“I believe that everyone has a company in them that only they can build.”
AI has been credited with making San Francisco hot again. People who drifted away during the pandemic to work from anywhere or try to colonize new hotspots like Miami have returned in droves, bringing traffic, house prices, and valuations soaring once again.
So it was a surprise to hear the latest hot AI startup say this: “This company couldn’t have been built in Silicon Valley.”
Last week, at our final Venture Underground event of the year, Decile Group CEO Adeo Ressi interviewed Boardy CEO Andrew D’Souza. Boardy is an AI that acts as a super-connector, having conversations with founders and investors to understand what makes them unique, then making warm introductions between the right people.…
Category: Venture Capital Case Studies
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Joe Harkins
The best angel investors in the history of Silicon Valley have usually had a really unscientific approach to investing:
Spray and pray.
The odds are so low that they’ll get into the next Google or Facebook that they just place those bets as widely as possible and… pray.
But a new generation of angels has found a cheaper, more efficient way to spray and pray: putting half of their angel funds into a Micro LP allocation instead.
Joe Harkins broke this down at a recent VC Lab event:
“It’s not so much mathematical as it is strategic. You can bet on one company and one founder, or you can bet on a fund with a fund manager that will hopefully have great deal flow and vet hundreds of companies, if not thousands, and ultimately bet on, say, 20 or 30 of those.…
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Ariel Segal Eck
Ariel Segal comes from a long line of industrial entrepreneurs. Her great-grandfather invented a stainless steel flexible gas connector that was placed in industrial kitchens all over the country, and when her father took over the small Pittsburgh business, he scaled it into something global.
Everything was “the factory” in their home growing up. She even remembers her dad taking her whole class on field trips there. He would introduce her to all of the different departments, explaining each of their roles. Ariel was always drawn to the marketing team: Their jet set life to conventions and trade shows, their mission to weave the products of the company into a story the market would buy.
By the time Ariel made it into the world of entrepreneurship, it was less about inventing things out of stainless steel and factories, and more about software and venture capital.…
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Martin Tobias
In my role as a marketing strategist for Decile Group, I do a lot of case studies on emerging managers and LPs.
A lot of emerging managers talk about their abilities to squeeze into hot deals, because of their non-threatening check sizes, or the importance of getting into deals that are about to get a big mark-up, so that they can post a quick win.
You can see their logic. Emerging managers have a tight window to build a track record before they raise their next fund, and there are only so many variables you can control in the startup game. Stacking the deck with some near wins is understandable. And no one ever faulted anyone for investing alongside a Sequoia, a Benchmark, an Andreessen Horowitz. …
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Jukka Alanen
“I was developing a new vision for venture capital and I wanted to build it from the ground up.”
When you meet Jukka Alanen the word “rebel” doesn’t exactly spring to mind. He dresses in starched dress shirts and blazers. He started his career at McKinsey & Company. And his last job before starting his own venture fund, was an SVP of PagerDuty, a publicly traded tech company.
But after helping build three tech companies that collectively amounted to $3.5 billion in exits and years of AI operations and process automations under his belt, Jukka was being recruited by plenty of the big venture capital firms.
He rebelled to start his own.
And he turned to VC Lab to start Rebellion Ventures. …
“Start Fund was the only thing that would work.”
Radhika Iyengar and Jorden Woods had tire kicked the idea of starting a venture fund for the better part of the last decade.
Finally, in 2025, they were ready. They had the fund name. They got accepted to VC Lab. They knew exactly what their thesis would be. They knew some of the early limited partners they would reach out to first. Most importantly: There were a handful of very hot deals they were eager to invest in, and they were lucky enough to have access, thanks to decades of working in their field.
One of those things was a “good problem to have.”
Access to several hot new deals.
You wouldn’t expect that would be a negative for a new venture capital fund.…
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Varun Turlapati
“Start small. Start something. It was a game changer for me.”
The earliest thing that Varun Turlapati can remember dreaming of doing was being a train conductor. Growing up in India, he loved the idea of being at the front of a huge, powerful locomotive, as it barreled through unknown lands, carrying people to new places to explore.
“I think in some ways, that dream is still carrying me forward,” he says. “I don’t have an actual train, but I have been a software engineer for about sixteen years and now I get to invest in companies that are changing the world.”
