I’ve made the much-fabled transition from founder to venture capitalist – I’m excited to have joined the team at Ridge Ventures.
Over a year ago I realized I wanted to make the transition and move into the world of venture capital. I’ve loved founding startups (both the one that worked and the ones that didn’t!), and I’ve loved building products with amazing teams at places like BBC News, Uber, and MySpace.
Values that have carried me through my career to date include the democracy of publishing, the importance of open source, maintaining an on-going state of curiosity and ultimately leveraging innovation to help improve the society we live in.
I’m excited to embark on the next phase of my career and see how I can manifest those values in the world of venture capital.
Those that know me know I’ve always been a bit of a renegade – I don’t fit into a particular corporate career ladder or box, having worked across software engineering, product development, business operations, marketing and even a little public policy at Uber. But what I’ve always enjoyed most throughout my career is exploring new innovation and helping others succeed, grow and fulfill their own potential. It was during some time off doing lots of yoga (yes, clichéd I know) that I realized a career in venture would let me double down on those strengths and experiences and passions.
For the past year I’ve been bolstering my angel experience by looking after Gigster’s fund to make seed investments in their most promising clients. I’m super grateful to good friend and Gigster CEO Roger Dickey for the opportunity, which gave me the impetus to seek out a fulltime investment role.
Alex Rosen and the rest of the team here have worked hard, heads down, to deliver fantastic successes over the last three funds under their former IDG Ventures banner. The opportunity to work closely with such smart and experienced early-stage investors represents a huge opportunity I couldn’t pass up. But what I’m also excited about is the new and complementary experiences I can bring to the firm as a startup founder/operator and product-focused technologist.
Finally, the independent Ridge Ventures rebrand makes this a particularly exciting time to be joining — it really feels like the slate is blank and ready for us to define this new era together. And, if you know me, you know how much fun I had with this kind of branding and marketing opportunity at WP Engine 🙂
At Ridge our core areas of focus include Enterprise, B2B SaaS and entertainment software – but we’ve made investments in many spaces over the years. We write mostly Series A checks with some seed deals along the way. While B2B SaaS is a space I know and love, I’m also very open minded at this point with what kind of deal flow might come my way.
I look forward to working with entrepreneurs and founders in this new capacity and, as always, can’t wait to dive right in.