Investing in the Sheconomy: The Power of Female-Founded Startups

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• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Laura Rippy:
  Welcome. We are so excited to see an amazing turnout today. This is the first webinar of our new Women’s Fund at Alumni Ventures. I looked at the RSVP list and it is amazing. We have new friends, longtime investors in the Alumni Ventures family of funds, and founders. We have all genders represented as well and are welcome here. This is going to be fun.

  I’m Laura Rippy. I’m the managing partner of the Women’s Fund here and your host today. Alumni Ventures is the third most active VC globally with 1.25 billion raised so far and 1,300 portfolio companies. I love that. Fabulous female-led startups are the focus of our attention today.

  To be clear, we’re starting the Women’s Fund from a position of strength. We have 357 portfolio companies founded, co-founded, or led by women—357 venture-backed companies with female leadership. For every single one, we invested because of the enormous potential of the startup.

  You’ll meet some of those stories today and we are so excited to back even more with your support and investment.

  So before we begin, a little legalese: this presentation is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to buy or sell securities. You can see the disclosures in the lower right-hand corner at avfunds.com/disclosures.

  So with that, let’s jump into the agenda. First you’re going to meet the team—this fabulous tribe around me. We’re going to do some introductions. We are going to go into some SHEconomy statistics and then a little bit about why to invest in the Alumni Ventures new Women’s Fund.

  There is a Q&A at the end—that is always my favorite—so if you have questions, please pop those into the chat. We collected some from all of you before this started, but we really are curious about what you’re curious about and hope to answer some of those.

  So with that, let’s meet these fabulous women that we have. So let’s me over on the left. My passion about the Alumni Ventures Women’s Fund is deep. I was a CEO three times, and I raised venture capital back when the number of female CEOs was hardly measurable. So I care.

  I love my role as a venture investor at Alumni Ventures. It’s been about six-plus years. I now run a few funds here and I’m on the board. So this is the intersection of two passions for me.

  Meera Oak:
  What an intro to follow up, Laura. Great to see everyone out there. My name is Meera Oak. I’m a senior principal with Alumni Ventures. Prior to the venture world, I worked at Yale as part of their endowment finance team and later led product initiatives within enterprise infrastructure—and more specifically, a full-fledged ERP implementation.

  I later jumped into a venture studio and helped launch a business in New York in the HR tech space before joining Alumni Ventures full-time a little over three years ago, which is incredible. So excited to be here with you all.

  Sophia Zhao:
  Hi everyone, my name is Sophia Zhao. I’m a senior principal on both the Women’s Fund and the AI Fund here at Alumni Ventures, and I’m super excited to be working with our team of amazing women.

  Prior to becoming an investor, I was in the startup and banking world, working with founders and CXOs in the cloud computing, SaaS, natural resources, and consumer sectors. I immersed myself in the world of Web3 post-graduating from Yale School of Management. I have been focused on AI and Web3 investment on our team, and this year I’m particularly interested in the application of AI on how it can help optimize the way we work and live for the better. Great to meet you.

  Brittany Wade:
  Awesome. Well, hi everyone. My name is Brittany Wade. I’m a senior associate here on the team. Prior to joining AV, I was working largely in the product space—first with a number of large enterprise customers at MasterCard, specifically on installment and buy-now-pay-later solutions. I later transitioned to the startup ecosystem and worked for multiple startups, all the way from the seed stage to growth.

  I’m super excited to be here with you guys today and learn more and talk more about all the great work that we’re doing.

  Laura:
  Fantastic. This is a major initiative at Alumni Ventures—the Women’s Fund—so let’s meet more of the team you need to know.

  Stacey Tsai:
  Good afternoon, everyone. I’m so excited to be here today. I recognize a number of different, very familiar names on the webinar, and I also look forward to meeting others who are new to our community.

  I am a senior partner here at Alumni Ventures, and my main role is to engage with our investors. I have over 15 years of experience in finance in a variety of capacities, but I must say my current role here is one of my favorites. So please do not hesitate to reach out and I look forward to discussing the fund with you.

  Haley Sharlow:
  Great, thanks Stacey. Hi everyone. My name is Haley and I’m the investor relations manager for the Women’s Fund. I’m here as a resource if you have any questions about the Women’s Fund or the next steps to invest in our current Women’s Fund. And with that, I’ll send it over to the wonderful Shail.

