Before
She founded mobile startups beginning in 2007, then started mentoring other founders with no arrangement and no compensation.
The move
The quietest repeatable route in this corpus. She gave time to founders through Techstars as a volunteer, in her words with no expectation of anything in return, for long enough and well enough that the institution hired her as managing director of Techstars New York in 2014. From that seat she built a personal portfolio of more than 130 angel investments, which is an unusually large sample of judgment to be able to point at.
The turn
She used the scaled personal record and the founder community it produced to co-found The Fund, a syndicate-driven pre-seed vehicle, which became Everywhere Ventures.
Timeline
- 2007 founds mobile startups
- Mentors at Techstars, unpaid
- 2014 hired as managing director of Techstars New York
- Builds a personal portfolio of 130 plus angel investments
- Co-founds The Fund, later Everywhere Ventures
What this route asks
Years of genuinely unpaid service to founders inside an institution that can eventually hire you. The mentorship has to be real, because the hiring decision is made by people watching how you actually behave with founders.