Ladies in VC have caught the entrepreneurial bug.
Over the previous yr, quite a few notable girls buyers have left their roles at established corporations to launch funds of their very own. From Katie Haun spinning out of Andreessen Horowitz to Sydney Thomas leaving Precursor Ventures to, most not too long ago, Sarah Guo moving on from Greylock, we’re amid a wave of recent rising girls managers.
There isn’t one particular cause why so many ladies have chosen this path this yr, however reasonably a mess of potential catalysts.
“It’s very private,” Guo informed TechCrunch about her choice to depart Greylock to begin her personal mission. “Why does any founder begin something? They see a once-in-a-lifetime alternative and so they go do it.”
For Guo, after practically a decade at enterprise-focused Greylock, she mentioned she noticed a chance brewing that had the potential to be a gold mine. Guo mentioned that she thinks the market is initially of a brand new tech cycle. After years of entrepreneurs constructing infrastructure expertise, she thinks a brand new cohort of firms will emerge throughout machine studying, AI, information and crypto.
“If I’m proper, and that new wave of companies is simply across the nook, then doing early-stage investing now in a bear market that sweeps out pretenders is exceedingly good circumstances,” Guo mentioned.
Sydney Thomas told Natasha Mascarenhas final week that she was leaving Precursor to capitalize on a chance she couldn’t ignore both. In her case, it’s investing in firms on the pre-seed stage earlier than doubling down at seed, a funding void she observed all through her time at Precursor.
Thomas and Guo usually are not the primary girls to discover a area of interest in enterprise and go after it. For Julie Wroblewski, it was exhausting to disregard the prospect to focus. In 2019, she observed a rising variety of stable early-stage firms making an attempt to unravel issues within the care financial system. Whereas she was in a position to put money into some in her position at Pivotal Ventures, she realized it was a large enough alternative to type a whole thesis. So she discovered a accomplice, Joanna Drake, and launched Enlarge Ventures in 2020.
Spinning out has additionally given girls the prospect to interrupt from the standard enterprise mould and construct corporations which have totally different governance or construction.
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