  Shail Highbloom:
  So my name is Shail Highbloom, and my role is to grow this fantastic community of self-identifying women and allies through strategic partnerships. I’ve spent my career in venture capital and at a family office, both as an early-stage investor and a platform leader. Alumni Ventures is leaning into the Women’s Fund with my role, and I encourage you to reach out if you lead an organization that has a commitment to women’s entrepreneurship. I look forward to you learning more.

  Laura:
  Fantastic. Great. So we are building from strength. We’ve invested $200 million in 357 startups founded, co-founded, or led by women. We invest at a higher rate than the VC market generally in women—about 26% versus 24%. And Alumni Ventures is especially strong with female-only founders—9% versus the industry average of 6% in our years.

  So we are super proud of these statistics, but we can do more with your support. As we dig in—and we’re going to give you a taste and get you to kind of touch and feel and hear more about these teams as an example of the kinds of companies that you’d invest in—I wanted to kind of share a little bit about the sectors that we’re in.

  We’re in everything that the venture world really excels in: cybersecurity, robotics, biotech, fintech, gaming, the metaverse. That’s where our founders live and have led companies. A couple that we’re going to drill into in a minute—Venus Aerospace and Senty—as examples, but just to let you know, this is a fund that backs truly amazing companies that are setting off to change the world—and just coincidentally, their leadership is women.

  Sophia Zhao:
  Great. I’d like to highlight a few important stats along with my colleague Brittany.

  The first one will be the funding disparity: 25% of total U.S. capital goes to companies with at least one female leader—a number I’m not really excited about, but I hope our Women’s Fund will bring that up higher.

  Second is the gender gap in VC. With 65% of firms lacking a female partner, our all-women team, as well as our cohort of venture scouts at our Women’s Fund, stands as a powerful force for policy change, addressing the evident gender disparity in venture capital.

  And third, leading in women founders: AV ranks fourth among all VCs for funding female-founded startups, exemplified by successful exits like Nexus’s $320 million acquisition by Ity in 2022, and our investment in Kindbody—a fertility care company that’s valued at $1.8 billion.

  Brittany Wade:
  Great. And then just building on the stats that Sophia just shared, there’s also additional research to show that backing women is not only the right thing to do, but also a smart economic play as well.

  I’m sure you intuitively know that women-led ventures have better performance and also quicker exits—as the data shows, and as we’ve highlighted here on the slide. But also, additionally, women-led startups are across the venture spectrum in deals such as biosecurity, cyber, and fintech, as Laura highlighted previously. And we see all those things highlighted in our portfolio as well.

  Laura:
  So this is my favorite part of any of these discussions—and certainly with these founders. So we’re going to go and give you a little taste of what are the kinds of companies that we back.

  I’ll kick it off and then the team’s going to share some more.

  Kindbody—this is the epitome of our topic today. My team invested in the Series A for this fertility platform and I remember it vividly. There were only women around the table—the leadership team and all the VC investors. That company is now valued at $1.8 billion.

  And why? Gina Bartasi. She is the CEO and she’s the founder, and she’s a force of nature. She previously took a company from founding to IPO.

  And as a little example of what Kindbody did in 2022—it always shows to me the grit and the drive that this team has—in one year, they acquired a competitor, doubling their footprint. They acquired a labs company, which helped them to vertically integrate. And then they closed Walmart as a customer—the second-largest employer in the U.S.—all in one year. Wow.

  The Walmart deal is important because historically, fertility benefits were mostly on the coasts, and kind of knowledge workers were the ones that got those benefits. And with Walmart, it opens up a broader swath of America to those fertility benefits that Kindbody represents.

  So in so many ways, Kindbody is the kind of company that I hope you see if you come in as an investor—will be exemplary. Really knocking the cover off the ball so far. Still lots of distance to travel, but what an amazing company.

  So why don’t I pass the proverbial mic to Brittany?

  Brittany Wade:
  Great, thanks Laura. Another startup we’d love to highlight is Praxis Labs—and the founder being Elise Williams is another great example of a female leader really building to change the world.