Varun started working in startups in 2015. He had just moved to California and didn’t even know what venture capitalists were back then.…
“Thank God you guys came up with Start Fund this year.”
People like to say the startup ecosystem is all about a high tolerance for failure. Still, people often try to spin it. Or at least, they don’t lead with their failures in an interview.
Galit Flasterstein isn’t one of those people.
“The first run I took at VC Lab, I couldn’t finish it,” she says. “I am very transparent about this. I just couldn’t figure out what my secret sauce was. I was like, ‘OK you are asking me about my track record? I have none. I don’t know a thousand LPs. I don’t have that many connections.’ They told me to drop out.”
But did she give up? Absolutely not.…
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Jessica Kamada
“I have a skill set that can be applied to this huge market that 87% of VC check writers do not understand.”
Fund: Swizzle Ventures
Thesis: Advancing women’s health and wealth through the pivotal stages of their lives.
Fund size: $6.6 million
How she’s making the world a better place: Applying her skills to make women’s lives healthier and richer.
If there’s one word to sum up Jessica Kamada, it’s performance.
Kamada spent a decade as a growth marketer helping companies like Uber, DoorDash, Turo, and the New York Times rapidly and exponentially grow their mobile app audiences. In particular, she excelled at performance-based marketing: She got paid based on hard, measurable outcomes, not feel-good, unmeasurable brand stuff. And at the agency she co-founded and ran for a decade, she was one of the best people in Silicon Valley at it. …
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Ihar Mahaniok
“This is something I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Fund: Geek Ventures
Thesis: Immigrant VCs Investing in Immigrants
Fund size: $23 million
How he’s making the world a better place: Mahaniok believes talent is distributed equally all over the world and wants to give brilliant immigrant founders their shot.
Ihar Mahaniok’s story starts out like so many tech geniuses. A young boy with access to a computer back in Belarus. A twelve-year-old who learned to code, and the world opened up before his eyes. A computer science major in college was his ticket to a dream job at Google as a software engineer.
He went to tech conferences, mixed and mingled with other engineers and founders.
He made good money as an engineer as his career grew, and he worked at companies like Facebook and other hot AI startups. …
“VC Lab was quite intense, but what I learned from it was brilliant.”
Fund: Chui Ventures
Thesis: Investing in African entrepreneurs solving mass-market problems with a gender equity lens
Fund size: $16 million
Companies funded to date: 16
How she’s making the world a better place: Believing in the best founders in her home continent and making sure female founders get 50% of the opportunities to build companies as the men.
Joyce-Ann Wainaina’s journey to becoming a VC looks intentional in the rearview mirror, but in actuality, it was anything but.
She was a highly successful investment banker in Nairobi, Kenya, with two adult daughters successfully launched into their careers. She could have gone on that way forever.
So what changed?…
Who are NextGen VCs?
NextGen VCs are a new class of early-stage investors emerging amidst a set of tectonic and transformational shifts in the venture capital industry. We are witnessing a historic moment as NextGen VCs are redefining the venture capital industry and changing the underlying motives, relationships and practices within Venture Capital.
These new fund managers are often masterful marketers of their firms and personal brand; they are also deeply passionate about positively impacting the world through their actions and their portfolio companies.
A Changing Industry
As we are seeing the atomization of venture firms that have faltered in their succession of partners, an increasing number of solo capitalists are launching enduring venture capital firms around the world. Simultaneously, we’re seeing a gradual shift in the type of VCs founders are opting to work with and NextGen VCs are a perfect fit for the changing preferences of startups and founders.…
VC Lab allowed me to pull together all the necessary documents, resources, and systems required to start my venture firm
In Spring 2021, I found myself in the process of exploring the next leg of my professional career.
A couple of friends recommended I consider the VC Lab program, a highly engaging and rigorous hands-on program for aspiring venture capitalists headed by Adeo Ressi and Mike Suprovici, both experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
The last ten weeks have enabled me to develop a strong, focused fund thesis
So far it has been a commitment of +50 hours each week. The primary focus of the effort has been to get the presentation and the model right so that I can clearly articulate my unique approach and portfolio construction design to potential investors and the companies in which we plan to invest.…