolutely brain-busting task and feat—that was being able to roll out at the same time.

  So everything altogether is my big hooray story.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Yeah, it’s amazing just to hear the hurdles that you’ve all overcome in your professional world—but also beyond that, within the job and beyond the job. It’s so inspiring.

  And I want to end this discussion on a theme that came through from our audience.

  We have a lot of aspiring female technical leaders in the audience, or women in tech generally. And I would love to end on a lightning round of sorts—just one piece of advice that you would give for individuals who are aspiring to become CTOs or leaders in tech.

  And this is a free-for-all. So feel free to jump in if you have a thought. I’m sure our audience would love to hear it.

  Maria Telleria, Co-Founder, CTO @ Canvas:
  Take the risk.

  Take a risk—and grit, right? You have to take that opportunity, like Alison said. You just go for it.

  But then you have to be ready for—it’s a trench, and you’re just going to have to dig through it.

  But don’t let your passion and who you are get lost in it. Stay true to that.

  And sometimes it won’t work—very likely won’t work the first time. Just try it again and you’ll find something.

  But I would say: be okay with risk. And it takes working really, really hard.

  Leila Deravi, Co-Founder, CTO @ Seaspire Skincare:
  Thanks. I’ll speak—or not. Okay, yeah.

  So I would say: sit at the table and ask your questions.

  Because I think one of the things with women is—people always say, I don’t know what you guys think, but to me—they have always said: “You can’t have it all.” “You can’t do it all.” “Don’t do it all. Do something. Pick one thing and do it well.”

  But I just want to say to anybody who’s listening, anybody who’s out there: You can absolutely do it all.

  You can be the mother. You can be the successful woman entrepreneur. You can be the successful academic with a propelling research career.

  You can do it all.

  Do it. Do it.

  Alison Burklund, Co-Founder, CTO @ Nanopath:
  Yeah, I don’t really have anything to add.

  Just do it—to quote Nike. Lean in—Sheryl Sandberg.

  But I think they’ve captured it all. And thank you for saying that, Layla, because sometimes I don’t think I can have it all.

  So I appreciate that coming from someone who’s a little further along than myself.

  Meera Oak, Senior Principal @ Alumni Ventures:
  Amazing. Thank you all so much for joining us.

  This has been one of the best discussions. I am so glad that I was able to be a part of it.

  With that, I might ask you three to go off camera, and Brittney and I will sort of wrap things up.

  But thank you so much again.

  Thank you.

  Oh man, if that is not an inspiring discussion, I’m just not sure what is.

  But if you were inspired enough to take action, there are really two ways that you can do that.

  You can start a company yourself, as the women on our panel have done—or you can support the ones that have already been started.

  And in this ecosystem, money—financial capital—really matters.

  And we’d be thrilled to have you join our journey today.

  April 30th is actually an even more special day because it is our first close deadline for the Women’s Fund, and that means that our investors get a fee break if you sign the documents today and fund within 30 days.

  So for more information, please visit us at av.vc/womensfund or email us at [email protected].

  And with that, thank you so much for joining us, and hope to see you soon.