  Her startup Praxis Labs uses cutting-edge software to bring DE&I training to corporate customers. So far, this has been launched with the likes of Uber, Google, and Etsy—as well as several other large corporate clients I’m sure you all have heard of. She’s already closed $19 million in her company, and she’s still building—and I’m sure that she will continue to progress from there.

  And this deal also really shows the power of the Alumni Ventures network. We got into this deal with a connection to a Midas VC at Norwest Ventures due to our Dartmouth DNA, which was really exciting.

  And I’ll pass it over to Sophie.

  Sophia Zhao:
  Thank you, Brittany. That’s such a cool company. Financial literacy is very important to me. I’ve been a volunteer at Junior Achievements and going around different schools, educating students on financial literacy at an early age. And to me, I love what Ellevest is doing. It’s basically a robo-advisor investment platform and financial literacy resource primarily for women. It was founded by Sallie Krawcheck and Charlie Kroll in 2014, and they received venture capital from Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, Valerie Jarrett, and Eric Schmidt.

  Meera Oak:
  Awesome. I’ll bring it home. I think what’s really interesting is to see companies with their footprint both within the U.S. and beyond, and I think Carry1st really exemplifies this. I really love this gaming and payments deal that’s rooted in Africa. This is led by Lucy Hoffman and her co-founder Cordel Robbin-Coker. The team is tackling an enormous opportunity as the leading mobile games publisher and digital commerce platform in Africa.

  Just to give you some context here, the average age in Africa is 19 years old, and there will be more smartphones in Africa in five years than in Europe and North America combined. So it really paints a picture—not only do they have a foothold, but the market opportunity is enormous to say the least.

  We were really pleased to see a leading specialty gaming investor, Bitkraft, bring a supersized check to this round that we were able to participate in. Andreessen Horowitz, which was the prior lead, doubled their pro rata. So around the table, there was so much conviction, and that really strengthened our conviction—not only in the team, but the opportunity. It was a great deal to be a part of.

  Laura:
  Phenomenal. Let’s page through a little bit more. I think this hopefully brings it to light. Brittany, do you want to kick us off?

  Brittany Wade:
  Yeah, sure. We’d love to highlight some of the growth-stage companies that we’ve also been able to be a part of. The first one, Madison Reed—I’m sure many of the women on this call have heard of. It’s the leading natural hair color brand in the country.

  The CEO, Amy Errett, and the Madison Reed team have grown this company massively, especially during the pandemic when so many women and people who needed hair color were stuck at home. Naturally, since then, they’ve grown from one Color Bar to 75 Color Bar locations and counting. They’ve also expanded their omnichannel distribution to include locations such as Walmart and Target, and they have an e-commerce partnership with Amazon to fuel that growth as well.

  We invested back in 2016, and now the company is worth many billions—definitely unicorn status there. We’re so excited to see their continued growth, and we’re proud to have backed this team.

  Meera Oak:
  Awesome. Yeah, that’s really cool. And you have to throw a deep tech opportunity into the mix as well because it really paints the moonshot opportunity—and literally in this case. Venus is a moonshot opportunity because Venus Aerospace is actually building the first spaceplane which can fly at hypersonic speeds at the edge of the atmosphere.

  Talk about a company building at the cutting edge here. I think on a couple of slides earlier you could see a picture of the spaceplane. But in practice, what this product will do is take off from LAX, land in Tokyo in an hour, and bring you back in time for dinner. I just think that’s such a revolutionary sort of technology to be a part of.

  Venus is led by Sarah “Sassie” Duggleby, who’s an engineer and a serial deep tech entrepreneur with multiple exits to her name. We were lucky enough to invest in Sarah and Venus during the company’s seed round and have since followed on into the company’s Series A. The progress here has been tremendous. So excited to be a part of this story.

  Sophia Zhao:
  That’s awesome. I’m also on our AI Fund, and I’m excited that AI is a transformative technology that is reshaping and creating how we’re living and working in the future. And I think it’s important to recognize that female founders are not just in medtech, they’re not just in beauty and lifestyle—they’re also in these frontier tech areas that are so promising.

