Katie Jacobs Stanton on moving from angel investing to starting Moxxie, experiences with LP's "ghosting", and why she went the solo GP route

Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers

Non-traditional paths into venture have been a common theme among many emerging managers, and our guest this week, Katie Jacobs Stanton, founder of Moxxie Ventures, is no exception. Katie started her career as a Banker at JP Morgan, but subsequently worked within the Obama White house as special advisor to the office of innovation, and she had operator roles at Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Color Genomics. She was also named by Forbes as the #56 on the most powerful women in the world.

Prior to Moxxie, Katie also co-founded the #Angels investment collective along with other former Twitter executives, and invested in 40 early-stage companies including Airtable, Cameo, Carta, Coinbase, Literati, Modern Fertility, Shape Security and Threads.

Katie started her career as a Banker at JP Morgan and she had operator roles at Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Color. In addition to her startup career, Katie worked in the Obama White House and State Department. She is also on the board of Vivendi.

In this episode we discuss the following topics:

01:24 Katie’s journey into investing

05:38 The decision to start her own fund rather than joining an established firm

07:49 Why she went the solo GP route

09:51 Adaptation process of not having a team around her

11:39 How she optimized her fundraising process

14:08 Learning to deal with LPs who ghost and how “no’s” can be helpful

15:54 Patterns she noticed in LPs the believed in her

18:04 The types of questions LPs ask off sheet contacts during their reference checks

19:39 Thinking about future fund sizes when raising your fund I

22:15 How Katie works to diversify her deal sourcing

25:35 The edge she believes Moxxie has in the marketplace

28:28 The need to keep evolving to maintain competitive edge

29:49 Breaking down the time commitments needed to run a fund

31:21 The advice she would give to a new manager

32:32 The big miss of her career

34:00 The experience that prepared her the most for being a manager

Mentioned In This Episode:

* Moxxie Ventures

* #Angels

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Katie. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.

Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency

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