Before
Product and growth roles, including at Instacart. No finance connections whatsoever. Her own line about it is the honest one: her mother is an art teacher who to this day thinks she works at a mutual fund.
The move
She cold applied to Andreessen Horowitz with no warm introduction and no referral, then spent roughly six months closing the credibility gap with substantive written work. Market maps, deep dives, and the Passion Economy thesis that became the firm's framing for creator monetization. The writing was the application. This is the rarest route in the corpus and the only one where original analysis alone carried the entry.
The turn
Hired onto the investment team around 2019. She left in May 2020 to raise her own 13 million dollar fund, Atelier Ventures, launched in February 2021.
Timeline
- Operator in product and growth roles
- Cold application to a16z, no introduction
- Roughly six months of market maps and deep dives
- Around 2019 hired onto the investment team
- 2020 leaves to raise her own fund
- 2021 Atelier launches, then merges into Variant
- August 2024 moves from general partner to advisor at Variant
What this route asks
A view the field does not already hold, written well enough that it survives scrutiny from people who read this for a living. Expect months of substantive exchange rather than one good email. Many profiles still list her as an active general partner; Atelier has not existed independently since the 2021 merger, and she stepped back from investing in August 2024. The entry route is the durable part of this case.