  SyntheX’s techbio platform is powered by AI, and it decodes the signal of immune repertoires to power disease discoveries. The co-founder and CEO, Lily Wang, has a PhD in computational biology, and we fought our way into this oversubscribed round through flexing our alumni network—connecting the founder to invaluable investors, CEOs, and academic connections within our AV network.

  Looking at all these fabulous women, these are just a subset of our Venture Scouts. If we can go to our next slide on Venture Scouts, you’ll see some familiar faces from a spotlight deal. And when we reached out to our founders to be the ears and eyes for the deals for us, we had a resounding hell yes. As for myself, I’ve been working with the Venture Scouts for our AI Fund as well, and I can tell you that this is a great model for both Alumni Ventures and the scouts.

  Laura:
  Absolutely. Just jumping in here—maybe many of you on the call might recognize Gail Ball. She was my peer. She started the Chestnut Street Fund at Alumni Ventures around the Penn community and also started the first Women’s Fund here. When we decided to jump in and build this broader Women’s Fund initiative, she was one of my first calls. I’m so proud that she is a Venture Scout here and participating. So it’s really a treat to get to work with her again.

  So I want to go next to some slides. I know there’s a lot of people on the call who are new to venture investing, so I want to just kind of set the table for folks who haven’t invested before and share a little bit about the why behind what we do.

  Alumni Ventures, as we mentioned, is really an innovator in this. Our mission is to democratize access to venture capital. Why do we do that? It’s because venture has outperformed pretty much every asset class out there in 5- to 25-year periods. It’s uncorrelated to the public markets and it’s a place of huge value creation.

  So what we do at Alumni Ventures is we create these portfolios—and the Women’s Fund is one of those—where it’s a portfolio that’s balanced on stage, sector, and geography so that you get a set of companies, not just one or two, but a set of companies in your portfolio.

  In our case, we always do about a third growth—and that’s why, as we’ve talked about these companies over the last few pages, you can get a sense of where those existing companies in the portfolio might show up in yours if you join us for the Women’s Fund.

  If you don’t know AV, you will now—we’re about 10,000 investors that have joined us. We’ve raised about $1.25 billion. We are the number one most active VC in North America and the third most active globally. Our returns are terrific. You’ll see in the next page that we are a top quartile performer.

  
  You can see that over the first years of our fund, as we get started, we’ve really delivered with this strategy. So our comparison set here are the Andreessens and the Sequoias and really all the big-name firms. Our model has produced this top quartile performance in a measure that we think is super important, which is called Distributions to Paid-In Capital (DPI)—which is basically the money coming back to you.

  We are super proud of what we’ve delivered so far as an organization. The way we do it is through things like the Scouts. But also—it is, of course, Alumni Ventures. So we have 20 school funds and each one of those has their network that they mine. I run two funds here around the Dartmouth and the Harvard networks, and we get to know folks in those communities starting companies. We bring it back and we start the vetting process and the diligence process. We have a very rigorous, structured approach to enable deals to move quickly through our process but at the same time have comparison teams scoring them for a check and balance.

  The net result is a diversified portfolio that’s really gone through the wringer of scrutiny, and we’re super proud—as you can tell—about those deals.

  A big piece of what we do is we are a co-investor. I consider this kind of an unfair advantage that we have at Alumni Ventures. Namely, as a co-investor, we can scrutinize the lead investor. And why that makes a difference—not just the firm, but some big names here: Andreessen, CSL, NEA, Google Ventures, folks like that—but also down to the individual partner that’s leading the round, going into the boardroom, and really making a difference.

  That process of diligence that we go through is in part to look at the lead investor and to see in each round why that makes a difference. In the deal that Meera talked about—Carry1st—the lead in that round that was joined was Bitkraft. They’re a specialty gaming VC, but not only that—the lead partner who founded the firm was the one going on the board.

  And we also unpacked the deal—as Meera described—to know what’s happening with the prior investors. In that case for Carry1st, it was Andreessen Horowitz. And as she said, they were coming in with double their pro rata.

  That ability to get into these amazing deals—leveraging the alumni networks—is the core of what we do at Alumni Ventures.

  
  So let me turn it to Stacey. We’re going to share a little bit about what the Women’s Fund is specifically about. Give you a chance to get to know her, and we’ll come back for questions in a little bit. Go ahead, Stacey.

