Category: Venture Capital Case Studies

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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Raoul Maier

The entire point of Decile Group is to help power emerging VCs who break the mold. The types of managers who don’t fit the stereotype of the VC with the right degree, the right gender, the right resume. But even by these standards, Raoul Maier is unique. There’s the fact that his firm, Eudemian, is a reference to Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, a work that explores what makes life worth living via happiness, virtue, and action. Virtue? Ok, you’ve already lost a lot of Silicon Valley right there. When he was raising his first venture fund with no experience investing, it was brutal. “I can tell you, we were desperate at times,” he says. “We needed every single cent.” So far, so normal.…
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Roger Luo

Roger Luo May Have the One Degree AI Has Made More Valuable Every day there are panicked articles about the carnage on white-collar jobs that AI is wreaking. How AI has destroyed the value of young people’s college educations. Those engineering degrees? Worthless. Is any investment in education safe in this new AI era? Well, maybe one. Maybe that of Roger Luo. See, Roger got a PhD in AI back in 2011. About fifteen years before that became the single most valuable skill set on the planet. It’s certainly paying off now. Roger recently closed on a new $16 million fund for a new firm called Embedding VC. It took him two years. But that’s not a long time when you consider he often spends two years working with a potential new AI company before he invests.…
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Mia Lewin

Close your eyes and picture an AI founder who built three startups, had substantial exits, and has just launched a new venture fund specializing in vertical AI. Keep your eyes closed. This fund celebrated its final close this month with seven investments in its portfolio, some of which were so hot they were oversubscribed in large pre-empted rounds by mega funds like Index, Forerunner, and NEA. Be honest: What are you picturing? I bet it’s wearing a Patagonia vest.I bet it’s not Mia Lewin. But Mia is exactly the kind of emerging manager Decile Group believes in and was founded to help unleash. She’s unequivocally good at this. She’s built three companies, including StyleGenome, an AI home furnishing and decor company that was acquired by Wayfair.…
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Anthony Atlas

Anthony Atlas has a minor planet named after him. Asteroid number something or other, orbiting out there in the black. He won first place at the International Science Fair in 2004 with a project on protein tailoring in marine muscle adhesion. He was seventeen, from a town of seventy-five hundred people on the east coast, and suddenly he was on a stage with kids from forty countries, watching flags from around the world while his heart was pounding in his chest. He didn’t win the grand prize. He remembers that, too. Remembers not getting called for the top honor. And he’s grateful for it. “It’s good to have those checks,” he says now, two decades later. What he didn’t know then was that this moment, this competition, would become the thread running through his entire career.…
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Insights News Venture Capital Case Studies

Mike Suprovici

Decile Group and VC Lab help launch venture funds at scale. Launching thousands of funds takes software, services, and cutting-edge new ways of doing things. But it would be disingenuous not to point out the impact one person has had on launching nearly 1,000 new funds: Mike Suprovici. (Or as he’s nicknamed in VC Lab, “Mike Super VC.”) Talk to any fund manager in the Decile Family, and they all have a Mike story. The “stupid” assignment that Mike made them do, that wound up accelerating their first close. The people he believed in when they didn’t fully believe in themselves. The managers he did session after session after session with until they honed their thesis and secret sauce to something only they could deliver.…
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Connor Sattely

The Journalist Who Said “Yeah, Sure” Connor Sattely grew up in Western Pennsylvania without a clear plan for his life. He didn’t have career goals as a kid. He just wanted to have fun and rebel against authority. That rebellious streak led him to journalism. “Journalists by definition are very independent and very rebellious,” Connor says. “Newsrooms were interesting and not your standard work environments.” Buried in all the unread local news pieces were a couple great investigative articles: breaking news on alleged abusive behaviour assault by a basketball coach, revealing a coverup on lack of student housing. He found deep meaning in telling human stories, inspiring action through writing, and pushing teams of reporters to think bigger and better. But print journalism in the mid-2000s wasn’t looking like an industry with a lot of long-term potential.…
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Pedro Coutinho

“Arriba Nacho!” Pedro Coutinho was five or six years old, on a stressful winter holiday in the Spanish Pyrenees. His family had just spent hours trying to cross the mountain, too much snow forcing them to turn back. They arrived at a hotel late at night, exhausted. His parents were still at the front desk trying to check in. Five minutes later, Pedro was already playing with other kids, screaming “Arriba Nacho!” They didn’t even know he could speak Spanish. His mother still tells this story. It says everything about who Pedro is: someone who adapts instantly, connects with anyone, and finds his way in unfamiliar territory. The Satellite Engineer Who Wanted More Like many kids, Pedro dreamed of being an astronaut.…
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Sarah Romanko

“Where’s the VC?” Sarah Romanko sat down at a table to meet a founder at a conference for founders and investors in Austin, TX. The founder looked at her, looked around, and asked: “Where’s the VC?” It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. Too young. Too female. No finance degree. She even had braces at the time, her second round due to jaw surgery in college. People at events would assume she was still a student. “People would tell me, ‘You don’t look like a VC. You don’t act like a VC. You’re really nice. You’re very ethical,'” she says. “Like this isn’t the typical profile when we think of someone who’s a VC.” Or it didn’t used to be.…
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News Insights Venture Capital Case Studies Venture Capital Trends

AI Connector Boardy Breaks the VC Intro Barrier

“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.…
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

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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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

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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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

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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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

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. …
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Radhika Iyengar & Jorden Woods

“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.…
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Insights Venture Capital Case Studies

Galit Flasterstein

“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. …
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Joyce-Ann Wainaina

“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?…
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Venture Capital Case Studies Insights Next Gen VC

The Rise of Next Gen VCs

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.…