Meet The Female MIT MBAs Starting A Venture Capital Fund

Breaking into venture capital is not easy. Starting a brand new VC fund?

Even harder.

Potential limited partners (entities that invest in VC firms) judge a firm on the past performance of the firm’s previous funds. The life of a fund is nominally ten years, which means the verdict on how well a firm’s current fund has performed takes at least a decade to be assessed. Given that only a small number of VC firms maintain stellar investment performances over time, it’s difficult to stand out and attract limited partners to invest in your firm without a pristine track record already established.

Therefore, starting a new VC firm (since one lacks a track record) is challenging for anyone. Even more so for women, since they are underrepresented in the venture capital industry.

However, female-led firms such as Forerunner Ventures and Female Founders Fund have had recent successes. The former has had notable investments in Dollar Shave Club (bought by Unilever for $1 billion) and Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion), while the latter has just closed their second $27M early-stage fund.

These achievements by female investors helped spur the All Raise movement, an initiative started in 2017 by “34 senior female investors from institutionally backed venture capital firms based in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York and Boston.” Their goal is to improve “the success of women in the venture-backed tech ecosystem”…