  Stacey Tsai:
  Hi everyone. So the Women’s Fund—if you’re familiar with some of our other offerings—there’s going to be some similarities here.

  The fund is going to be about 15 to 20 deals, and the team is going to take up to 18 months after the fund’s closing to fully construct the portfolio. It’s going to be diversified by stage: about 25% of the deal flow will be seed stage, 50% early stage, and the remaining balance late stage.

  It will also be diversified across geography. Not only do we invest in deals across the United States—we may also participate, on occasion, in international deals. And we co-invest alongside very reputable, institutional-quality lead investors.

  We may also seek pro rata rights and preserve up to 25% of the total AUM of the fund for follow-on rounds. And minimum investment size is about $25,000—up to $3 million. So anywhere in between, we would love to have you join the fund.

  Laura:
  Absolutely, and it is for accredited investors, which I think we probably sent some material out ahead of time. So the definition of accredited—there are two paths. You can either be accredited by how much you make—it’s $200,000 as an individual, $300,000 as a married couple—or you can have over a million dollars in assets. There are also ways to qualify as accredited if you have some of the financial certifications under your belt as well. But generally, what AV has built here is a way to democratize access to venture capital. We want as many people as can participate. We’d love to have you come in as a member through joining through the Women’s Fund.

  Stacey Tsai:
  Absolutely. And some of the key terms, like I mentioned: minimum investment size is $25,000, upwards to $3 million. And there are numerous ways in which one can invest—whether through an LLC, through a trust, we take cash or self-directed retirement funds. So there are a variety of different venues in which you would be able to fund your investment.

  I think some of the key terms to be aware of are the following: one, that we do take a 2% management fee, but we will reserve 10 years of it upfront with one capital call—coming to make it super straightforward and easy for you, the investor. You give us one check, and over time we will send you the proceeds, and we will actually manage everything within that. We will not pass through legal fees; we will not pass through structuring fees. So it’s very easy, straightforward—one capital call.

  On the profit-sharing side: once you recoup the original contribution of an investment and once you recoup the management fee allocated to the investment on the pro rata side, you will keep 80 cents on the dollar. The fund will keep 20 cents on the dollar, and that’s known as a 20% carry.

  Alright—and lastly, like I said, we take numerous modes of funding and different entities. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. I know sometimes you have very particular personal situations, so we’re always here to help.

  Laura:
  Awesome.

  Stacey Tsai:
  Alright, so this is something that’s exciting and new. It’s a new loyalty, rewards, and fee reductions program. There are two paths where you could actually gain a reduction on your management fee. One is based on the AUM you have with us. If you have over $500,000 in any Alumni Ventures investment product, you will receive a fee reduction. And on the timing side: if you are able to sign and fund by first close, you’ll also receive a fee reduction.

  And just a public service announcement—the fund’s first close is April 30th. We’d love to have you come in at that point or anytime after that. But if you want to meet that first close, it’s April 30th.

  Laura:
  Super.

  Stacey Tsai:
  Like I said, any questions, we’re here for you and look forward to welcoming you to the community. Alright, back to you, Laura, Meera.

  Laura:
  Yeah, let’s do some questions, shall we? So I know we had a few that were sent in ahead of time. We’ve gotten some from the chat. So Meera, why don’t you be our MC for this and pass around the questions?

  Meera Oak:
  Sounds great. Yeah, and it’s no surprise—given the content—that we have seen some really thoughtful questions come through just while we’ve been speaking, so I’m excited to have everyone opine on these.

  So I think first, let’s talk about—we’re all sort of female investors in this ecosystem—and I think a lot of folks are interested: can you share insights on the impact of female investors in the startup ecosystem? How can we engage more female investors in the startup ecosystem? And maybe Laura, I can start with you and then we can jump off from there.

  Laura:
  Awesome. So I mean the obvious is: join us for the Women’s Fund, right? This is an easy way to get things started. I think if you’re comfortable with the risk, you could certainly try to be an angel investor. Part of why we exist at Alumni Ventures is because that is an area where not everyone is comfortable, whereas in this kind of packaged portfolio approach, you really are able to contribute to these female leaders and do it in a way that’s this balanced portfolio that takes into consideration the concerns of risk and rewards and balances it in the total.

