Finding Your Niche as an Investor | VC Panel
Whether founder-driven, thesis driven, sector focused, or geographically focused, every successful angel investor or VC has an investment thesis or focus area, even if it's purposefully 'generalist.'
Our speakers are full-time VCs, not to mention prior operators from companies like Quora, Meta, Cruise, and WeWork. Collectively they have founded their own VC firms and worked for top tier multi-stage firms. Each is now known within the startup community for something specific. They'll be sharing how they found their niche, and how you can too.
This event is great for:
Operators who want to start investing as angels or LPs
Operators who are founder curious and wanting to learn how VCs think 😉
Active angel investors looking to hone their thesis
Future VCs who will need to define their 'secret sauce' and personal brand with founders, co-investors, and LPs
More on our speakers:
Kathleen Estreich is the co-founder at MKT1 Capital where she invests in early-stage B2B startups and helps them build their marketing team and strategy. Prior to founding MKT1, she built and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups including Intercom, Box, Facebook, and Scalyr (acq by SentinelOne). Her experience in both marketing and operations brings a holistic view to help founders grow their businesses. She lives in the Bay Area with her 2 young kids and enjoys taking advantage of the amazing running trails on the peninsula.
Sarah Smith is the founder and GP of an eponymous $25M pre-seed/seed rolling fund focused on marketplaces, fintech, future of work, and dev tools. Sarah was previously a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, Graph Ventures, and active angel deploying $50M into 60+ companies including Airtable, BetterUp, Lime, Archive, Arc, and more. She spent 10+ years scaling global teams at Facebook and Quora. Based in Menlo Park, Sarah teaches at Stanford and has degrees from Stanford GSB and University of Wisconsin. She and her husband Kyle enjoy his cooking and wine expertise over strategy board games after wrangling their two young kids to bed.
Zeeza Cole is a Principal at Bain Capital Ventures (“BCV”) where she invests in early-stage opportunities in horizontal and vertical SaaS. Prior to BCV, she was a founding team member at the Creator Fund, WeWork’s early-stage venture fund, and started her career doing industrial investment banking at Goldman Sachs. She grew up on a farm in New Jersey and currently lives in San Francisco.
Amber Illig is the founding General Partner at The Council Fund, a pre-seed fund focused on B2B software for legacy industries like manufacturing, logistics, construction, healthcare, and agriculture. Prior to running The Council Fund, Amber angel invested for years and worked for companies like Snap, Cruise, Apple, Lilly, and Atmos. She grew up in the Midwest and studied Mechanical Engineering. Now she lives with her husband, chow chow, and daughter in San Francisco.