  I’d say as an advisor is another fantastic way to be helpful. So at Alumni Ventures, we have an expert community. The broadest definition of “community” for us at Alumni Ventures is about 650,000 people that come from all of our school communities and now from places like the Women’s Fund. In the expert community, this is a set of resources that we tap into to help our portfolio companies as they have a specific request.

  So I remember I had one where it was a specific payments question, and we tapped in through my network—I have a friend from business school who was an expert in payments at Apple. This digital knowledge was super valuable for an early startup. Just talking to Monique briefly was a real breakthrough for that team. We do that in spades all the time.

  So being a part of the expert community—and maybe Haley, if you can put that link in our follow-up for everyone—that would be a useful way as well. And if others want to chime in and add, or if we should go on to the next question… Anyone want to pile in on that?

  Brittany Wade:
  I think the only thing I would add—yeah, for sure… Oh, go ahead, Sophia.

  Sophia Zhao:
  Please go ahead, Brittany.

  Brittany Wade:
  Oh, okay, great. I think the only thing I would add is the importance of community. I think a lot of female founders are always looking to connect with other women that are also building things.

  One of the things that we, I think, do really well here is sort of make those connections. So if you’re building something in the aerospace arena and you also want to meet another woman who’s building in that space, we’re really able to make those connections—to help founders build off of each other and then also kind of see the results from that as well.

  Go ahead, Sophia.

  Sophia Zhao:
  Yeah, for sure. I agree with Brittany. I think it’s important for us to amplify the awareness and their voices within our community.

  For the Women’s Fund, we have an upcoming blog highlighting women in AI, for example, where we not only highlighted our portfolio company—Sarah Hooker, who is the head of Cohere for AI, she spearheads the AI research at portfolio company Cohere, which is the large language model enterprise—as well as featuring women investors within our network, etc.

  So it’s important to continue to lift each other up and help make more awareness within our communities.

  Meera Oak:
  That’s such a great segue into something else that is also coming through, which is really just an understanding of sectors. Are there sectors in particular that the Women’s Fund is seeing more female founders entering? Are there particular ones where they’re excelling?

  I don’t know if folks can really tap into that. Maybe Sophia, since you just were touching on AI, maybe we can start with you.

  Sophia Zhao:
  Yeah, absolutely. I think at Alumni Ventures from our team, we definitely see women founders in all sectors. Since I focus on AI and Web3, I’ve seen women researchers, engineers, and product managers coming into the space to experiment with innovations that they’re ideating.

  And I think this coincides with a natural confluence of the AI boom since last year—because we have advancement in quantum computing, improvements in the rise of machine learning algorithms, and availability of mass amounts of data. All of these created a great environment for AI to explore, and for women to come in and explore.

  And then in terms of the value that I see—and what I feel excited about—is that these female founders bring such a unique perspective and their creativity, which I think is sometimes underestimated.

  And I wish that women founders had more… I don’t know—I just feel like they tend to ask less than male founders. And I always encourage women founders: are you sure that’s all you want to raise? Are you sure that is the valuation you want to ideally have for your round?

  Because I feel like the value that comes from their creativity is a lot, and sometimes a few women founders could improve that by being more confident and asking for what their ideas are worth.

  What do you think, Brittany? Over to you if you want to…

  Meera Oak:
  I was actually just going to piggyback off of that quickly, Sophia. I feel like one attribute I really recognize in female founders—or one thing they optimize for—is capital efficiency.

  Laura:
  Totally, Meera. I was just about to say that. Absolutely. Sorry, go ahead.

  Meera Oak:
  Women make 5x out of 1—they are able to convert way more return out of… I mean, we’ve already discussed that on this panel obviously—but I just think that is something I’ve seen time and time again in our founding teams, especially ones that are led by women.

  So you sort of kicked it off, Sophia, but that made me think of that attribute.

  Laura:
  Absolutely.

  Meera Oak:
  Brittany, Laura… any other sort of comments on this?

  Brittany Wade:
  Yeah, I think the only other thing I would add—and I think you guys have been kind of noodling around it—is just the hunger of female founders. They’re just so driven and ambitious. Not that men are not—but I think there’s almost a little bit of a chip on a woman’s shoulder that really just makes them excel in any area that they’re building in.

  So I think that’s one thing I’ve definitely noticed, and I’m excited to continue fostering that as well.

  Laura:
  Yeah, I think that’s fair. So what I’d say is at Alumni Ventures we’re omnivores, right? We invest across all these sectors. It’s definitely the venture world—only 1% of businesses get venture capital. So it’s an elite crew to begin with. And within that, I think as we say, the female founders—they definitely have capital efficiency and a drive that I really love. It’s candidly been sort of one of the highlights of my seven years where I get to be meeting these teams, and if I have a female—I’ve worked obviously with Meera and with Brittany in the past—and getting on the horn with the female founder… when you have female VCs, there is a really, really awesome experience out of that. I think we all know what that feels like, and it’s been really special and energizing for me as someone who raised capital a long time ago when there weren’t those female VCs. So it makes me happy to see this.

  Meera Oak:
  Yeah, that’s awesome. Maybe just—we touched on sourcing throughout the panel—but I think there’s a lot of questions coming through. These promising startups are hard to find sometimes, even if there’s a lot of attention there. But I’d love to hear—maybe people can speak to a bit more of the sourcing methodology here. How have you found your way into deals, or what have been promising channels for that? And maybe Brittany, I can start with you and then we can jump from there.

  Brittany Wade:
  Yeah, sure. I think that’s a great question. I would definitely say we have a multi-pronged approach. I think the first thing I would highlight is our scouts. Those have always been really great sources for us—people that just have ears to the ground at all times, meeting other founders that are building really cool things. So I think the Venture Scouts is definitely one.

  I would also definitely highlight our network and being able to tap into so many different venture ecosystems and also understand what they’re seeing and what they find really compelling—and sort of be a really great partner as people are raising capital.

  And I think the third is thematic. I think all of us have different areas that we really focus on. I know Sophia just mentioned how she has a really strong expertise in AI and Web3, so I think having that sort of thematic expertise is also really important for sourcing. But also curious to hear—Laura, Sophia, Meera—what are some strategies that you guys have used?

  Laura:
  We got to make sure we hear from Meera. My chip in—that I love—I love all those aspects that you mentioned, Brittany. And then I’d also just amplify the network piece. I really feel like what we do at Alumni Ventures gives us an unfair advantage. We can get into those founders, we can navigate the school channels in a way that others really can’t. But yeah, Meera, let’s hear from you.

  Meera Oak:
  Yeah, I mean I think Brittany touched on network, and I think a specific archetype that I love in our network is actually our founders. So our founders—obviously we bring them into the portfolio, we work with them from a CEO services perspective—we try our best to add value across go-to-market, BD, hiring, and then these are our eyes and ears in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

  And I think we already showed a beautiful page of scouts that we have, and a lot of those are founders in our community. They are already sort of well-penetrated into the founder networks in their respective geos, in their respective spaces, and they’re also the experts in those spaces. So as a referral channel, they’ve just been a really promising channel for really interesting opportunities moving forward.

  Sophia Zhao:
  Yeah, absolutely. I feel that, Meera—you touched upon this well. Everyone mentioned the power of network, and I think our network will not work if we’re not good nodes within our network, which means all of us are individual contributors and supporters to our network. We bring value, we take care of each other, we pollinate ideas and deal flows.

  So I think from a thematic perspective, every one of us has a particular sector focus or a geo focus or whatever focus we have—and we try to add value to the networks that are covering those particular focuses. From an AI perspective or Web3, I try to be plugged into research centers at different top universities and AI accelerators to make sure that we’re able to capture any emerging new deals that are just coming out of their stealth mode. So I think it’s important for us to be in the right ecosystem and have our ears and eyes all over the place with the support of our scouts in order to capture all of these upcoming and promising opportunities.

  Meera Oak:
  Absolutely. I think we’ve spent a bit of time talking about the broader AV community or the funds that are within AV, and I think a question that’s coming through is really—how does the Women’s Fund collaborate with the broader AV? If someone could touch on a bit more of the internal mechanics?

  Laura:
  Yeah, happy to take that. So to understand, the Women’s Fund is this unusual and amazing opportunity to pull female founders from all of the school funds at AV. So any of the 20 school funds are out there and finding amazing deals—just like we got to the 357. So any of those teams—whether they have women on them or men on them—as they find amazing opportunities, we note that there is a female founder, co-founder, or CEO there. And at that point, our team gets triggered to take a look at it and to work on the composition.

  Because part of what we do at Alumni Ventures is think about each portfolio as really this entity that is crafted—it’s balanced. As Stacey said, that sort of seed and early are the bulk of it, sort of two-thirds, three-quarters of it, and one-third is growth. And so those tend to be on the early and the seed side—those are probably new to the AV portfolio.

  The fact that we are the single most active VC in North America, third most active globally, is evidence of kind of how big our deal flow is—to really create those early pieces of the early-stage companies in the portfolio. And really heavily for growth, a lot of times those come from the companies we already have. So as those companies move through their pipeline—Venus and all the others—as they come through their pipeline and they raise another round, that’s another chance for us to craft it into the portfolio, add it in, balancing by sector and geography so that the portfolio has a holistic feel to it.

  One or two robotics companies, but not five; a few biotechs, but not ten. So really to balance that. And so that crafting is what this team does, but is really built on the shoulders of the existing momentum at Alumni Ventures and the fact that we have 357 companies that are female-specific, but more generally, the 20 school funds and those sourcing engines that are up and running and humming, candidly. And that’s really—we get to build that perfect mix from all these different sources.

  Meera Oak:
  I think we’re up on a little bit of time for one more question, which is really more on the mechanics a bit more. So I think folks are interested in: how does someone get the ability to invest in these funds? How does it all work? I need some basic training.

  Laura:
  Okay, so I’ll take that as a first and then Stacey, if you can see if I missed anything.

  So our investors—and how we’ve built to this point at Alumni Ventures—is folks from pretty amazing schools. So we’re really careful about their time. And so your time as well. There’s a portal, and on the portal there’s three steps.

  First, you sign the documents, which 10,000 people beforehand have done. Second, you have to prove that you are accredited, which is a digital process where we have a secure platform where you upload a W2 or other ways to show that you are accredited. And the third is—you fund it.

  And the funding part, we make really easy. If you’re going to do it with cash, then that’s literally—the whole kit and caboodle can take 10 minutes. It’s like a digital transfer. If you want to do a self-directed IRA or an LLC or some things that maybe have a little bit of extra steps, then Haley—who you met before—jumps in and is helpful in that process to make it work.

  So we’ll kind of shepherd the process if you use a self-directed IRA, for instance, or if you are an overseas investor and you need to use our offshore vehicle or some of those others. Maybe it takes a couple of steps. But if you’re just a cash investor, you can sign the docs, show your proof of accredited status, and fund—in literally like 10 minutes. Because that is how we respect your time as well.

  Then, once you’re an investor, you have this portal. You can look as the team compiles the portfolio. So you’ll see new companies come in every quarter. You can put up a little Google alert so you can follow those teams and get to know them. Recognize it’s going to take a little while for these companies to get to maturity. It’s a 10-year fund, it’s not going to happen overnight. But every quarter, you can log on with some new information.

  Every six months, we send you out a report that kind of composes the portfolio. And then once a year, you get a K-1—that is your tax form. So that kind of distills the whole portfolio down into one document, and all that works. And then you start to get maybe those checks back, right? One check in, many checks back, as Stacey said. And over that time period, we are keeping track of things in the portal, and you have access to that at all times.

  I think that’s most of the mechanics. Did I miss anything, Stacey?

  Stacey Tsai:
  That was perfect. So you made my job very easy. That was it. So we’re all good here.

  Laura:
  Okay, great. Alright, well with that, I think we are coming up to time. It’s 45 past the hour, so thank you for joining us.

  I hope you consider joining us for the Women’s Fund. We’re going to send out some links—to the expert community, to the entrepreneur’s form if you have a startup that you want us to take a look at. And in general, just really glad that you are tuning in and please share the word with others in your network as we grow this Women’s Fund and really build it with the goal of supporting amazing female founders and CEOs.

  So thanks, guys.

  Stacey Tsai:
  Bye, everyone. Thank you.